Member Avatar for mdm7923

I know everyone says an i7 is more than enough power, but I am looking at an upgrade to my primary computer, and I am unsure of what I should upgrade. Right now it handles the load pretty well, however it chokes up particularly when running multiple VMs. Primary uses of the PC are

-Web Browsing
-School (Coding,Word processing,Database,Virtualization)
-Gaming, both heavy and light
-Experimental Networking and Server setup (Mostly VM stuff)

Hardware specs are
-i7 920 CPU D0 OCed to 3.8 GHz
-6GB DDR3 1333 RAM OCed to 1500 MHz
-ATI Radeon 4890 1GB
-2x30 GB OCZ Vertex SSDs in RAID0
-1 TB WD Caviar Black 7200 RPM (for storage)
-Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit

System scores 7.6 out of a possible 7.9 on the WEI
Usually, VMs are the most taxing thing, they usually eat up about 80-95% of my RAM and
about 50-80% of my CPU. I'm thinking 12 or 24 GB of RAM will fix this problem, but I am also aware that buying a 6 core i7 CPU will help as well. My graphics card will run pretty much all the games I throw at it on 1680x1050, so I don't think I need an upgrade there.

I'm pretty knowledgeable about Hardware in general, but I just want to get a second opinion before I break out the cash for the upgrade as it will be expensive (especially for the 6 core i7 CPU). I am thinking 12GB of DDR3 1600/2000 (3x4 GB) with the option to upgrade to 24 GB in the future, simply because the i7 970 is too darned expensive.

but post away, if many of you think the i7 CPU is the way to go, I will consider biting the bullet...

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by khakilang

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Short answer: add RAM first. Virtual machines suffer far more from running out of physical memory (and hitting the pagefile) than from a few fewer CPU cores. As and hinted, eliminating swapping will give the most immediate, noticeable speed-up for multiple VMs.

Buy a matched triple‑channel kit (3×4GB) so the board can run in its intended memory configuration; check the motherboard manual for the correct slots. Avoid mixing different sized/speed sticks unless you’re prepared for the system to fall back to the slowest timings. Plan the purchase so you can add an identical kit later if you really need 24GB — but only do that once you confirm you’re still memory‑bound.

When to consider a CPU upgrade: only after RAM is no longer the limiter. Monitor per‑core CPU utilization (Task Manager/Resource Monitor). If you see sustained high usage on most cores while RAM has headroom, a higher‑core CPU will help. If the CPU shows moderate load but the system is swapping, more RAM is the right call. Also keep at least ~2GB (more if you run desktop apps on the host) reserved for the host OS when sizing VM allocations.

Other practical checks and cautions: answer by verifying your PSU wattage and 12V rail capacity before OC and upgrades. Watch Resource Monitor’s “Hard Faults/sec” — high values mean disk paging is happening. Your RAID0 SSDs help disk speed but can’t match RAM. If budget is tight, consider offloading some VMs to a second inexpensive machine or using lighter server images (as suggested) rather than buying the expensive six‑core immediately.

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Member Avatar for Rik_

What PSU are you using? Does it have enough amps on the 12 volt rail(s) to power that lot?

Member Avatar for jaydeee

if you're planning to add more virtual machines on your system and will be playing more games then RAM upgrade will be a good choice. However I'm also thinking that your system is good enough with your computing needs.

Member Avatar for jak0b

I have a similar setup, running VM's as well (except I didn't OC it).

I have 12Gb ram installed, and think it is sufficient to run 3-5 server's/client's simultaneously, depending of cause of the work load.

If you need more VM's than that, I think you should go for the 24 GB ram, before upgrading the cpu.
Remember that insufficient ram will become a serious bottleneck as soon as Windows starts to use swap-file on the hdd (even with the 2 SSD's you have).

Member Avatar for Johnclave111

12 Gb is good if you have a server or something if you only for simple use 4gb is enough

Member Avatar for khakilang

Why not have another computer for networking and server to ease up the load.

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