Dual Purpose Machine ~£800

[sidethink]

I need a few ideas for a dual purpose machine:

I'd like something with 16GB of RAM (I'm studying for an MCITP and need a home lab) but I also dabble casually with EVE and Lotro, so I need something that has a decent amount of gaming grunt. I have approximately £800 to spend.

Needs:

Full Sandybridge i5 system (not fussed on overclocking one way or the other)
16GB RAM
A couple of hard disks (1TB+)
Solid graphical grunt for games (22" 1980x1200)

Already have:
OS, Keyboard, Mouse and Monitor

Many thanks.

 

[nate922]

Are you planning to run VMware? Since memory is cheap I might go for a little higher.

I have 12GB and when I run a couple of win2k3 servers I start to run out of memory.

I tend to have my VMware sessions on a separate machine as I don't like the console lagging behind.

 

[sidethink]

I will probably just be using VirtualBox running on top of Windows 7. My various VMs are to allow me to practise Group Policy exercises and AD design and implementation so performance is not critical.

I've been using three or four VMs with 1GB allocated to them without any real issues on my current 8GB machine. they are slow to boot up, but once running are fine. I'd just like to deploy a few more, and move the general spec of my machine on a generation or so (for the gaming side).

 

[nate922]

If you're not too concerned over Performance that spec looks fine.

I've been to a couple of classes with Global Knowledge and they used Hyper-v on 16GB Machines without any issues. As you said booting up is a pain.

Sometimes when too many machines boot up with Hyper-V services don't start up properly.

 

[sidethink]

Any glaring issues with this spec? Or any ways to get the price a little closer to my target of £800 without gimpining it in any significant way?

MSI GeForce GTX 560Ti OC Twin FrozR II 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £199.99
Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £169.99
Asrock Z68 Extreme4 Gen3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £169.98
Fractal Design Define R3 Midi Tower Case - Black Pearl £69.98
OCZ ZS Series 650W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply £64.99
2x Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD1002FAEX) £125.98
2x (16GB total) Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £89.98
Samsung SH-S222AB/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM £16.99
Sub Total : £756.57
Shipping : £20.10
VAT is being charged at 20.00% VAT : £155.33
Total : £932.00

 

[sidethink]

I think I've already made a rookie mistake - someone at wok pointed out that 6GB drives are useless in todays terms. He reckons that two Samsung F3 drives would be sufficient, and a lot cheaper.

True?

 

[Reaper 392]

I think I've already made a rookie mistake - someone at wok pointed out that 6GB drives are useless in todays terms. He reckons that two Samsung F3 drives would be sufficient, and a lot cheaper.

True?

thats correct, mechanical drives are not fast enough to saturate 3GB/s SATA connections, so these 6GB/s drives are pure marketing rubbish to claim that they are faster when in reality they arent.

just a quick question. do you need multiple 1TB HDD's, or will a single 2TB drive that is slightly slower be fine?

heres a decent spec thats only a teeny tiny bit over budget:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i7-2600K 3.40GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £227.99
1 x MSI Z68A-GD65-G3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard £159.98
1 x OcUK GeForce GTX 460 OC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card £113.99
1 x BeQuiet Pure Power L7 530W '80 Plus' Power Supply £45.98
2 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) £44.99 (£89.98)
2 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £44.99 (£89.98)
1 x BitFenix Merc Alpha Gaming Case - Black £32.99
1 x Corsair A50 High-Performance CPU Cooler (Socket AM2/AM3/LGA775/LGA1155/LGA1156/LGA1366) £23.99
1 x Samsung SH-S222AL/BEBE 22x DVD±RW SATA Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM £15.98
Total : £800.86 (includes shipping : FREE).

this gives plenty of upgrade options at the expense of a bit of gaming power.

dont forget that if you link your forum account to your shop account you get free shipping.

*edit*

one last thing while i remember, the card you have chosen is an overclocked version of their twin frozr 560Ti. you could save £25 by choosing their less overclocked version of exactly the same card with exactly the same cooler, and putting the overclock on yourself. overclocking a graphics card is the easiest thing in the world - you literally move a slider on the MSI afterburner software, arguably the best overclocking software for graphics cards. its what i use for my graphics card, and it conveniently comes with the graphics card you have selected in your £900 build

 

[R088ieS86]

@ OP, if you are studying for MCTIP then i'd also recommend building a client PC.
Just a cheap* rig with a network card which supports PXE. It will come in handy!

*literally a machine that can boot and can run win7

 

[sidethink]

just a quick question. do you need multiple 1TB HDD's, or will a single 2TB drive that is slightly slower be fine?

Thanks for the advice on the GPU overclocking - much appreciated. My logic for including two discrete hard disks is based on experience of playing with some basic virtualization in the past. When booting or rebooting a few VMs there is inevitably a long IO queue and I was hoping to stop this choking my boot drive.

Just a cheap* rig with a network card which supports PXE. It will come in handy!

I'm going to try and accomplish this with a couple of extra VMs. I've already got three virtual networks talking to each other via a Debian VM acting as a router. I'm going to try and make enough room for a couple of 'client' VMs so that I can see the results of things like GPO changes.

To accomplish what I would like to do, I only really need 3 virtual domain controllers in three sites and then some clients; so though it will be slow to boot, it should be fine for running exercises against.

 

[Reaper 392]

i know bugger all about virtual machines, but would you be able to fit what you need to boot them up on an SSD? would reduce boot times massively

 

[sidethink]

i know bugger all about virtual machines, but would you be able to fit what you need to boot them up on an SSD? would reduce boot times massively

I think it gets messy and the VMs can be quite large (with disk growth and snapshotting), so I'll just dump them all on a separate spindle and be done with it.

The VMs might take 4 or 5 mins to boot properly but they wont get rebooted so often that its a killer issue and I can put the kettle on while they do.