Buying computer for home lab...

[sandeepy]

Hi All,

I want to build my home lab where i can experiment with Hyper-V and Vsphere virtual machines running under vmware workstation 8 or any latest one. Based on my googling I found that I should go for AMD FX 8350 processor as compared to intel core i5 processor as its good value for money.

Now my question is I am not able to find the best motherboard that will support 32 gb or RAM. Please suggest one.

And whether the processor I choose do support 32 gb or RAM as I need good amount of RAM as I am going to create many VM on this machine for learning purpose.

And last is AMD BULLDOZER FX 8350 is different processor or AMD FX 8350 and BULLDOZER are both same thing.

 

[girogalllas]

ASUS M5A99X EVO is a good choice. don't cheap out on your motherboard because a lot of people have complained about oldest amd chipsets not being fully compatible with 8 cores although most manufactures have ruled that out. not sure.

 

[sandeepy]

ASUS M5A99X EVO is a good choice. don't cheap out on your motherboard because a lot of people have complained about oldest amd chipsets not being fully compatible with 8 cores although most manufactures have ruled that out. not sure.

Thanks. But when I tried to find the price of the same it's very high. It seems that with this much cost I can easily buy i7. It seems that I will have no benefit then for buying AMD processor. I am going for AMD because of its excellent value for money but motherboard ruins the same.

 

[girogalllas]

ASUS M5A99X EVO is a good choice. don't cheap out on your motherboard because a lot of people have complained about oldest amd chipsets not being fully compatible with 8 cores although most manufactures have ruled that out. not sure.

Thanks. But when I tried to find the price of the same it's very high. It seems that with this much cost I can easily buy i7. It seems that I will have no benefit then for buying AMD processor. I am going for AMD because of its excellent value for money but motherboard ruins the same.

Are you sure? an i7 3770k cost about 100 pounds more than a 8350 and amd motherboards are cheaper than intel's. i don't know from were you will buy your hardware, but if you can find similar prices between amd and intel for the same performance then its clearly you should go intel.

 

[sandeepy]

ASUS M5A99X EVO is a good choice. don't cheap out on your motherboard because a lot of people have complained about oldest amd chipsets not being fully compatible with 8 cores although most manufactures have ruled that out. not sure.

Thanks. But when I tried to find the price of the same it's very high. It seems that with this much cost I can easily buy i7. It seems that I will have no benefit then for buying AMD processor. I am going for AMD because of its excellent value for money but motherboard ruins the same.

Are you sure? an i7 3770k cost about 100 pounds more than a 8350 and amd motherboards are cheaper than intel's. i don't know from were you will buy your hardware, but if you can find similar prices between amd and intel for the same performance then its clearly you should go intel.

Thanks I further searched the web for the prices but it seems that I have to pay extra bucks for i7. In India the motherboard is costing around 10-12 k which is really high as the cost of the processor is also the same. Is there any other good solution for my lab scenario which will be bit cheaper. As I have to accomodate for 32gb Ram cost also.

 

[GhislainG]

Is the ASRock 990FX Extreme3 available in your country?

I also looked into an AMD solution, but ultimately I chose Intel because I didn't have to buy a video card, it uses less power, the motherboard that I bought includes 2 Intel LAN controllers, etc. Are you sure you need that much processing power? I usually find the bottleneck to be the storage and not necessarily the CPU. Will you use SSDs for your VMs?

Unlike the i7 3770 or the FX 8350, the i7 3770K is not a good choice for virtualization.