I built this:
Product Name Qty Price Line Total
AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 920 2.8GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 920 2.8GHz (Socket AM2+) - Retail £139.99
(£121.73) £139.99
(£121.73)
Asus T3-M3N8200 Barebones System - AMD64 (Socket AM2+) Asus T3-M3N8200 Barebones System - AMD64 (Socket AM2+) £126.49
(£109.99) £126.49
(£109.99)
Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB 7200RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST9320423AS) Seagate Momentus 7200.4 320GB 7200RPM SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (ST9320423AS) £49.99
(£43.47) £49.99
(£43.47)
OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 Dual Channel (OCZ2G10664GK) OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8500C5 Dual Channel (OCZ2G10664GK) £41.99
(£36.51) £83.98
(£73.02)
OcUK Value 2.5" to 3.5" Hard Drive Adapter OcUK Value 2.5" to 3.5" Hard Drive Adapter £5.99
(£5.21) £5.99
(£5.21)
Sub Total : £353.42
Shipping cost based on delivery to My Home Address, *cough* with:
DPD Next Day Parcel
(This can be changed during checkout) Shipping : £11.25
VAT is being charged at 15.00% VAT : £54.70
Total : £419.37
The other week - Phenom II quad core 2.8ghz, 8gb RAM, 320Gb HDD. That would easily run a couple of level two VMs while you have thirty web tabs open and a couple of decent text editors; might be worth playing with the individual components to get the price down [cheaper CPU, less RAM, try the Intel variant of the T3, but
avoid the Q8xxx series as they don't support hardware virtualisation, etc].
I'm using it as a XenCenter host server [Citrix's equivelant of VMWare ESXi], but I did pop Win7 on it and it to give it a test run and it was just as quick as my Q6600+8gbRAM when doing normal stuff - no reason to doubt it would be just as happy multitasking as that is.
Also, it's really rather small, as close to silent as you could reasonably hope [if you had it under a desk you wouldn't hear it], has HDMI [on board Geforce 8 class GPU], Gb ethernet, PCI-E x16 [although you'd want to replace the PSU if you wanted to put in a chunky GPU - I didn't bother as the onboard is fine for Aero. Also, it's GPU restricted in terms of physical size too...obviously], 3x SATA, Firewire, loadsaUSB, mutlicard reader, etc etc.
I went for the AMD version as it takes 8GB RAM at speeds of up to 1066, the intel one is limited to 4gb and 800mhz.
I'm seriously impressed with that wee Asus box, it's really rather good. Next step is to hook up a four disk eSATA cage mit Xenserver approved eSATA card, and have it serve out a nice four terabyte share on my network. Yummy.
VMs don't benefit from more CPU cores?
S'funny, my Xencenter VMs run at near hardware speed thanks to having two cores assigned to each of the two VMs [one Win2k8, one Win2k3]. Try doing that on a single core or dual core machine with a level one hypervisor, let alone using a level two hypervisor inside Windows/Linux where the host OS wants resources too....!
When it comes to VMs, if you plan to run more than one at a time, it's safe to say you want to go quad, or triple as a bare minimum to keep things grinding along at a decent lick IME - although a core2duo on a level one hyperviser can hack along, it won't be terribly quick or responsive once you start using more than one VM at a time.
