Hey all,
My old rig is dying so I need to upgrade.
MY PLAN -
I plan on purchasing an affordable ASUS or Gigabyte Z87 mobo and installing a i5-4570 (or maybe something better depending on the Intel Haswell Refresh in a few weeks). Also, this rig will have a boot SSD and a second 250GB SSD for programs. This PC will be running Windows 7 Pro 64 bit.
MY USAGE -
This rig serves several roles. A daily use PC for work at home. I also do some basic video editing on occasion. I also use VMWARE WORKSTATION for setting up small network labs and testing scenarios. Finally, I am going to create a Windows 7 VM solely for day trading Forex - VMWARE is perfect since it gives me snapshots and allows easy back up of the entire VM in the event something goes kablooey! Overall, my typical daily use will be general PC work (emails, web browsing, Office 2013, etc.) and a trading VM running at the same time.
Question #1 -
Strictly from a VM Workstation point of view - Will I benefit from something faster than DDR3 1600MHz RAM?
The Z87 line will allow for memory OCing. Right now my gaming rig runs 16GB of 2133MHz and everything is smooth as butter. Right now, excluding some kind of wild sale/rebate promotion 8GB of 1600 is only around $65-70 but 2133 or 2400 is only about $25 more. But if anything faster than 1600MHz is overkill then I would rather spend the extra $ and get 16GB of RAM instead of 8GB.