My main PC is around 5 yrs old. It's a Dell Vostros 200 Slim Tower. There's a E4500 in there, 2GB RAM, and a low profile Radeon 4500. For the most part it works, but it is pretty old and I don't want to put up with the things that are nagging me any more. Most annoying problem is the noise of the fans. I'd like a quieter computer, silent if possible. The system is mainly used for web browsing, watching movies, spreadsheets, maybe some coding. Lite to no gaming. When watching 1080p movies sometimes frames will skip and the fans spin up getting louder than the movie. I also tried running a virtual machine and it was sluggish. Not a good idea with only 2GB of RAM I guess.
What I'd like to get from a new PC (if I need one) is to be able to run one or two virtual machines without sluggishness. I'd like to be able to watch 1080p movies on the virtual machine without skipped frames or freezing. With the haswell chips coming out I became motivated to try to build a PC. I was looking at fanless builds, but reseach seems to show it's not really worth it.
Maybe I should just slap some more RAM into this old PC and look for bigger fans? But there really isn't any room left in this slim tower.
For the new build I was thinking a i5-4670k+asrock H87(M?)+16 to 32GB RAM. Past that I'm not sure. Suggestions?
if you run a professional version of VM ware or oracle virtualbox, and that has multi core support, then you can also go with an AMD system. AMD FX8350 8core cpu.
You can trow multiple VM´s and next to that you can also do things you like. i had windows 7 ultimate 64 as my os, i runned windows 8 x64 pro+ media center in a vm, and also linux suse. at same time. but 16GB ram is highly recommended. also a good gpu
so what is your budget?
p.s your old system could indeed use more ram, also do you have your gpu drivers installed in the VM? and ofc does your vm software support multiple cores?