Get Fastest Support CPU for MB or Upgrade MB/CPU for Virtual Machine Host?

[TheeGooch]

I have a headless Ubuntu PC hosting 2 VM's running on a A6-3500 , a Gigabyte GA-A75M-D2H mobo, and 8GB DDR3 RAM. Recently I started loading the VM's more and noticed that at times the CPU and memory resources were low. I've ordered 16GB RAM to take care of the memory shortage, but I'm not sure what to do about the CPU bottleneck.

The fastest support CPU is the A8-3870K. I can get that for <$90, or I can upgrade the CPU/Mobo at the same time.

If I upgrade both, I'm looking at an i3 or i5. My CPU needs are pretty modest as the VM's are running Web, DNS, and Plex services.

Which way would you go, if you want to keep the cost for CPU/Mobo <$200?

 

[Ajay]

Well, the A8-3870K gets you and extra core plus an ~50% increase in clock. If you do not envision more than a 50% increase in load over the next year or so, seems like you have a safe bet @ $90. If you can foresee much heavier loads than that - you will have to reconsider.

 

[TheeGooch]

Well, the A8-3870K gets you and extra core plus an ~50% increase in clock. If you do not envision more than a 50% increase in load over the next year or so, seems like you like a safe bet @ $90. If you can foresee much heavier loads than that - you will have to reconsider.

Thank you for the feedback. I went with the A8 for now as the safe bet.Odds are next year the I'll get the upgrade bug, This will buy me time to do research and maybe even go whole hog and set up and ESXi with hardware raid like a synap box.

For now I stay on the cheap with the low cost hardware, mdraid , and virtualbox since it gets the job done.

 

[alyarb]

A home server doing DNS and some apache is not going to demand much CPU. I would look closer at your Plex workloads.

What are the client devices it is transcoding for? What is the source material? GPU-accelerated encoding is not going to work inside a virtual host, so there is literally no substitute for x86 muscle. And if you recall, supplementing admittedly weak CPU cores with heterogeneous GPU time is the only angle of the AMD APU, so I am afraid you chose entirely the wrong platform for this server if you had planned from the start to virtualize. None of your GPU silicon can be used in the environment you are providing, so why the A6 to begin with?

If your Plex work is anything like PS3 media server, where most of the work is going from h.264 to MPEG2, then I think an A8 at 2.9 GHz would be able to accommodate you, but at that point you should know that the board is maxed out and the system will never go any faster. Chances are you are transcoding for newer devices and h.264 is your output, and that is heavier work.

Do you really want to spend $90 on an incremental CPU upgrade? You still have time to recoup value for the parts you have. I would sell your A6 and board and move to a Pentium G3420 and Asrock H87M. This starts you off with way more power than any A8, and you will have a socket that can support more than 2 cores.

Also, ESXi is free and just better. No Need for hardware RAID, just use the raid 10 on the intel PCH and make regular backups of your VMs. Plenty of free tools out there.

 

[sm625]

A pentium G3220 has nearly 50% more overall performance. A haswell i3 would deliver a clean double in performance. It is hard to justify any llano upgrade path since a $100 upgrade gets you only about 40% more performance even if you go with the A8-3870K and overclock it. It makes infinitely more sense to buy a low end haswell or even better yet, a used 1st or 2nd gen i5.

 

[TheeGooch]

Well, the A8 has already been shipped. but you have given me food for thought for my next upgrade. This upgrade was a short-term solution to let me move on to other projects.

It has definitely brought to light how much I'm out of the loop on current hardware. I wasn't even aware Intel had CPU's outside of the i3-i7 family!

Thanks for taking the time to reply to my post. If I am seriously unhappy with the A8/16GB RAM solution, I'll save up a good chunk of change for a serious upgrade and look at the Intel G series CPU.

I did read some comments today that said that the i3-2500k was a good value, and there was a popular i7 that people were comparing to the AMD FX-8350, but I don't remember the model.