CPU for VT on LGA 775 or New Board/CPU?

[Flying_J]

I have a Dell Optiplex 745 with Pentium D 2.80GHz Dual-Core processor (socket LGA 775?) and 3GB of DDR/SDRAM. System runs fine but I've encountered a roadblock: I tried to install Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 on it today and the event logs indicate that the system isn't capable of virtualization. (I've used VBox in the past to run various Linux OSs and while slow, it worked.) But I need to be able to run 2 or 3 instances of Windows 7 and at least 1 instance of Windows Server 2008 R2.

The case is SFF and the power supply is very small. Even if I can upgrade only the processor, I plan on putting it all in a larger case with larger power supply.

Is it possible to do a processor-only upgrade that will meet my needs? Or must I replace the motherboard, processor, and memory for this to work?

I don't want to spend big bucks if possible but I've got to run the vm's.

Recommendations?

 

[Emperus]

Your motherboard is most probably based on an earlier LGA 775 chipset which wont support the higher LGA 775 processors.. If you are thinking of building up a new rig, i'd recommend you to go the AMD way as AMD's Hyper-V is said to be a better visualization supporter compared to Intel's VT.. Furthermore, VM's love higher number of cores and you can get a hexa core AMD CPU for a very decent price..

 

[das_stig]

"I need to be able to run 2 or 3 instances of Windows 7 and at least 1 instance of Windows Server 2008 R2. "

If at the same time, your system will perform poorly. You will need to spend £££ to get it running at reasonable performance, and would be more cost effective to purchase newer hardware.