Hey I've been planning a build for quite awhile and reading about some of the cool things you can do with virtualization i decided to spring for a more powerful machine then i expected, unfortunately its now completely spiraled out of my budget. What I'd like to do is run sickbeard, plex, couchpotato, standard backups and virtualize Windows 10 as well as OS X (almost never running simultaneously though.) The windows install would be for gaming and some dev work and osx just dev work, my gaming requirements are minimal, if it runs Civ5 well at high settings with many AI I'll be happy. Exactly how much processing power do I need to accomplish this ? And what would be the most cost effective method to do it ?

Don't know what you have already included in your projected costs, but onboard video will not be available to VMs, so you will need a dedicated video card.

 

See the KVM subforum and its stickies.

None of the things you listed appear to require too much in terms of CPU horsepower, I would think a quad core i7 should be fine with 16 or 32GB of RAM.

And a discrete video card to pass through for Gaming on the windows 10 box.

 

A GTX 950 would be more than enough for some gaming. They can be found under $150 usually.

 

 

 

 

since it has spiral out control.

 

What do you have

Dual Xeons was on the table for a little bit. So any particular gen of i7 to recommend? I found a great deal on a prebuilt system with an AMD 8320 for nearly the same cost as the average i7 in canada, do you think that would be adequate?

I would go with Intel if you want to mess with OS X virtualization. It *should* work with AMD but you have to trick the system.