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Once and for all... i5 or i7

kirkster

kirkster

kirkster

Associate
Joined
14 May 2007
Posts
843
Location
London
Upgrading from Q6600 and 4 Gig RAM.

I run virtualisation tools a lot such as virtualbox and vmware. Video and photo editing are things I do as well, though not massively.

I want a rig with 16G of RAM too. I could afford the i7 but would rather save the extra ton if I can. On the other hand, spread that ton over three years this rig will last and it doesn't sound so much does it - what 70p per week extra for the i7?

Gaming not a big deal for me. I'd stick with my current GTS 8800 card.

Any thoughts guys. I am 'erring towards the i7 and the Gigabyte boards.

Convince me one way or the other ! :)

Cheers Steve
 
If you are going to spend the extra on an i7, then you should consider going for the i7 3820. mainly because this uses the x79 platform - which uses quad channel memory and many of the boards support 8 memory modules (which should be useful for the vm stuff). for example, this board supports 8 memory modules and gets a good write up.
 
For your purposes i7 does seem the way forward.

And if you worked it out at an extra 70p per week..well..you could probably find that in change on the floor in a week!
 
As others have said, the real question is which platform not which cpu!

And i would suggest x79, just for the quad channel. May as well take extra options. VM have been running nice on an i5 system, but more is better in this case :D
 
What kind of work load are you running on your vm's, how many do you intend to run & are these going to always on or on demand?..

Some work loads are hampered by hyper threading, personally I bought i7 and ended up disabling hyper threading. I don't do loads of OLTP stuff or encoding which seems to benefit the most from hyper threading so I may as well have bought an i5..

Not sure on x79 sure it can hold a more ram etc but its a lot more money too!

Are you going to use your q6600 for hosting some vm's too? I kept mine, increased the ram to 8 gig and setup 2tb of raid 10 on there , currently it hosts a virtual active directory domain & 2 sql vms, as well as storing all my precious data.

On my SB i7 box oc'd to 5ghz with 16gig of ram & a shiny ocz ibis ssd + a 6990, I run 2 sql instances, one of which runs reporting services, analysis services, SSIS & a management data warehouse & an instance of oracle.. I also game with these running and get no drops in fps & drive another 2 screens at the same time

Set yourself a budget and spec to that, sorry about the wall of text :)
 
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