I am at a bit of a cross roads and would appreciate some advice. 
 

I currently run unraid on an i7 3770 Cpu and 16gb RAM. 
 

I have one OS X VM and a few dockers of which Plex is the heaviest used.

 

I have found my memory is close to saturation point now (8gb allocated to the VM) so would like to add some more. 
 

However my mb only supports 16gb and i think the 3770 is possibly up there at the top of the compatibility list for the mb.

 

So it is time to upgrade, but I am torn between finding a board that takes 32gb RAM and keeping everything else the same or taking the plunge on a cpu with more cores which will also mean a new board and some more RAM. 
 

I am not sure how beneficial the extra cores will be. I probably have at most three concurrent streams with plex and have seen it max out and hang but I think that is more down to the lack of RAM causing data to be written to disk. 
 

Of course If I do upgrade everything.... I then have to decide Intel v AMD!

Perhaps try reducing your VM RAM to 6GB (usually 6-8 range doesn't make that much of a diff to regular uses) and that would free up a 2GB for your other uses.

 

Of course it's always fun to upgrade but then you probably don't need it if the RAM shortage isn't too severe.

I'd not thought about going to 6Gb. For some reason my mind works 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 for RAM!

 

Thanks - I will give it a go.

 

Mind you, I am not kidding myself and realise that there will be an update in the not too distant future...