Phenom II X4 980 or FX-4170 for virtualbox?

phoeneous

Currently I have a Phenom II x4 925 oc'd to 3.1ghz but with 6 hosts running on virtualbox, my processor utilization is reaching 75% steady and spike to 100% occasionally. Hosts are being used for mcse lab so not much intensive io going on. Would it be worth it to get either the 980 or 4170 and oc to 4ghz or just stick with the 925 and deal with it? Thoughts?

Asif Dasl

PassMark - CPU Benchmarks - List of Benchmarked CPUs

They are about the same speed - 50% faster than what you've got now, so go which ever one is cheapest you won't notice the difference.

Best option going forward is to have another machine or upgrade to Ivy Bridge & SSD.

ptilsen

Your issue is more with core quantity than core power. You should be looking at an FX-8120 or 8150 if you're sticking with your current motherboard. There is really no sense in using quad-core AMD for virtualization. The only advantage the current Phenom and FX series offer is that they are many-core and cheap. The least expensive Intel alternative with as many logical cores is ~$120 more than an FX-8120. But once you hit that ~$300 mark, there is absolutely no reason to use AMD in a desktop at this point.

I definitely don't see any sense in upgrading to another AMD quad-core. A few hundred MHz is probably not going to significantly improve your labbing experience. Six guests will run much better on six or eight different cores.

oot

You can get an FX-8120 for $149.99 at Micro Center (assuming you have one near by).

MentholMoose

What type of storage are the VMs running on? The high CPU utilization you are seeing may be due to a storage bottleneck. How to check for this depends on the host OS. If it's a Linux host, run top and check the I/O wait values (the "wa" parameter). For Windows, run perfmon and add the % disk time counter. Higher percentages indicate a storage bottleneck, in which case adding a faster CPU or even more cores won't do any good and you'll be better off adding more or faster disks. If you're really seeing high CPU usage with low (close to 0%) I/O wait / disk time, then a faster CPU or more cores should help. For labbing, however, I rarely see high CPU utilization that isn't caused by a storage bottleneck, regardless of CPU.

phoeneous

I think you're right. It's all internal storage since it's just my home pc and the drives are a few years old. I even think one of them is 5400...

MentholMoose wrote: »

What type of storage are the VMs running on? The high CPU utilization you are seeing may be due to a storage bottleneck. How to check for this depends on the host OS. If it's a Linux host, run top and check the I/O wait values (the "wa" parameter). For Windows, run perfmon and add the % disk time counter. Higher percentages indicate a storage bottleneck, in which case adding a faster CPU or even more cores won't do any good and you'll be better off adding more or faster disks. If you're really seeing high CPU usage with low (close to 0%) I/O wait / disk time, then a faster CPU or more cores should help. For labbing, however, I rarely see high CPU utilization that isn't caused by a storage bottleneck, regardless of CPU.

phoeneous

So I did some benchmarking an indeed it's my disks that are bottleneck. All of them are 7200 but only 16MB cache. Looking into ssd...

ptilsen

Yeah, I use SSDs and it removed all disk problems. I still think an X4 is a bit weak to run six concurrent VMs on, though. If they end up actually doing anything concurrently, you are still going to run into CPU bottlenecks.

joshmadakor

Yeah 6 hosts is a bit much for normal hard disks (depending on what you're doing anyway).
I use two(2) of these in RAID0 with a 6Gbps controller: Newegg.com - Intel 510 Series (Elm Crest) SSDSC2MH120A2K5 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I get ~840MB/s reads, it's disturbingly fast and I can run as many VMs as I want (memory permitting). I can also build VMs like it's nothing. For example I can go from nothing to the oobe desktop of server 2008 R2 from an ISO in ~5 minutes. I can't do without SSDs now!

Actually, I have a 2600K@5.0GHz, but I highly doubt that contributes as much as the SSD setup.

ptilsen

I would personally recommend this:
Crucial M4 128GB

It's also blazing fast but cheaper.

I can confirm that CPU and RAM are my limitations, on the rare event I hit them.

phoeneous

Which controller do you use?

joshmadakor wrote: »

Yeah 6 hosts is a bit much for normal hard disks (depending on what you're doing anyway).
I use two(2) of these in RAID0 with a 6Gbps controller: Newegg.com - Intel 510 Series (Elm Crest) SSDSC2MH120A2K5 2.5" 120GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD)

I get ~840MB/s reads, it's disturbingly fast and I can run as many VMs as I want (memory permitting). I can also build VMs like it's nothing. For example I can go from nothing to the oobe desktop of server 2008 R2 from an ISO in ~5 minutes. I can't do without SSDs now!

Actually, I have a 2600K@5.0GHz, but I highly doubt that contributes as much as the SSD setup.

joshmadakor

Just the onboard P67 controller. It's this board: Newegg.com - ASUS P8P67 DELUXE (REV 3.0) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS

SteveLord

Crucial M4s are the best SSDs you can get in terms of proven reliability and cost. They are at about $1 a gig now. Far better than Intel and OCZ's overpriced crap.

joshmadakor

SteveLord wrote: »

Crucial M4s are the best SSDs you can get in terms of proven reliability and cost. They are at about $1 a gig now. Far better than Intel and OCZ's overpriced crap.

But..... I have Intel .....

MentholMoose

The M4 and other SSDs are hitting sub-$1/GB now. The 256 GB M4 is $200.
Crucial M4 256GB Internal SATA III MLC Solid State Drive $199.99 Free Shipping

SteveLord

MentholMoose wrote: »

The M4 and other SSDs are hitting sub-$1/GB now. The 256 GB M4 is $200.
Crucial M4 256GB Internal SATA III MLC Solid State Drive $199.99 Free Shipping

Very temporary special as it's popularity made it run out quick. Would be nice if Black Friday deals were like this instead of not being anywhere near this in price or just being plain junk.

rockd24

I would recommend the 6-core Phenom II X6 series over the FX's. The X6's are true 6 cores and the FX's are not. I went with the Phenom II X6 1045T and its running fine.