Dell or Clone

[pvdodhia]

Hello I am looking at a dev machine and I need a lot of power to run hyper v virtual machines on it and hence I am considering this Dell model but it is pricey. Close to $3K with taxes. Any other options out there for a power hungry developer?

Processor Intel® Core™i7-930 processor(8MB L2 Cache, 2.80GHz)


Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Ultimate, 64bit, English


Security Software McAfee SecurityCenter, 15-Months


Office Software No Option Selected
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Memory 24GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz - 6 DIMMs


Hard Drive 2TB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 64MB Cache


Included Monitor UltraSharp U2311H 23-inch Widescreen Flat Panel Display


Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5


Optical Drive Dual Drive:Blu-ray 6X Combo Drive and 16X DVD+/-RW w/double layer write capability


Sound Card THX® TruStudio PC™


Modem and Wireless No Dial Up Modem Option


Keyboard Dell Consumer Multimedia Keyboard


Mouse Dell Laser Mouse


Speakers No Speaker Option


Network card Dell 1525 Wireless-N PCIe Card

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

plus 1 for dadiggle

 

[marcellis22]

Questions to ask, "Can you assemble this machine and take care of issues yourself", and, "Do you know someone that can assemble this and support you if you have problems?" If you can't and you don't, then the Dell would be the way to go... I deal with Dell support on an almost daily basis, and I can't begin to tell you how superior it is compared to HP...

 

[surfpuppy2k]

If you are looking for a server to host them, you could try the PowerEdge T110 with the Intel Xeon X3440. It is currently priced at $469. This chip allows for hyper-threading, thus given you 8 virtual CPUs I am running one for a ESXi server at home. You can use non-ecc memory in it, so you can add up to 16gb cheaper that way if ecc doesn't matter to you.

Unless there is a reason you need you need the blueray and Radeon HD 5870 1GB, don't bother with them. You will want to get a hardware RAID card and run the drives in RAID10 from that for decent performance. At the very least get a second drive so you main OS is on one, and the VM are running on another physical drive.

If you are look for a machine to dev with and run Vms as well, you still should think about a second drive. You might also want to think about getting two different machines. Then you can spec out what is important for the different machine's functions. For VMs, IO and RAM are very important, followed by CPU.

Hope this helps