Need to upgrade - 4GB Core 2 2.4 not fast enough

[dwhore]

As per the title, I have a PC with:

ATI X1650 Pro
Maxtor 6Y200M0 200GB hard drive (fairly old 7200 rpm SATA hd)
2 * Samsung HD103UJ 1 TB hard drives
Pioneer DVD-Rom
Creative X-Fi soundcard (Gamer?)
4GB of RAM
Asus P5B-E Plus motherboard
Core 2 Duo E6600 running at stock with aftermarket quiet fan
Antec Sonata (1) case/power supply

Running on Vista SP1 32bit

My PC is fast when first booted up, but tends to suffer after a couple of days when I have a few programs going.

This is my typical workload:

VMWare with up to 8 VMs running, all on XP SP3 with 256mb allocated, most lightly loaded or inactive
Windows Media Player
Microsoft Excel (several spreadsheets)
Internet Explorer (several dozen windows)
Auction Sentry
Paint .NET
Several Explorer windows
Messenger windows
Word with some heavy documents

I do not play games, but the system gets slow as more programs get loaded.

Do I need more RAM, as I only have 3GB in effect due to running 32 bit Vista.

Any suggestions as to a sensible setup?

I'm thinking I could junk the existing 4 * 1GB RAM and go for 4 * 2 GB under 64 bit Vista. 2GB DIMMs are now relatively cheap, I don't think I'll need 16 GB which would imply pricey 4GB DIMMs.

This would mean a move to time-consuming move to 64 bit Vista (reinstall, which might not be a bad idea anyway), but should I put it off until Core i7 is available, and get the full works: motherboard, CPU and the RAM.

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: dwhore
should I put it off until Core i7 is available, and get the full works: motherboard, CPU and the RAM.

If you want i7 you have to buy MB and CPU later.

 

[JackMDS]

Any desktop computer running 8 VMs would be slow.

However when running VM, more memory is always good. :thumbsup:

 

[dwhore]

Originally posted by: Blain

Originally posted by: dwhore
should I put it off until Core i7 is available, and get the full works: motherboard, CPU and the RAM.

If you want i7 you have to buy MB and CPU later.

Yeah that's what I meant.

I basically have four options:

1: wait, and buy new mboard, i7, and RAM, then go 64 bit
2. buy 4 * 2GB RAM and go 64 bit now
3: buy Core 2 Duo Q-series and 4 * 2GB RAM and go 64 bit now
4. do option 2 now, see if I am happy with the performance, and if not I can (?) reuse the RAM in option 1 in the future.

 

[dwhore]

Originally posted by: JackMDS
Any desktop computer running 8 VMs would be slow.

However when running VM, more memory is always good. :thumbsup:

TBH it's slow with four or five.

And they are most of the time sitting idle.

 

[Blain]

Buy 4 x 2GB (1.8v) DDR2
Buy as fast a 45nm quad core as you can afford.

 

[yinan]

Buy a server with a good RAID controller so the disk load can be more evenly spread out. You can get a decent server for 2k nowadays.

 

[akugami]

Get the 8GB of RAM, get a quad core cpu and get Vista 64 bit now.

I don't believe going to i7 is going to help much. At least it's not worth the cost to do so with the more expensive DDR3 RAM you will likely need. There's also the Early Adopter's Tax (TM).

Finally what is your OS drive and how are your apps installed? Is everything running off of one HD? That can be a major bottleneck when you have Media Player and a few different VM installs trying to read from the HD at the same time. A faster HD can alleviate some of the problems, the newish Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS drive is fairly fast and won't break the bank (for most).

 

[Blain]

4 x 1TB WD Black in RAID 6 = :thumbsup::thumbsup::laugh:

 

[dguy6789]

Going to 8GB ram, 64 bit os, and a Q9XXX quad would be very nice.

 

[dwhore]

Originally posted by: akugami
Get the 8GB of RAM, get a quad core cpu and get Vista 64 bit now.

I don't believe going to i7 is going to help much. At least it's not worth the cost to do so with the more expensive DDR3 RAM you will likely need. There's also the Early Adopter's Tax (TM).

Finally what is your OS drive and how are your apps installed? Is everything running off of one HD? That can be a major bottleneck when you have Media Player and a few different VM installs trying to read from the HD at the same time. A faster HD can alleviate some of the problems, the newish Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS drive is fairly fast and won't break the bank (for most).

My OS/app drive is the old 200GB SATA drive. All my data is on the 1TB drives, which are quite new, and I guess (haven't checked) benchmarks, perform very similarly to any other 1TB drive.

I originally had WD 400GB Raid Edition drives (RAID1), but they failed every six weeks or so, and after blaming my onboard raid and buying a separate RAID controller, I eventually gave up on them.

 

[akugami]

Moving it to that WD Caviar Black would alleviate some of the bottleneck when multiple apps are accessing your HD. Any newer drive will be faster than that old 200GB SATA drive. That WD Caviar Black is one of the fastest SATA drives unless you wanna move up to a 300GB Raptor. RAID1 would improve things but you've found out the pitfalls of RAID1 and that is the increased risk of failure.

Storage Review - HD reviews only
http://www.storagereview.com/

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: akugami
RAID1 would improve things but you've found out the pitfalls of RAID1 and that is the increased risk of failure.

You're thinking of "RAID 0". RAID 1 is mirroring, not striping.

 

[Denithor]

As I see it, here's your situation:

You're running 8xVM with 256MB allocated to each. 8x256MB = 2GB or 2/3 of your available system memory (keeping in mind the 3GB cap in 32-bit OS). Leaving you with basically only 1GB of available memory for Vista. Which is a big oopsie, as Vista performs like crap with less than 2GB memory.

Here are your choices.

Bump up to 4x2GB DDR2 & Vista 64. This *should* improve your performance significantly. Overclocking your e6600 to 3GHz would help also. Note that you will not be able to reuse this RAM in a Nehalem build as Intel has decided in their infinite wisdom to require DDR3 for their latest & greatest. Memory upgrade will cost about $100.

If you go with the memory upgrade and find you need more processing power you're going to be upgrading to a Q9xxx not the latest i7 chips. Note if you go this route you may also want to spend a few extra bucks for a newer motherboard (better quad & memory support than P965). Full upgrade (say, Q9400/P5Q Pro) will run about $400.

Wait until i7 launches. Spend at least $1000 on i7/mobo/8GB DDR3. Maybe more. Get about the same performance.

HDD is in addition to any of these cases. I'll second the other ppl here, you're probably due for a new one. Look at the WD6400AAKS for a good performance/value drive. The Caviar Black drives offer even better performance so those might be worth a look also.

 

[videogames101]

Need quad + 8GB

(wait for Nehalem!)

 

[dwhore]

Originally posted by: Denithor
As I see it, here's your situation:

You're running 8xVM with 256MB allocated to each. 8x256MB = 2GB or 2/3 of your available system memory (keeping in mind the 3GB cap in 32-bit OS). Leaving you with basically only 1GB of available memory for Vista. Which is a big oopsie, as Vista performs like crap with less than 2GB memory.

Here are your choices.

Bump up to 4x2GB DDR2 & Vista 64. This *should* improve your performance significantly. Overclocking your e6600 to 3GHz would help also. Note that you will not be able to reuse this RAM in a Nehalem build as Intel has decided in their infinite wisdom to require DDR3 for their latest & greatest. Memory upgrade will cost about $100.

If you go with the memory upgrade and find you need more processing power you're going to be upgrading to a Q9xxx not the latest i7 chips. Note if you go this route you may also want to spend a few extra bucks for a newer motherboard (better quad & memory support than P965). Full upgrade (say, Q9400/P5Q Pro) will run about $400.

Wait until i7 launches. Spend at least $1000 on i7/mobo/8GB DDR3. Maybe more. Get about the same performance.

HDD is in addition to any of these cases. I'll second the other ppl here, you're probably due for a new one. Look at the WD6400AAKS for a good performance/value drive. The Caviar Black drives offer even better performance so those might be worth a look also.

My Spinpoint F1s score 1042 IO/s, the Caviar Black 1136.

When I go 64 bit, the 200GB (which probably gets about 500 IO/s) will be junked, and I probably will go back to RAID 1 for the F1s.

In the meantime I've switched my pagefile to the Spinpoint - the VMs are already alll there.

I think you are right that the main problem is lack of RAM.

8GB DDR2 in 4 DIMMS costs £80
the Q6600 is £135
or Q6700 (2.66 GHz) is £150

Total = £215/£230

The i7 solution is

8GB DDR3 costs £280
Core i7 920 costs ~£250
mboard ~£150
Total = £680 to achieve similar performance

It doesn't make sense on any level

If in future i7 offers a compelling performance advantage then the cost of buying it all then and tossing the £230 spent now is likely to be similar.

So only question is it really necessary to get a new motherboard when my P5B-E plus should support quad core and 2GB Dimms already?

The other I guess if it's possible to go eight core

 

[dwhore]

The other issue is it's possibly worth simply buying the RAM and skipping the CPU upgrade.

If I did this, is a dual to quad core on an existing install a sensible swap, or is it necessary/highly recommended to reinstall Windows?

 

[F1shF4t]

Originally posted by: dwhore
The other issue is it's possibly worth simply buying the RAM and skipping the CPU upgrade.

If I did this, is a dual to quad core on an existing install a sensible swap, or is it necessary/highly recommended to reinstall Windows?

Check how much your cpu is loaded, if you max it regularly then a quad will be worth it.

The issues with switching cpus was sometimes a prob under xp with going from single core to dual core. The second core would not be detected.

Switching from dually to a quad will be not an issue under Vista most it will require is a reboot.

 

[jdkick]

If you're VMs aren't incurring much load then a CPU upgrade probably won't be terribly noticeable. Additional memory, which would require Vista x64, would probably yield the most benefit.

One of my development machines at work is a single core P4 HT @ 3.00GHz with 4GB and Vista Business x64. While it's not exactly zippy, it's still capable of running several VMs - two NetWare servers (1 w/ 512MB + 1 w/ 768MB), a RHEL server (256MB) and two XP installs (2 w/ 256MB each). That's 2GB for the VMs and the rest for Vista, which is a touch < 2GB. It's for development only tho - I have a separate workstation for general stuff. Have you considered running your VMs on a separate/dedicated machine so your other apps don't get bogged down?