Upgrade Worthy?

[StarsFan4Life]

* Antec Three Hundred Case
* Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P motherboard
* AMD Phenom II Quad Core 940 Black Edition - Stock cooling
* 8GB G-Skill PC2-6400
* XFX Radeon 4870 1GB
* Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB SATA II
* Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATAII
* Onboard LAN/HD Audio
* Logitech DiNovo Keyboard
* Logitech MX 518
* 2 X Yate Loon 120mm silent case fans
* 2 X Dell" S2309 W @ 1900 x 1080
* Windows 7 64-bit


I want to upgrade the following:

CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1100T
RAM: G.SKILL 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800

Now, I plan to install and utilize VMWare Workstation 7.1 so I can start some image testing with SCCM. Will this upgrade be sufficient or is it overkill?

 

[mvbighead]

Start with RAM. I would leave the CPU alone for the moment.

The extra cores could help if you start doing processor heavy stuff, but the extra RAM would help more, IMO.

Also, add disks if you can for your VMs. Alleviating disk contention will likely provide a better performance improvements than 2 more cores.

 

[mfenn]

I agree. If you're just playing with VMs for testing/configuration purposes, you don't need a very beefy CPU at all.