hardware upgrade question - for vers. 6 and VMs etc

[chuga]

Hi

 

I currently have build based on a Gigabyte GAZ68A-DH3-B3 (rev 1.3) with a Intel G530 (65W celeron) chip and 4 gig of ram.

 

I wanted a do a few cheap'ish upgrades as I am upgrading from V5 to V6beta8 and wanted to start playing around with VMs.  I will be running media browser server, possibly Plex server, and owncloud.  Need to be able to stream to a variety of devices - HTPC, Roku, Netgear neo TV, iphone, ipad, etc (some of which require the transcoding on server).

 

Was going to buy 4 more gb of identical ram (mushkin) and put in a beefier CPU.

 

can someone recommend a CPU for this board?

 

Is adding 4 more GB or ram (for a total of 8GB) OK or any reason to go for 16GB ?

 

 

thanks

chuga

[garycase]

If you're going to have a few VM's, I'd go with 16GB.

 

But don't install 4 modules -- on an unbuffered memory system you'll have far more reliable operation with only 2 modules installed.    Just buy a pair of 8GB modules ... something like this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148545

or if you prefer Mushkin:  http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226430

 

As for a CPU ... your G530 scores 2168 on PassMark's CPUMark.  Just choose how much more "horsepower" you want .... here are a few examples:

 

an i3-3250  scores 4394

an i5-3570 scores 7000

an i7-3770 scores 9392

 

I'd go with the i5, but it just depends on how much "headroom" you want for the other applications and VM's

 

[chuga]

thanks.    So 16gb ram and the i5 processor should have no issues for awhile with VMs etc?

 

one more question.  I currently  have a 120gb ssd cache drive.  Do I also need to buy another SSD for use with VMs/Dockers/etc?

 

thanks

chuga

[garycase]

That will provide plenty of "horsepower" for what you want to do.

 

Whether you need a larger SSD depends entirely on just what you're planning to use it for.  It's big enough for an "apps" drive ... but if you're also using it to cache your writes (i.e. your shares are cache-enabled) then it depends on how much you write to the array on a daily basis whether or not you have enough space left over for the apps you want to try.

 

I'd just use it as is for now, and upgrade it later (or add a 2nd unit) if you find that you don't have enough space.