What motherboard should I go for?

in response to pparks1 enquiring about 'needs', i would like to be able to run some VMs (not simulatneously though) and have a pleasant less-freezing than before Windows experience. The ZV5000 keeps displaying out of memory erros and suggesting to kill explorer :/

(and I would like to be able to game on it, but not a lot and nothing as 'demanding' as crysis 2. the odd sims 3 and GTA whirl would suit me, but when you get to 4GB+ of RAM, it starts to depend more then on what graphics card you have :/)

biggles1000 said:

in response to pparks1 enquiring about 'needs', i would like to be able to run some VMs (not simulatneously though) and have a pleasant less-freezing than before Windows experience. The ZV5000 keeps displaying out of memory erros and suggesting to kill explorer :/

(and I would like to be able to game on it, but not a lot and nothing as 'demanding' as crysis 2. the odd sims 3 and GTA whirl would suit me, but when you get to 4GB+ of RAM, it starts to depend more then on what graphics card you have :/)

An i7-2600k (i5-2500k would even do), a P67 motherboard (Gigabyte or ASUS I'd recommend), 8GB RAM, GTX560 (don't use Radeons so can't really recommend any) and you're set for a while with that setup. Quite highly specced, would play any game that's out now, will run VMs perfectly well. Just throw in an SSD and a storage HDD and you're good to go.

I'm not aware of any game that will really take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM, i can comfortably run 3 simultaneous VM's as well as my host OS and still not run out of RAM.

I would agree with your new suspicion of starting with 8GB of RAM and see how things go. I've never once thought, "i wish I had more RAM on my home machine".

(again, apologies for lack of quoting )
Everlong, thanks for the list (it does help :) ). I think i'll go for Asus (as i haven't had the best joy with Gigabyte recently ) and I guess the Rampage III Black edition would suit my 'reformed' needs after the helpful explanations and example from all of you :)

pparks1, 3 simultaneous VMs sounds very impressive, but will it run iTunes fast? just kidding, we all know it runs faster on same specced Macs no matter what (anyone know why that is??)
I guess 'starting' (and probably sticking) with 8GB wouldn't hurt my wallet as much as my original (now apparently extreme ) system aims. I guess if I find it too slow, I can just pop out for some more RAM, but given everybody's examples, I doubt I'd ever get close to 24GB being necessary.

Thankyou all for your help and advice


footnote: I would appear to over-use smilies an awful lot. apologies if it makes all the text seem a huge yellow dotted mass (as it did to me on viewing after posting). I normally use smilies in IRC as plain text and short sentences/lines, so I never saw my over-use of them before

biggles1000 said:

pparks1, 3 simultaneous VMs sounds very impressive, but will it run iTunes fast? just kidding, we all know it runs faster on same specced Macs no matter what (anyone know why that is??)

3 VM's is easy. if Windows 7 is using 2GB or so, I could dedicate 1GB of RAM to 6 different VM's and fire them all up.

iTunes? No idea there. The only way I would use that would be if Apple sponsored me. I don't own any apple products and I plan to keep it that way. My portable MP3 players are simply drag and drop. I currenly use a 16GB Sony Walkman. For my music collection and tagging, I use Media Monkey.

biggles1000 said:

I guess if I find it too slow, I can just pop out for some more RAM, but given everybody's examples, I doubt I'd ever get close to 24GB being necessary.

Usually adding RAM doesn't make a PC faster unless your PC had very little ram to begin with.

re VMs
I suppose so, and I guess many OSes (esp. many linux variants) don't demand much. Being able to run 3 VMs is something that I do aspire towards with this future computer. Probably not for much use, but just to be able to go 'wow. this really IS an awesome computer'. Just out of interest, do you use virtualbox, VMWare or another?

re. iTunes. yeah, I wish I had got out of the 'apple loop' earlier. now i'm trapped with a 3rd generation iPod touch that I use for all my portable media (my phone (an htc touch pro2) is too slow). It's great for portable media, but I do wish it wasnt so locked. I haven't synced with iTunes for at least half a year, and if I do it'll demand I erase it (I use DiskAid with the FileApp Pro app and the VLC app to avoid stepping near iTunes).

re more RAM. doesn't it?? I guess I'd never have noticed, as stepping from a sluggish 512MB laptop to a 2GB tower did seem like a big boost, but I suppose when it gets to over 2GB the hard drive etc. become just-as-equal-a-factor as more RAM would.

biggles1000 said:

Just out of interest, do you use virtualbox, VMWare or another?

VMWare for me. Primary because i use VMWare VSphere and ESXi at work...so I'm very familiar with it and I like keeping things as common as I can between work and home. I'm actually working towards some VMWare certification...so the more experience that I have with the product..the better. However, I do have experience with VirtualBox and it's a great product as well. My suggestion for people is to use whichever they are most comfortable with.

ah. I use VirtualBox (well, tried to, as all I could run reasonably with it on my specs was a puppy linux iso ), but i've always had problems with getting USB attachments (such as storage) to work with it (anyway, thats for another thread another time ).
From what i've seen, virtualbox is the more down-to-earth and 'does what it says on the tin' piece of virtualisation software, but (from the little i've used VMWare) it's the 'pro' choice for people who know exactly what they want to get out of it.

good luck with your VMWare certification

biggles1000
Unless you have the money now to begin purchasing I would decide on the stable constants in your build like the case, PSU and the other components that won't become old and out dated after 10 minutes of installing them. Reverse engineer your build and when you have all the money together then shop for the wiz bang mobo and processor deal of that day! Otherwise in my experience you'll just be wasting time as with 1-2 months passing the whole range of whats cool changes and that my friend is the joys of computers! But I've been wrong before and likely to be again.......lol oh and remember as I mentioned before this whole process is the real fun of the build.