AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 2.8GHz 6-Core Processor for Multiple Virtual Machines?

JoJoCal19

I'm going to be building a desktop at the end of the month and one of the things I will be doing is running multiple virtual machines for studying MCSE stuff and running labs. Do you all think this would be a great proc for that? I would also be multitasking by running TV tuner software, web browsing and other stuff at the same time. I'm thinking this would be a great proc for all of that but wanted opinions. At $199 its a great proc for the money.

I've looked at the i7 870 2.93GHz but its almost $100 more and 2 less cores. Plus the mobo's are more than the AM3 socket boards.

exampasser

I'd go with the AMD 6-core. My 955 quad does well for me when it comes to virtualization.

Zartanasaurus

How many VMs do you want to run at a time? I found that beefy desktop PCs choke when running a lot of VMs b/c the single hard drive can't handle all the activity.

JoJoCal19

Zartanasaurus wrote: »

How many VMs do you want to run at a time? I found that beefy desktop PCs choke when running a lot of VMs b/c the single hard drive can't handle all the activity.

I would say on a normal basis 2 maybe 3 vm's. In rare instances more than that. I'm probably going to load my OS on a raptor or SSD and use two separate drives for everything else.

Zartanasaurus

JoJoCal19 wrote: »

I would say on a normal basis 2 maybe 3 vm's. In rare instances more than that. I'm probably going to load my OS on a raptor or SSD and use two separate drives for everything else.

Oh, you'll be fine then. I usually run a minimum of 6 VMs at once up to as many as 10-11 in my home lab.

n2wishin

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earweed

I see those prices and wish I had gone a different route for myself. I went with a Corei5 and spent a lot more $$$.
So far I've done pretty good running 6 or 7 VM's as that's the most I've tried so far.

JoJoCal19

earweed wrote: »

I see those prices and wish I had gone a different route for myself. I went with a Corei5 and spent a lot more $$$.
So far I've done pretty good running 6 or 7 VM's as that's the most I've tried so far.

Yea I really like the new i7 procs but AMD is just so much cheaper and I've never had any problems with AMD. The Phenom II X6 benchmarks just a hair behind the i7 870 but costs $100 less. I've been tempted to go with the i7 but rather use that $100 saved to get a 64GB SSD for the OS/app installation.