Apologies if this will be a bit of a vague question.
Could people give some advice on what might be suitable parts for a box who’s primary use will be host OS + 1-2 VMs (running concurrently). These wouldn’t be heavy VMs a couple cores each, couple gigs of ram.
Primarily obviously looking to find out what would be the most suitable CPU these days. Is there a good middle of the road option?
AMD seems like an obvious contender, but it seems like there’s considerations if using Linux, and that ram needs to be pretty specific (or is that just the case if your overclocking?).
The main issue is money, really need to build something for someone as their current box basically just doesn’t support VMs, but there’s not a big budget, realistically under £600.
(i know there’s new AMD cpus coming out apparently? any info on this? would their current gen be a good choice if there’s a price drop?)
High memory speeds are nice to have for gaming, I wouldn’t think too much about that when it comes to VMs. The Ryzen 5 1600 is still price/perf-king, runs cool and won’t drink all the power.
I would probably go with something like windows xp/7 for those rare moments when you there is not a better option for something that is linux friendly. The second os would be a minimal install of fedora/debian/arch etc for just messing about it without the fear of breaking your host OS
For the cpu i would guess that something like the 1300x or 1400 would be enough for most users. the 2400G would be a good APU for those who want a decent GPU. assign 2 cores to both of the VMs and you should be good for most users workloads
What workload are the VMs going to be doing? Will they benefit from h.264, h.265 or other acceleration instructions? edit: importantly, what will the host OS be doing? will that also be light duty, or are you talking a gaming box with VMs as well?
If not, i’d even suggest picking up some bargain previous generation AMD hardware on a cheap motherboard.
All the software/firmware/driver bugs are ironed out and you can get 8 cores for peanuts.
Sure, performance isn’t as great as a shiny new ryzen box, but the cost is nowhere near that either, and the software stack is far more mature.
Ryzen is nice and all, but if its just a few VMs with light duty and price is a concern… it’s simply maybe not worth spending the extra.
I’d go Bulldozer OR perhaps the cheapest box you can build with DDR4 support on either team red or team blue.
Avoid K series intel’s as they don’t have some of the virtualisation instructions (which can help speed up various things) from memory.
Maybe even consider an AMD APU (pre raven ridge) to avoid the need for a GPU as well. You don’t need it from the sounds of it and an onboard R7 or whatever class GPU will be plenty.
Socket AM4 APU like an A8 or A10 on a B350 board will at least give you current standards for IO and memory… Ryzen itself sounds like overkill to me personally.
If making this as cheap as possible is the goal I would look for an secondhand 83xx FX with a decent board. Having said that you might also find a good deal on an Sandy or Ivybridge I7 although the bargains are usually AMD based.
The one good think about second hand non-K intel chips is that the chances are they have never been overclocked or messed about with. I’ve purchased a couple of dud K series chips second hand in the past. I’ve never had problems with the non-K series.
As it sounds like you are in the UK take a look at CEX, the prices for second hand CPU’s is usually cheaper than ebay and you get a 12 month warranty. Both times I’ve returned stuff they haven’t messed about and either given a full refund or quickly located and dispatched another part.
I’ll tell you right now. Mac pro 4/5,1 can be had for so little, as can the chips, and likely has 16GB of ram… It’d be easy to make a 12 core system way under budget.
Mac Pro 4,1 starts at $299 used on eBay with a 4c/8t CPU, 12GB RAM and a 500GB hard drive. A cheap modern craptop would run circles around it on everything except plugging in SATA hard drives.
You can get two X5675s for 12 total cores for another $110, so it’s true that the Mac Pro is a cheap way to throw tons of CPU cores at the situation, but each of those cores are pretty dog slow. So depends on what you want to do with it, really. Tons of slow VMs, it’s a pretty good choice.
If you’re building new, I wouldn’t buy any currently available Intel CPU unless it was extremely cheap due to Meltdown. Ryzen is a good alternative, but Zen2 is coming out soon. My suggestion there would be to wait.
Have you seen the L1 vid on recycle places and university sales? They get rid of stuff all the time. Even on my MP 1,1 with just 5150’s I use parallels in OSX to game and it works just fine. I would do a 4,1 or 5,1 just because its enough to still do whatever you need it to do. A large consideration I have right now is going from my current 1225V3 machine to a mac pro 5,1, and I’ve been looking, and its a platform I know and trust already.
Point is under 600, most power possible, MP 4,1 / 5,1 is best bang for buck in my opinion.
The 4th gen i5 or i7 in one of the EliteDesk 800 G1 machines, either SFF or Tower supports Virtualisation (you may have to enable it in BIOS) and is pretty affordable. They are solid machines, I have a similar SFF as a media PC and a Tower with a 1050ti as my main workstation/gaming PC. They are 3-4 years old so many are available as ex lease/refurb.
A bonus is they often have a Windows 7/8 Pro COA meaning Windows 10 Pro can be installed (as per this example) giving you the option of using Hyper-V to host your VM’s.