Philip Wen's //

Core vs Phenom II virtualization showdown

With the wounds from competitive price cuts still fresh, I decided to make some small deposits into the pockets of both Intel and AMD.  I picked up the Core i7 920 chip as well as the AMD Phenom II 940 CPU/Asus board combo from Fry’s about a week ago, and recently picked up an Asus P6T Deluxe from a friend who works at Newegg.

The consensus online seems to be that the Phenom 940 offers slightly more performance per dollar, while the Bloomfield is capable of providing the higher performance if budget is less of a concern.

Well, I am giving it a tally for the parts of the both systems, and will be butt-benching the both systems using Hyper-V and seeing which system offers better bang for the buck in terms of VM’s performance.

Thus far,

The Core machine’s cost:

Core i7 920 – $219
Asus P6T Deluxe – $220
Patriot 4GB DDR3 – $90 – $25 Rebate = $65
——————————————————-
Intel Total = $504

The Phenom II machine’s cost:

AMD Phenom II 940 Black Edition – $203
Asus M3N78 Pro – $96
Corsair DDR2 4GB – $50 – $30 rebate = $20
——————————————————-
AMD Total = $320

The rest of the components will be identical between the two systems, so I’ve left them out of consideration.

Once I am able to get these systems thrown together and get some VMs on, I will report back.

In the meantime, have any of you done this already, and what are your thoughts on either/both systems?

Viable Alternative to the NetBook assault?

So check this out.  Buy.com is selling this refurbed Everex StepNote for an incredible price of $350.  This is cheaper than some of the NetBooks flooding the market right now.

For a very similar price, you get the full usability of a normal laptop.  Dual Core (T2080), DVDRW, WXGA screen (1280×800), and the usual expansion possibilities.  Downside of this choice?  Slightly bigger and heavier.  Reasonably so, you are lugging around the Optical Drive with this one.

Compared to the newer, sexier Dell Inspiron Mini 12, I think I would choose this option.  Why?  The RAM on this is upgradable to 2GB.  Unfortunately for the Dell, RAM is not upgradable.

How about to the newer, sexier HP Mini 1000?  The HP can definitely be considered geek-worthy fashion accessories, but the smaller screen and the lower performance kind of kills the deal… for now.  Plus, (and I shed a silent tear here), the Mini 1000 did not inherit the high res screen of its 2133 predecessor.  If HP ever offers the Mini 1000 with 2133’s screen resolution @ 10″ – I am sold.

Slightly heavier and doesn’t have the same pizzazz as the netbook variants. Hmm…  Difficult choices indeed.

OK I am done debating.  I’ll choose the Usability over Cool factor.  Where’s that Order Button?

Which one would you pick?

New Core i7 logos

Don’t you just LOOOOVE Moore’s Law? When Q6600 was first introduced, it was going for slightly more than $300. Now? You can get a Nehalem Core-i7 920 for $288 shipped from here.  Couple the chip with one of these boards and you’ve got yourself an awesome box to run quite a few VMs!

What will really knock the bang-for-buck out of the ballpark will be the 24GB RAM.  This won’t be cheap of course.

I still feel that a Q9300 with a good P45 board is still the way to go for budget Virtualization for now.  It will get real interesting though, if those DDR3 chips start coming down in price.

Until then, I will just keep dreaming about replacing a rack of 4U servers with one of these boxes