January 19, 201610 yr Which would be a better? I was pricing out a Skylake based system i5 6500 (ish) - CPU MSI H170A - Motherboard 16GB DDR4 But then i started to wonder, would AMD be a better route? They have 8 core CPU's for much less than an i7. AMD FD8320FRHKBOX FX-8320 FX-Series 8-Core - CPU ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX - Motherboard 16GB DDR3 The AMD build out is about 50 dollars cheaper, but has 8 cores. Would a system running maybe 2 VM's be happier with the more cores?
January 19, 201610 yr There are specific situations where more cores is better, but in general Intel provides more powerful and efficient CPUs and more bang for the buck than AMD. What do you plan to run in Dockers and VMs?
January 19, 201610 yr Author I'm planning to be running a pvr backend, some file downloaders, some cloud backup, a lightly uses sql db. Probably a few things in dockers and at least one Windows vm to start. That's just a starting point. I'd rather over build a bit in case I want to add another Windows vm or two down the road.
January 19, 201610 yr Based on Passmark the FX-8320 has more horsepower than an i5-6500. Passmark is a good independent benchmark of the amount of work a CPU can perform. Personally I'd go with an i7 or Xeon for your use case over the FX, though. If the only choice is the FX or i5 - I'd reluctantly go with the FX.
January 19, 201610 yr Author The cost difference between an FX and an i7 is pushing the price pretty high. I'm an Intel fan and really don't like the idea of the amount of heat generated and power needed my the FX. But I'm liking the idea of more cores to be available for the vm's.
January 19, 201610 yr Keep in mind that AMD's "cores" aren't at all equivalent to intel's "cores". At best you could describe it as hyperthreading with more benefits. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/06/amd_sued_cores/ I'm not entirely sure how efficiently KVM virtual machines can use AMD's cores since each core pair shares a significant portion of the processing chain.
January 20, 201610 yr Regarding your use case, it's the "starting point, another Windows VM or two..." that makes me suggest more horsepower. If those VMs are fairly lightweight or turn out to be Dockers then the i5 would be more than fine. I'm running 4 Dockers on my old 8GB 4,000 Passmark Q9550 with plenty of memory and horsepower to spare, unless I'm transcoding a native BD Rip - that stretches the CPU. So it depends on what you want to do. The i5 is a lot of CPU for most purposes. By the way - the MSI looks more like a gaming motherboard. Make sure it supports VT-D and that you'll be able to pass in the functionality you need to VMs.
January 20, 201610 yr Which would be a better? I was pricing out a Skylake based system i5 6500 (ish) - CPU MSI H170A - Motherboard 16GB DDR4 But then i started to wonder, would AMD be a better route? They have 8 core CPU's for much less than an i7. AMD FD8320FRHKBOX FX-8320 FX-Series 8-Core - CPU ASUS M5A99FX PRO R2.0 AM3+ AMD 990FX - Motherboard 16GB DDR3 The AMD build out is about 50 dollars cheaper, but has 8 cores. Would a system running maybe 2 VM's be happier with the more cores? Figure I will toss in my 2 cents. I am currently running a FX-6300 with 8 gigs of ram on my unraid machine. It currently runs2 VMs. A Debian instance for all of my usenet stuff. (CP,SABnzb,sickrage,headphones etc..) and a Win server 2008R2 instance as a DC for my home. It also runs 2 dockers 1 plex and 1 OpenVPN and there is plenty of horse power to spare. I am also running a total of 10 disks. 7 storage spinners and 3 ssds in a cache pool for VMs and Dockers. I haven't noticed any heat issues but I upgraded my case fans to noctua NF-F12 fans to keep the case quiet. Checking my CPU temp now and its running at 25 C
January 20, 201610 yr I would always recommend Intel over AMD especially for virtualization. I've just seen too many weird issues with AMD hardware.
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