why do you want a more expensive 8370E over a 8350 or 8320? All those cpu´s are totaly the same, same architecture, same instruction sets, etc etc. THe only diffrence is clockspeeds. and for the E models, they use some agressive stepping. for power saving.
+1 If you are going to go with AMD and want to keep power consumption down buy an FX8320 or FX8350 and under-clock it. Most FX8320's could easily be configured to match the normal and turbo clock speeds used by the FX 8370E.
If you ultimately want to run lots of VM's with a decent amount of memory allocated to each you might find it easier to pick up a second hand Z800 or similar workstation with a 6 core X5650 or similar CPU. I run one of these with two X5650 and 48GB. The case layout is fantastic and the X5650 has similar performance as an FX8320.
Lots of VM's simultaneously will run better on an AMD FX8k, Intel virtualization performance is a bit underwhelming in comparison. A single Windows VM with simple PCI passthrough is another thing, but in that case I would get a CPU with better IPC than an end-of-life Xeon.
There are newer kernel functions, like being able to passthrough USB devices over TCP, that don't work that well on Intel, but work flawlessly on AMD, and AMD's do scale better.
If you're going to do a lot of QEMU for other platforms (e.g. ARM), go with Intel, because at that point you need maximum IPC.
Can you elaborate on why/how Intel visualization is underwhelming? I've had no problems on my home kit with VMware or Hyper-V and have always seen better performance of VM's on E5 Xeon powered servers vs Opteron equipped servers when using VMware. Is this AMD/Intel disparity particular to the hypervisor you use, if so do you happen to know why?
Architectural differences, platform support, kernel support, etc... a bunch of things really. I'm running virtual machines mainly on quad Opteron MP machines, but also on a dual E5 machine of current steppings and on simple AMD FX8350 machines, a single E5 workstation of current stepping, and several single E3 machines. None of the Intel machines (and that's regardless of consumer chipsets or C chipsets) perform as well as the AMD machines for running many VM's at the same time. I don't use VMWare (and most certainly not Hyper-V lmao) because it doesn't perform that well and has some pretty annoying PSOD issues, but I use kvm/qemu and Xen, right now on SLES and OpenSuSE, before on RHEL and Fedora, and have used those for years without issues.
An FX8k is unbeatable for running a development server with many VM's for a tiny budget, because it actually supports all virtualization standards really well, without bugs or hickups, and the standard AMD chipsets support ECC RAM, something no Intel consumer chipset does, not even X99, and that immediately raises the price considerably. An single E5 of an EoL stepping won't come near to an FX8k in performance for multiple VM's simultaneously, and there's the risk of buying used. An MP E5 would match the performance, but would also be more expensive, even used.
Putting Windows in a VM with PCI passthrough for playing games while still guaranteeing basic security and privacy and for the ability to snapshot the Windows appliance to improve the reliability, is very popular now, and a lot of people buy AMD FX8k's for that. Even though that's not wrong per se, that's not the kind of virtualisation the AMD excells in. People that want to do that, and don't care about ECC or running multiple VM's in an advanced configuration, should go for a VT-d compatible Intel setup in my opinion, but they should also do careful research on the compatibility of motherboards, because the support for VT-d on consumer class boards is extremely poor across the board, whereas on AMD, there is only one single board manufacturer that has problems with IOMMU, and that's Asus, even though these problems can be solved by flashing beta BIOS and/or switching yes/no in the BIOS at the "enable IOMMU" setting.
as a side note, as far as i know, only Asus am3+ boards support ECC ram.
All other manufacturers dont have ECC memory support on theire spec lists.
thinking about switching out the adata with a crucial mx 100 256gb, anyone recommend it over the adata?
The first thing that comes to my attention about both your Intel and AMD build, they each don't have 2 GPUs. I'm 99% sure you need 2 GPUs for the setup you're wanting, 1 for the host, and 1 for the guest. I'm in the same situation you're in, I want to run Linux and play games in a Windows VM. This is the build I have so far: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/qd3XJx
I choose this i5 because it had VT-d support. The Intel GPU will be for the host, the 290 will be for the Windows guest.
i have like 2 nvidia xfx 9500t's and a gtx 260 laying around i believe that i could use.
Thanks, that's great that you've found good lower budget solutions that work. Your experiences with VMware and Hyper-V (latest version) and Intel vs AMD seem to be somewhat different to mine, but the bigger deployments have been in larger companies where budget and specialist staff are in abundance and I suspect underlying requirements are also different (I tend to work on closed source applications\appliances where higher CPU IPC is important).
I'm interested to learn more about good lower budget solutions especially using FOSS platforms as not all the people I work with have large budgets or want to be told how well something runs on VSphere or Hyper-V since they can't afford all the management software licences or cutting edge hardware. There seems to be plenty of information out there but could you recommend any reliable blogs or forums you follow on KVM or Xen?
aggressive stepping? what kind of problems would that cause?
Sorry for not getting back to you, but I believe the Xeon supports VT-D and the 8k series doesn't. Like what's above, simply underclock the 8320, and put the only saved into a 290, or better/more storage. I just recommended the Xeon as it should be better for virtualisation because of VT-D. Once again, I'm not sure if the 8320 supports it. The biggest reason I recommended it, is for the reason that it supports ECC. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the 8k series does support it. One more thing, the 8320 is in theory a 4 core. Think of what AMD did as their version of hyperthreading. And in theory, you'd be about as well of by choosing a Phenom 1055t six core as the cores are true.
Sorry if any of this is wrong, but I thought that VT-D was just an Intel technology for virtualization?
I know very little about virtualization, so I need someone like Zoltan to explain.
This AMD build is $5 more than yours above, and is better as I squeezed 32gb of RAM into it with a gold 850w PSU.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/Pcf8XL
Not to mention the upgrade to a 280 from a 270x.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/wYTHrH
I set out to build a propper server with a 12 core opteron all this come in at 1.2k and if you buy all the new egg stuff off of newegg you can get $50 off with promo code OBYEAREND14
I would the adata is faster than the crucial but they are both very good drives. Im using the 256gb Adata 900 with no problems.
this is faster than the intel and amd build but a little more $$
All AMD CPU's and chipsets since the Phenom II support AMD-Vi, which is the AMD version of VT-d, like AMD-V is the AMD version of VT-x.
On the Intel side, VT-d was actually implemented pretty early on, before VT-x even, but then got switched off in "gamer" type SKU's, and with Haswell refresh, it's switched on again, and now Intel seems to want to do the same thing as AMD does, enable it on pretty much all SKU's. Even Atom-based CPU's have VT-x now, and some of those even have VT-d.
We should really call it "kvm" or "IOMMU", because those are the generic names for the extensions that enable the technology, looking at it from the software end instead of the hardware end that is lol
FX cpu´s also support ECC un-buffered ram, if you buy a Asus AM3+ board.
If going amd, and the graphics card were asus or maybe this xfx im looking at, compared to sapphire, would there be any problems ( like you would get if you used a asus motherboard) for linux?
Not at all. With AMD go with the open source driver.