If you're gaming, and not doing any CPU intensive tasks, then I'd wait a little while and go Ivy Bridge. Isn't there a new chipset arriving with that? That's probably what I would do. If you desperately need to upgrade now, then just go 1155 and stick a OCed 2700K in there. There's no advantage to games by going SB-E.
it costs £70 or less to have 16gb of ram in 4 dims. I don't think upgrading to a 2700k is going to be a bad shout when it comes to lasting a while. Let alone when the sandybridge-e comes. I highly doubt you'll need to have more for your VMs. Considering at work, a lot of people still need to run XP as a VM within 7 because of old proprietary software on a lowly 4gb and dual cores i5 laptops and don't complain about it, you'll be ok for your studies. In fact, the IT guy at work, after I showed him the speed of SSDs, went right ahead and started using his laptop to run a couple of VMs, either for building and testing before firing over to a co-lo or just for fun. All on 8gb and a i7 2ghz (pre sandybridge) whilst needing 7 and XP running at the same time. I think people overestimate what they need to make do sometimes... not that I blame them; just if you want the best stuff, come out and say it. In which case, just buy the Ivybridge 3960x and be done with it.
If you run server software like Windows 2008 with exchange etc, it will easily eat up RAM. I'm planning on running a couple of servers so that I can experiment between them and a couple of hosts. I had a quick look on Scan and they have a 24GB kit for £116 which might be an alternative option, but I'm worried that I might be throwing money on a dead socket/platform. Sent from Bittech Android app
Socket 2011 will be with us longer than socket 1155. IB-E is not due out until Q4 2012 and that will be a drop in on socket 2011
Well, that's basically what they've been doing at work. Building exchange servers for different regions, firing them over to co-lo's in a migration that's happening. Because its global, it has to be a live environment. There is various other servers being made also. I got to go in the data centre the other day, it was pretty geeky but cool to
It sounds like a really interesting job. If I'm running more than one server and a couple of hosts for lab purposes, I'm worried about running out of memory. As much as I like the idea of LGA 1155 being cheaper overall etc, it doesn't give me any flexibility in the RAM department.
