I have been out of the PC world for ages. All of my current knowledge is on Midrange and Large systems. There seem to be quite a few folks that are current on PC technology, so I could use some advice. I am looking to build a lab system for the house. I am going to run Fedora Linux with VMware Workstation. I require the ability to run 64-bit VMs, so I'll need AMD-V or Intel VT-x. My question is should I go with an Intel Core i3 or AMD Phenom II CPU. Either CPU should have more than enough performance for my needs. My main concern is heat, as I hate noisy systems. The TDP is similar on both chips, but I am looking for some real world information.
Not sure about heat, but AMD is significantly less of a douche company than Intel, particularly when it comes to us FOSS peeps. I would (and plan to in the near future) go with the Phenom II. Keep us in the loop about how this rig turns out.
I would tend to look at it way too logically. Look at some benchmarks, and get a performance/cost rating of a complete system (CPU+Mobo, etc). Also consider paying extra for a quiet cooling system. All else being equal I prefer AMD to Intel because Intel is as much about marketing as engineering: Pentium 4 Also known as the Spaceheater 4 had a wretched performance/watt rating. But Intel kept pimping the crappy netburst architecture that could go a bajillion Mhz, even though AMD had slower clocked CPUs that performed better and cooler. Then they released the Pentium D. Dual core space heater. Centrino Adding confusion to the mobile marketplace, people thought this was a CPU when it just means intel CPU+chipset+wireless. In other words, it's worthless. GMA 915 Intel apparently had warehouse upon warehouse full of this crappy graphics card. So much so that they forced Microsoft to allow it to be "Vista capable", even though it couldn't have WDDM drivers, and thus no Aero, resulting in a huge part of the "Vista Capable" lawsuits All their other graphics cards Marketed as "Extreme graphics", even though they perform worse than bargain bin integrated offerings from AMD/ATI, and nVidia. False marketing in the netbook space In addition to "Netbooks are underpowered" scare tactics, the first models were equipped with crippled Celeron-Ms lacking power saving features, so they could make Atom sound like a revolutionary invention. Meanwhile the chipset in these units are still spaceheaters. And they tried to fight tooth and nail to prevent other GPU makers from putting something half decent in there. Prevent competition By fighting tooth and nail against AMD and all other x86 makers, trying to sue them, charge ridiculous licence fees, etc.
i3 is nothing more than a rebadged last-model dual-core processor to bring it inline with Intel's new naming conventions. The i5 and i7 lines are simply great, and outperform AMD in every way from a variety of different benchmarks. Personally, I would go with an i7 860- I run my system on that, and its pretty quiet, doesn't chew through that much juice, 3 cache systems (8mb L3) and overclocks pretty easily (860 has a stock of 2.6GHz.. I've overclocked mine to 3.4Ghz just by tweaking one setting in BIOS). An i5 is a cheaper alternative- doesn't perform as well- but saves you money. You only need an i7 (or the newer series coming out next quarter) if you do video/audio editing, movie making or gaming. And of course, the CPU is only part of the equation. Don't touch an Intel graphics chip. Go with Nvidia... or ATI to save money.
According to my research the Core i3 is based on the Nehalem microarchitecture. I do want the onboard video, because I don't need the performance from the video. As the system will run headless. I am leaning strongly toward the Phenom II X2 as Fry's is running a special. A Phenom II X2 with MSI motherboard for $90. A Core i3 processor with motherboard will run $200. Kenko you are right about the Pentium D being a space heater. I have one now and it puts out some heat.
http://www.techpowerup.com/97604/De...ment_Emerge_Gulftown_to_be_Named_Core_i9.html Personally I haven't found anything good about the AMD Phenom X2's... then again, that's only when rated against Intel's latest offerings... http://www.anandtech.com/show/2839 that website has quite a few different tests comparing AMD and Intel against one another
I ended up going with the Phenom II X2 555. At $100 for the board and chip it was just too good a deal to pass up. Best part is that is was a decent MSI motherboard. RAM prices are ridiculously right now, so I ended up going with 4GB. Figure it is easy enough to upgrade later when prices drop. I also picked up 2 1TB Seagate hard drives. I have them running in a RAID 1 using Linux software RAID. So far the system is pretty peppy. Big improvement running VMs compared to my laptop. It just falls flat under the I/O workload.
nice HDD setup. I have a RAID 5 setup; and as for the RAM, you really don't need any more than 4GB... maybe in a year, 6 will be necessary with software improvements and whatnot, but I use my system pretty heavily, and I've never gone above 60% with my 4GB RAM... the transfer rate between RAM and CPU helps, too. What graphics card?
If you're running VMs you can use up RAM pretty quickly. My "main machine" is my 2.5 year old laptop. When it gives up the ghost again, the replacement system is going to be ridiculous.
Yeah, VMs eat up the RAM in a hurry. That was the main motivation for this build, as my laptop maxes out at 4GB. I have a virtual VMware ESX Cluster that I have running in a set of VMs for development and testing purposes. The minimum supported RAM is over 6GB. I have modified the configs so they will start in 4GB. When I say 4GB I mean 4GB. VMware does memory dedup, but I was still under 5MB of free memory on my laptop. So I couldn't even run a web browser without swapping to disk. This is the motherboard I got. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130247 Looks like it has an integrated ATI HD 4200. Which is way overkill for my needs. In fact I went into the BIOS and dropped the video memory down to 32MB, which is the lowest setting.
