Hi all- I've got an older desktop with a Q6600 (4 thread) Intel chip, 8GB ram, and various other components. I've been needing to upgrade for a while, as I work mostly in virtual machines and can't have more than 1-2 open at a time on my existing desktop. I've been tempted by the idea of moving to an 8-thread processor, at least 16GB RAM (maybe 32), and a motherboard that has plenty of SATA ports and that would allow me to bring over my older HDs and multiple CDRoms.
Then I saw the Lenovo Y50 and for the portability, I'd be willing to give up the extra ports and just move my drives to external bays, it seems to meet the rest of my specs with one exception- it won't take more than 16GB RAM, if that turns out to be the bottleneck once I have more machines open.
So the question is, for the same price ($1000) toward just a new MB, CPU, and RAM, what is considered the sweet spot in today's market?. I've been looking mostly at Intel chips only because when AMD switched to their APU naming, I was not keeping up to date, and I really have no idea how to figure out what would be comparable and good for CPU-intensive VMs that are doing a lot of calculations (not gaming- just desktop applications including lots of number crunching and some video processing).
Thanks for any advice. I'd also prefer smaller die chips for the power savings, but willing to consider all tradeoffs, especially if whatever I end up with is already more power efficient than the Q6600. Ideally I'd like to run 4 VMs at the same time without noticeable performance problems (using VMWare Wworkstation)
Then I saw the Lenovo Y50 and for the portability, I'd be willing to give up the extra ports and just move my drives to external bays, it seems to meet the rest of my specs with one exception- it won't take more than 16GB RAM, if that turns out to be the bottleneck once I have more machines open.
So the question is, for the same price ($1000) toward just a new MB, CPU, and RAM, what is considered the sweet spot in today's market?. I've been looking mostly at Intel chips only because when AMD switched to their APU naming, I was not keeping up to date, and I really have no idea how to figure out what would be comparable and good for CPU-intensive VMs that are doing a lot of calculations (not gaming- just desktop applications including lots of number crunching and some video processing).
Thanks for any advice. I'd also prefer smaller die chips for the power savings, but willing to consider all tradeoffs, especially if whatever I end up with is already more power efficient than the Q6600. Ideally I'd like to run 4 VMs at the same time without noticeable performance problems (using VMWare Wworkstation)
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