Budget Upgrade

[Belisarius]

Well, real life interposed and my planned upgrades for the end of last year/new year have failed to materialise. However I desperately need to bump up my rig as I'm starting to run XP in a VM a lot and really just need a good boost.

Currently have:

Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra 939 with AMD64 and 1GB(2x512) of DDR400
1x250GB IDE
1x40GB IDE (for windows I'm afraid)
2x80GB SATA
CD-Writer
DVD-Writer
AGP NVIDIA 6600GT Dual DVI connected to 2 Iiyama Prolite E431s @ 1280x1024
Elsa Synergy 2 PCI connect to another Iiyama Prolite E431S
600W PSU - Zalman

I think I can raise at max a couple of hundred quid (new baby due in June so even this is going to be hard but hey, priorities! )

I don't play games and the graphics cards run my monitors fine so I thought of just going for the Asrock DualSATA2 775 mobo at £43.00 and put the rest into a CPU? Although I can only use the 1GB to start in this mobo I thought of just selling on my 2gb DDR along with a gig of DDR Sodimms I have and then getting 2gb of DDR2.

And basically use everything as is. I know the asrock is not really overclockable which is why I'd rather put a little more into the CPU. Thinking of maybe the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)?

Any comments much appreciated.

Cheers

PS Uses. Coding, running VMs, some video encoding, bit of graphics stuff. Last night I had XP in a VM in Linux running a remote connection to my work machine(XP) which was in turn running mt test system in another VM.

 

[decto]

A couple of thoughts...

1. what do you want your PC to do more than it is now?

2. An X2 3600 or second hand opty Dual may give you a good boost.

3. Core 2 overclocks like crazy, my 1,8 chip easily hits 3,4. The E6600 is one of the worst value CPU's on sale. For a few £ more you get a Quad core at the same speed Q6600. Unfortunatly anything less than a 6 series doesn't have the virtualisation support that improves performance. Consider a second hand E6300, E6400 and a decent mobo for later upgrade. The P35 board are fine and start at £55


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[Belisarius]

A couple of thoughts...

1. what do you want your PC to do more than it is now?

Mainly the VM stuff. I need to have that up and running and still run my main OS. I also want a bit more processing power. It can be a little sluggish running the three monitors and when in Windows Vis Studio and the Adobe packages need a bit more oomph.

2. An X2 3600 or second hand opty Dual may give you a good boost.

I did try and X2 4200 a few months back but had to return it due to temp problems with one of the cores. IT was better but not enough for the then price. I'm really looking to move Intel
[/QUOTE]

3. Core 2 overclocks like crazy, my 1,8 chip easily hits 3,4. The E6600 is one of the worst value CPU's on sale. For a few £ more you get a Quad core at the same speed Q6600. Unfortunatly anything less than a 6 series doesn't have the virtualisation support that improves performance. Consider a second hand E6300, E6400 and a decent mobo for later upgrade. The P35 board are fine and start at £55

I'm a little wary of buying second hand - just can't afford the risk at this time, so I'd be tempted to go for a Q6600 with the Dual mobo, the RAM swap around and then, like you said, move to a new mobo later and then overclock the Quad?

Thanks for your comments

Andy

 

[SiD the Turtle]

I use VMs a lot at work. If you want to run a VM at a decent clip at the same time as the host system consider the following points:

1: Upgrade to 2GB of RAM or more if possible, once you give a VM a certain amount of RAM the host system can start groaning.
2: Make sure the VM itself is hosted on a separate drive to the OS. If they are both on the same disk, I find performance drops substantially as the platters spin like mad between where the host OS and the VM are requesting reads from.

Edit: I'm betting the 40GB system disk is a bit of a bottleneck as well.

 

[Belisarius]

I use VMs a lot at work. If you want to run a VM at a decent clip at the same time as the host system consider the following points:

1: Upgrade to 2GB of RAM or more if possible, once you give a VM a certain amount of RAM the host system can start groaning.
2: Make sure the VM itself is hosted on a separate drive to the OS. If they are both on the same disk, I find performance drops substantially as the platters spin like mad between where the host OS and the VM are requesting reads from.

Edit: I'm betting the 40GB system disk is a bit of a bottleneck as well.

Thanks.

Yes. Currently have 2gb but may have a temp of 1gb until I can afford the 2x1gb sticks. Agreed re disks. I do have them on seperates and it helps. Once I rebuild I'll take the 40gb out. I only put it in as an XP temp install and once the vms work to optimum it can go. Getting a bit crowded in there anyway!

Cheers

Andy

 

[Belisarius]

My Phenom deal fell through so...

3. Core 2 overclocks like crazy, my 1,8 chip easily hits 3,4. The E6600 is one of the worst value CPU's on sale. For a few £ more you get a Quad core at the same speed Q6600. Unfortunatly anything less than a 6 series doesn't have the virtualisation support that improves performance. Consider a second hand E6300, E6400...

I've just picked up an asrock dual mobo and wondered what a good secondhand price for a 6300 or 6400 would be? I'd like to go quad but wife has other ideas! May still manage but otherwise dual may have to do me...

Will I get much of an overclock with the asrock dual-vsta and a 6300/6400?

EDIT: what about putting a 4400 or 4500 800FSB in there?

Recommended HSF?

How much of a performance boost can I expect from this over my current (above) even without overclock?

Comments appreciated as having bought the mobo I'm finally going to rebuild something!

Cheers

Andy

 

[Belisarius]

Sorry for bumping this but I'm hoping to order my CPU ASAP so I get it for the weekend and would be interested in knowing the various merits of the options mentioned, including the E6?50 processors as well.

Thanks

Andy