virtualization/media build help

[kongqueror]

Hi guys. I'm having trouble deciding on a new build. I have an old Pentium D 805 @ 3.8GHz rig (Asus P5LD2, 4x512GB PC5300 DDR2 ram, Radeon 4670 1GB GDDR3) and while it is still sufficient enough for my daily needs, with my mobo not able to accept newer LGA775 quads and the price of DDR2 ram much higher than DDR3 ram, I felt it was time for me to upgrade.

Video transcoding and picture editing has replaced gaming after marriage & fatherhood and I also would like to dabble in virtualization. I have 64-bit Vista Ultimate and planning to use Virtualbox for my hypervisor. Since I am on a very tight budget, I can't purchase another OS like Windows 7. Linux is out of the question as well for the host OS as other people will be using it.

So below are my options:

Intel i5-2400 CAD189.99
Gigabyte GA-H61M-DS2 mATX CAD59.99
Patriot Sector 5 PGV38G1333ELK 8GB DDR3 2X4GB CAD39.97
Total: CAD289.77

FX-8150 CAD169.99
MSI 760GM-P23 (FX) mATX CAD58.23
Patriot Sector 5 PGV38G1333ELK 8GB DDR3 2X4GB CAD39.97
Total: CAD268.01

A8-3870K CAD114.99
Gigabyte A75-D3H ATX CAD79.99
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline Stiletto 16GB 4X4GB PC3-10666 CAD 77.99
Total: CAD272.97

I'm leaning towards the FX-8150 build due to the number of cores which I think will be ideal for creating VMs. My only concern is the board has only 2 dimm slots but I can purchase 1x8GB G.Skill for 49.07 and expand later.

I like the idea of having 16GB right of the bat (expandable to 32GB) with the A8-3870K but I am concerned about the future of the FM1 socket and it being just 4 cores and even at stock, the i5-2400 already has better general performance than both the AMD cpus. I do plan to overclock if I go AMD.

Thanks for reading and looking forward to your thoughts!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you're talking about video transcoding (DVD ripping, etc) as opposed to editing (Premier, etc.) just get any old processor, and use something like MediaCoder with a CUDA GPU. My old GTS250 encodes about 3x as fast as my Q6600 can. Newer cards (450, 460, etc) absolutely spank it for CUDA performance.

All of the above CPUs are plenty adequate for general computing.

Given your lack of gaming desires, otherwise, I'd probably skimp on the CPU.

What do you mean by "dabbling" in virtualization, exactly? If you're doing anything more than "learning to use it for class and figuring out if I like Linux or not" you'll probably want to consider 16GB your new minimum memory amount.

 

[kongqueror]

Thanks for the response, Dave. I do a fair amount of DVD-ripping and conversions to AVI/MP4s and also planning to start converting quite a big library of AVHCD files with some minor editing involved. As for virtualization, it will be a mix of testing/learning and a mini-project that will possibly have each room in the house setup with thin-clients and use VMs instead. I also intend it to be a media-server. Thanks!

 

[nyker96]

I would get i5 2400 over fx-8150, the reason is, for everyday tasks, the i5 2400 will be faster. even in transcoding tasks, it will be very close. Overall a better buy. Also intel has the special hardware transcoding built into i5 2400 called Quick Sync that makes transcoding that much faster. do a bit research on that, it might be very valuable for you. of couse you need software that support this function.

 

[Zxian]

Or.... you can avoid the horrible image quality produced by nVidia accelerated media transcoding. Link

If you want to do video transcoding, get the i5. The i3-2100 supports Quick Sync as well, and will handle all your media transcoding needs in a pinch. This would also likely give you some budget to pick up a license for Win7 Home Premium, which would go a long way for usability and overall performance.

If you're not going to be doing heavy multitasking with virtual machines, the number of cores is irrelevant. I've got my server running an i3-2100 and it performs just fine. I've got Hyper-V VMs doing all my downloading, file and print serving, and domain mangement needs. If you're going to be using more than two VMs at a time (giving each 2GB of virtual memory), you might want to consider finding a board that has 4 DIMM slots. Otherwise, the 8GB will do just fine.


In summary, if you're planning on experimenting with virtualization as a hobby (learning Linux, testing things here and there, etc), get the i3-2100 and 8GB of RAM. It will serve your light virtualization needs and handle your media transcoding very well. If you can spare the extra $30-40, take the savings from the i3 and add a license for Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Get IB instead. Better IGP.

Also get Intel, its a HTPC as well. Plus you gonna think about power consumption on a 24/7 build.

And FM1 is dead, FM2 and FM1 aint compatible.

 

[Zxian]

Since I am on a very tight budget...

Read the original post before you just spew out an answer like that. IVB is unnecessary and for his needs and way out of his budget.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Read the original post before you just spew out an answer like that. IVB is unnecessary and for his needs and way out of his budget.

How can an Ivy Bridge that cost the same be out of his budget?

http://www.tigerdirect.ca/applicatio...5&sku=I69-3550

Well, actually a bigger IB model for the same.

 

[Zxian]

Alright, maybe not way out of his budget, but it's still more expensive. I never consider rebates as part of the final price of my purchases unless they are instant rebates. I've had too many mail-in-rebates be rejected for one reason or the other that I just don't bother anymore.

For the budget constraints and the given usage scenarios, I still think the OP could likely be satisfied with the i3. It'll save him some money now and still do everything he needs it to while still giving him some upgrade options. The board he has selected will support IVB and 16GB (2x8GB) of DDR3 if he decides he should want to upgrade.

 

[Cpus]

Or.... you can avoid the horrible image quality produced by nVidia accelerated media transcoding. Link

If you want to do video transcoding, get the i5. The i3-2100 supports Quick Sync as well, and will handle all your media transcoding needs in a pinch. This would also likely give you some budget to pick up a license for Win7 Home Premium, which would go a long way for usability and overall performance.

If you're not going to be doing heavy multitasking with virtual machines, the number of cores is irrelevant. I've got my server running an i3-2100 and it performs just fine. I've got Hyper-V VMs doing all my downloading, file andprint serving, and domain mangement needs. If you're going to be using more than two VMs at a time (giving each 2GB of virtual memory), you might want to consider finding a board that has 4 DIMM slots. Otherwise, the 8GB will do just fine.


In summary, if you're planning on experimenting with virtualization as a hobby (learning Linux, testing things here and there, etc), get the i3-2100 and 8GB of RAM. It will serve your light virtualization needs and handle your media transcoding very well. If you can spare the extra $30-40, take the savings from the i3 and add a license for Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.[/Q



nope. if he wants to use more than 8gbs of memory (ram) he would need windows ultimate 64 bit.

 

[Zxian]

nope. if he wants to use more than 8gbs of memory (ram) he would need windows ultimate 64 bit.

Nope. Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit supports up to 16GB of memory. If the OP needs more than that, he'll have to use his existing Vista Ultimate license or get Win7 Pro/Ultimate.

Memory Limits for Windows Releases

 

[Ferzerp]

Core count does not equate to better virtualization.

Take it from someone with thousands of cores.

 

[kongqueror]

Thanks to all your responses guys. Looks like the SBs are getting the votes. My only concern is that to get a mobo with 4 dimms, I have to add $33 to the i5-2400 build not to mention the additional cost of 2x4GB to get to 16GB total ram. To keep the expense down, I can go i3-2100 but now I worry about losing 2 physical cores vs. the i5's 4 even though the i3 has HT. I've seen benchmarks where there is a significant difference between the two. So now it comes down to:

Intel i5-2400 CAD117.99
Gigabyte H77M-D3H mATX CAD92.99
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline Stiletto 16GB 4X4GB PC3-10666 CAD 77.99
Total: CAD288.97

A8-3870K CAD114.99
Gigabyte A75-D3H ATX CAD79.99
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline Stiletto 16GB 4X4GB PC3-10666 CAD 77.99
Total: CAD272.97

So 4 physical cores vs. 2 physical + 2logical cores.
Additional OC performance vs. stock.
Dead end socket vs ability to upgrade to i5/i7 IB down the road. However, judging by my current 6-year old rig, I do not upgrade parts every year - just ram and video if I do.

 

[Ferzerp]

I'd not drop below 4 real cores.

While I said core count doesn't equate to better virtualization, you do need at least some cores

 

[LeftSide]

Dude, that is less than a 10% cost increase for a massive increase in performance. Go with the Intel system, you won't regret it.

 

[Zxian]

Benchmarks are just benchmarks and a measure of maximum performance. Furhermore, benchmarks for compression/decompression or SuperPI or whatever else aren't going to give you a good feel for real-world usage performance.

What kind of virtualization needs are you going to expect? If it's just one or two VMs at a time, the i3 will be plenty. If you aren't expecting to be doing heavy multi-VM-multitasking, there is no strict need get the i5. I've had times on my server (an i3 machine) where I've fired up 8 VMs. The big thing to realize is that unless the virtualized systems are constantly under load, you won't notice any sigificant performance improvements with more cores. Idle VMs take up no CPU time. As long as you've got enough RAM, you can have as many VMs as you want on a single core.

If you really want the i5, go for it, but as someone who's recently done an upgrade path from a Q6600 to an i3-2100 to an i5-2500K, the biggest step up was simply from the Q6600 to the i3.

 

[Cerb]

If you really want the i5, go for it, but as someone who's recently done an upgrade path from a Q6600 to an i3-2100 to an i5-2500K, the biggest step up was simply from the Q6600 to the i3.

I don't know where he's buying, but the OP is showing an i5-2400 for the normal price of an i3-2100, so I don't think he can go wrong w/ the i5, if he can actually get it for that price.

 

[Zxian]

I don't know where he's buying, but the OP is showing an i5-2400 for the normal price of an i3-2100, so I don't think he can go wrong w/ the i5, if he can actually get it for that price.

i3's are dropping to the ~$100 mark. The cheapest i5 I've been able to find (I haven't dug too far) is $180 as the OP suggested.

I'd be all over a $100 i5 if I could get my hands on it.

 

[kongqueror]

Thanks for all the suggestions/recommendations guys - lots of things to consider given my budget limits. The price of CAD117.99 is for an i3-2100, not for the i5-2400 (still at $189.99). It was a typo but if were true - a no-brainer choice.

I found an interesting article on virtualization performance comparing an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition and AMD FX-8150 here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=1

All testing was done on Linux though. The i7 has 6 cores + HT and OC'd to 4.5GHz while the FX had 8 cores and run on stock 3.6GHz. They used KVM, Xen, and Virtualbox compared to bare metal. Unfortunately, Xen had issues with the FX' Asus motherboard so only KVM and Virtualbox results are available. On KVM, both processors generally performed the same relative to bare metal but on Virtualbox, the i7 struggled very much. Very interesting article and I wonder how a 4-core APU like the A8-3870K performs under the same conditions.

 

[holden j caufield]

has anyone else said more ram? That's almost the first rule of any virtualized environment. You can't have too much ram.

1) ram, ram, ram. Don't get a 2 slot memory board, also get the 8gb dimm as you'll want 16gb or more

2) disk i/o might be a concern but if you don't go over 4 vms at a time don't worry

3) get a mobo/cpu with vt-d amd iommu. So you can pass stuff through your pci-e devices, like video cards, hba, tv tuners etc.

4) you can get Vmware esxi 5 for free so dabble in that if you want

It's pretty awesome and you'll have so many options. I'm in the process of making everything run off of a single server. My amd 1045t/gigabyte 990fxa-ud3/32gb ram/esxi 5 is my vhost for all my pcs I'm almost to the point of virtualizing every pc into that machine and then just remoting into my virtual machines.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Thanks for all the suggestions/recommendations guys - lots of things to consider given my budget limits. The price of CAD117.99 is for an i3-2100, not for the i5-2400 (still at $189.99). It was a typo but if were true - a no-brainer choice.

I found an interesting article on virtualization performance comparing an Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition and AMD FX-8150 here:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu_1204_virt&num=1

All testing was done on Linux though. The i7 has 6 cores + HT and OC'd to 4.5GHz while the FX had 8 cores and run on stock 3.6GHz. They used KVM, Xen, and Virtualbox compared to bare metal. Unfortunately, Xen had issues with the FX' Asus motherboard so only KVM and Virtualbox results are available. On KVM, both processors generally performed the same relative to bare metal but on Virtualbox, the i7 struggled very much. Very interesting article and I wonder how a 4-core APU like the A8-3870K performs under the same conditions.

I dont think you understood the article.

Between Intel's Sandy Bridge and AMD's Bulldozer for KVM virtualization, the relative performance was generally quite close between these competing latest-generation architectures. If looking at the harmonic mean of the over three dozen tests that were run, the Intel Core i7 3960X was running at 93% the speed of bare metal with KVM while the AMD FX-8150 came in at 90% the speed of the bare metal Bulldozer.

And remember that SB-E is something like twice as fast as the Dulldozer.

But your money, your loss.

 

[lopri]

What are the client OS'es going to be?

 

[Cerb]

i3's are dropping to the ~$100 mark. The cheapest i5 I've been able to find (I haven't dug too far) is $180 as the OP suggested.

I was looking at the mistake (i5-2400 $118 CAD), and was working on the assumption that he'd actually found such a price (mobo combo, rebate, sale...).

P.S. I would go for the i3. The FX has more oomph when you can load it down with many threads, sure, but how often are you going to do that? 1-2 threads, the i3 wins; 3-4 threads, it will vary, but usually favor the i3; 6-8 the FX will beat it and take its lunch money (and, for that price, you may as well get an i5, which will beat the FX in daily tasks). The FX will have an advantage during transcoding, using the right programs, but if it takes a long time, you're going to do something else and come back, anyway. Your workflow isn't much different for 15 minutes than it is for 60 minutes; OTOH, it will be much improved when going from 2 seconds for a task to 0.5 seconds. The A8 is just plain worse, except maybe for light gaming with no video card, or OpenGL apps w/ no video card.

 

[Zxian]

@kongqueror - The big thing that we're missing from you is your intended usage for your virtualized systems. If it's just a matter of messing around for the sake of learning, just get the i3. I don't do any serious computational work (video transcoding/editing, photoshop, gaming) in a VM, and I wouldn't recommend doing so either. For my other tasks that I do use virtualization (installing and working with Linux distros, testing Windows installs, etc), I've never, ever wished that the VM was significantly faster. As holden mentioned, the thing that will really help you out is more RAM, and that's something that you can easily add later on down the road.

 

[blckgrffn]

Another i3 vote.

Get the other nice stuff now, like the solid mobo and ram and PSU and SSD for your VMs, revisit the CPU if you find yourself disaspointed. An i3 is practically as good as a quad core Core 2 and we ran ~30 production VMs on dual socket, dual core socket ~2.3 Ghz Core 2's. "Back in the day." As in as recently as ~4 years ago.

Don't let today's socket proliferation intimidate you. You can likely run 10 vCPUs per core.

More is better when it comes to some of the tasks that you talked about, but I've had no issues re-encoding videos in a VM on my i3. Adjust its share levels appropriately (talking ESXi here) and your other VMs wont even notice. I'd stick to a 2 vCPU per VM max though... HT isn't magic.

The i3 even has ECC support.

lol @ compulsory response from Ferzerp. I did that just for you