Virtual machines and CPUs

claptonman

claptonman

New Member
Hey, guys, I'm looking to buy a laptop and plan to have a few virtual machines running, at most 3. I'm looking at slightly lower model and seeing only i3s and i5s. The i3s are 2350M 2.3ghz, which have 2 cores and 4 threads. The i5s are the i5-2450M 2.5ghz, which also have 2 cores and 4 threads.

Would I see a noticeable difference between these? It is a $100 difference between them, which can go towards a RAM/SSD upgrade. Thoughts?

(also, max RAM on the laptops is 8GB. That enough?)
 
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Looking at all the other specs, the only difference is .2ghz. Not worth $100 in my opinion. Think I'll go with the i3 and use the extra money to get a big SSD sooner.
 
For my class I am using an i3 with 4 gb of RAM and it works fine for a Windows 7 install. I am just doing admin work with the command line. The only problem that I have is that I need to have it in performance mode if I want to work with the VM a lot. Otherwise it is too slow.

Just figured I would toss in what the performance was for me.
 
salvage-this said:
For my class I am using an i3 with 4 gb of RAM and it works fine for a Windows 7 install. I am just doing admin work with the command line. The only problem that I have is that I need to have it in performance mode if I want to work with the VM a lot. Otherwise it is too slow.

Just figured I would toss in what the performance was for me.
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Hmm, ok. If the i5 was actually a quadcore and not just a dualcore with hyperthreading, I'd spend the extra $100 on it, but the only difference is .2ghz.
 
Yeah the extra $100 is not worth it for the i5 but if you can find an i7 for a decent price I might go that route if you are doing more than just playing around in VMs
 
i3 will be plenty for VM work.
I used multiple vm's on a day to day basis and I'm still running a C2D.
 
The difference between the two is just that the i5 has turbo boost and i3 doesn't.
i3 will be the better option, as i5 just boosts close to 3GHz and rest all is same.
Are you sure you will use VM on laptop? When I tried on my laptop, the temperature just goes past 80 C, with XP running on VM.
 
Ankur said:
The difference between the two is just that the i5 has turbo boost and i3 doesn't.
i3 will be the better option, as i5 just boosts close to 3GHz and rest all is same.
Are you sure you will use VM on laptop? When I tried on my laptop, the temperature just goes past 80 C, with XP running on VM.
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Does Turbo Boost really matter though?
 
I'm not too sure if it would really make a difference. If I am correct I think that turbo boost might only boost select cores. Not all. Some one correct me if I am wrong.
 
Ankur said:
How exactly? I ran Visual Studio 2008 on XP that is why it almost fried the CPU.
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That's not an application issue... I run virtual machines just fine on my laptop, Visual Studio as well.

One thing to consider, if your laptop is over heating easily, remove the thermal paste from the processor. It'd be good to replace it, but even if you didn't, you'll still likely get better results.
 
salvage-this said:
I'm not too sure if it would really make a difference. If I am correct I think that turbo boost might only boost select cores. Not all. Some one correct me if I am wrong.
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I thought turbo boost just gave you an higher clock speed when doing something a bit more cpu intensive then surfing. Like my 2600k goes to 3.8 in stock with turbo on.?
 
SmileMan said:
I thought turbo boost just gave you an higher clock speed when doing something a bit more cpu intensive then surfing. Like my 2600k goes to 3.8 in stock with turbo on.?
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Right. But I think the laptops are a bit different. There is a maximum clock speed that can be boosted, but that is only for one core. You might see 3.8GHz on one core 3.6GHz if you boost 2, and 3.4GHz if you boost 4 cores. Again I might be wrong but I think that is how it works on the mobile processors.

Desktops can boost all cores because they have the cooling to deal with the heat and voltage bumps that happen with boosting the cores
 
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