RAM - HDD what would you be looking at

[SHimmer45]

slightly aging but reliable phenom 2 x4 which i use for gaming through to playing with virtual things.

 

Phenom 2 X4 2.8Ghz

8GB RAM

2x 300GB SATA HDD (RAID 0)

HD6800

 

looking to add either more ram or better HDD to it but cant make up my mind between going to 16GB RAM or putting another SSD in there (or 2x smaller ssd in raid can work out similar to a more expensive larger ssd)

 

when i do fire up some virtual machines for a lab its only a couple of DC's (however when i was playing with exchange it was painfully slow) a client and a firewall

[tmcd35]

Unless you're running out of space HDD isn't going to give you much. Sure SSD would improve boot time and initial program loads, but I suspect bottlenecks will be elsewhere. If you're playing with VM's then I'd expect upping the RAM to 16Gb would be more beneficial. What does Task Manager say about your CPU/RAM usage when you have a couple of VM's open?

[SHimmer45]

CPU isnt that high

with a DC and exchange running and allocating 2GB for the DC and 3GB for Exchange its using 60-70 including the Host OS (i am currently using virtual box on win 7 and i think it allocates the ram regardless of it being used)

[sonofsanta]

You've not listed any SSDs in that spec, only HDDs?

 

I'd say an SSD - Crucial MX100 at 256GB/512GB - is the what you need to do if you haven't already done it.

 

If you've got an SSD already, well, what problems are you hitting? If you're not RAM limited then adding more RAM is pointless. If you want to up your FPS, then upgrade the 6800, there are newer cards that'll double that performance and be a worthwhile upgrade (get an nVidia 970).

 

I've got a Phenom II X4 965 still, with only 4GB RAM, paired with a GeForce 680 it flies through any game I care to load up. It's still a decent enough CPU.

Edited October 14, 2014 by sonofsanta

[SHimmer45]

gaming is fine for what i play.

 

the HDD are only a couple of 300GB seagate 7200.9 in R0

[tmcd35]

It'd surprise me if SSD would make a huge difference with the VM's, other than booting you shouldn't be hammering disk access hard enough. But of course, if you're not maxing out either CPU or RAM has is, then trying an SSD can't hurt.

 

I'd suspect it's a case of Exchange being a resource hog.

 

Out of curiosity, I'm pretty sure the X4 has hardware virtialisation support, have you ticked the 'use VRTx' checkbox in the VM settings, this can make a huge speed difference.

[SHimmer45]

im 90% sure i have enabled using hardware virt support.

will double check this this evening.

 

i did forget to mention that my boot drive is a single ssd and all the VM and iso's are on the raided volume

[LincolnE]

I'd personally chuck an SSD into it. 16gb ram would be useful for virtual machines, but I think that the processor would be the first to bottleneck, rather than ram. Depends on how intense the VMs will be, however. If they need more than 8gb of ram, that'll be the best way to go down.

[featured_spectre]

If your budget allows, an SSD and a RAM increase would be in order. You could then allocate more RAM to the VMs, and you may end up having a noticable performance increase across the board from the SSD and RAM.

[SHimmer45]

cheers for the replies.

in a fit of rage uninstall game has been removed so actually going to convert it to be more focused as a virtual machine and actually achieve something.

so looks like an install of hyper-v server 2012 or 2012 is incoming..

would appear easier than attempting vmware as im sure the installer would have a fit at the hardware lol