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Thread: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

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    Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    Is the i5 enough?

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    I suspect so, but don't know enough about your programming work. What do you do?

    I'm still getting by on a Q9550 and 8GB DDR2, but plan to order some retail therapy this week :-

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    I run Fedora 22 (23 soon) and usually code with IntelliJ and a 2 "CPU"/4GB VirtualBox Vagrant VM running MySQL, Tomcat, grunt etc. 16GB is a bit more than I need, but 8GB is getting a bit tight. Threads aren't really the issue, since I'm not doing much multithread-heavy work (just Java/web dev).

    I thought about saving £40-60 and getting an i5-6500 and H170 board, but :

    1) Can't find any reviews on the non-K Skylakes! Why is that? Has anyone got one yet?
    2) I've had a good year and am treating myself
    3) I'd like to try overclocking these K chips. Never really done that much, beyond baseclocks in the very old days. Looks a lot more fun with fancy settings on new EFI BIOSes.

    nless you're running (say) lots of full Linux kernel builds every day, or huge test suites, I'd guess an i5 is enough.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    Quote Originally Posted by Peter Parker View Post
    1) Can't find any reviews on the non-K Skylakes! Why is that? Has anyone got one yet?
    It does seem a lot of hardware sites have become too focused on high end stuff and rarely get around to reviewing mainstream hardware. The lack of reviews of non-k high end chips is somewhat forgiveable though, other than testing whether they bump up against their power limit they're identical to the ones reviewed so likely performance is just a case of adjusting for clock speed.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    If you're doing a few VMs, might be worth looking at the Intel i7-5820K 3.30GHz (Haswell-E) x6 Core Processor, on X99. It's actually cheaper currently than the I7 Skylake, and wont be too much slower. Plus it has the benefit of 2 extra cores. It has a lot of the features in Skylake too such as DDR4 and increased PCI express lanes.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    For VM work, RAM is infinitely more useful than cores.

    My virtual infrastructure has 12 (small) cores and 48GB RAM.....I am normally running at a minimum of 75% RAM usage but about 10-15% CPU usage.

    Of course, you may be doing some cpu-heavy VM work but I suspect extra CPU will probably not help.
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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    Quote Originally Posted by shaithis View Post
    For VM work, RAM is infinitely more useful than cores.

    My virtual infrastructure has 12 (small) cores and 48GB RAM.....I am normally running at a minimum of 75% RAM usage but about 10-15% CPU usage.

    Of course, you may be doing some cpu-heavy VM work but I suspect extra CPU will probably not help.
    I'll second that - I'm doing (fairly light) Linux dev on VM's and I'm using a C2D laptop with 4GB RAM. And yes, it's RAM allocation that's holding me back - especially if one of those VM's happens to be Windows.

    Actually, I'm in a similar position to the OP and I'm wondering if a jump to Xeon might be a better option. From the (limited) look I've taken the Xeon seems to hold the advantage of more memory bandwidth which, I'm assuming, could play dividends if you're pairing it with DDR4 and planning to fire up a lot of VM's.

    Although in my case, it's VM and gaming for my update, and I'm wondering which of i7, Xeon or dual-Xeon would be best. I've been kind of spoiled by my hex core AMD, especially if you're doing those audio/video rips/recodes the extra cores make a difference. So dual E5-2609 v3's or a single E5-2630 v3....?

    Although speaking of the 2630, I'm a bit confused by the comment on the single review on Scan which says that the 2630 is running a LOT cooler than the i7 it replaced in the same workload.
    Last edited by crossy; 02-11-2015 at 11:16 AM.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    I just moved all the VMs off my laptop onto a proper esxi host. Then I VPN in and jobs a carrot.

    TBH there is little reason to keep VMs locally unless you are going to be somewhere without any internet access. If, however, you want to keep them locally. As above, RAM is king.

    Finally, I've always found that screen resolution is king when 'programming'. Even better if you can have two screens. I work off one and have docs (and irc ) on the other.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    Quite note, if you are using linux VMs, swap on zram will vastly descrease the VM memory requirments on a LAMP (or eqiv) stack.

    Eg my magento test VM only needs 256mb of ram with a 200mb zram swap space but 512mb without.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    Quote Originally Posted by abaxas View Post
    I just moved all the VMs off my laptop onto a proper esxi host. Then I VPN in and jobs a carrot. TBH there is little reason to keep VMs locally unless you are going to be somewhere without any internet access. If, however, you want to keep them locally. As above, RAM is king.
    Unfortuantely, I'd got other reasons for having to settle for a laptop-based VM host - I'd much have preferred a Microserver but SWMBO would have objected. Luckily I don't need remote access, although I tend to use NX to get from dev screen to VM "server". And yes, I'm swearing more and more at my VMhost because that 3.5GB is becoming a real nuisance. Roll on a 32GB RAM'd replacement!
    Quote Originally Posted by abaxas View Post
    Finally, I've always found that screen resolution is king when 'programming'. Even better if you can have two screens. I work off one and have docs (and irc ) on the other.
    I'd take two screens over high res every time - in fact my "office" has that setup and it works well (for exactly the reason you say - ref docs on one screen and work on the other). Remember that a 21" monitor (1080p) can be had for less than £80 from PC World, or your friendly local supermarket.
    Quote Originally Posted by abaxas View Post
    Quite note, if you are using linux VMs, swap on zram will vastly descrease the VM memory requirments on a LAMP (or eqiv) stack. Eg my magento test VM only needs 256mb of ram with a 200mb zram swap space but 512mb without.
    Interesting to hear your feedback on zram - don't you end up "paying the piper" for that in increased cpu usage and increased response times? Although, I'm thinking if/when I get my new setup it'll have cycles to burn so maybe I could give it a whirl - I've stayed away from it on the basis of hammering my poor, overworked C2D at the moment.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    In terms of zram the payoff is well in your favour even on a c2d. Anything that will stop you hitting disks (even ssd) is king. Obviously more memory will help that but remember that there are limits to throwing hardware at a problem, and buy doing so you show a lack of understanding of the problem.

    TBH if you are using mysql (or one of the many forks) you'll be amazed and how much you can get done in 64mb! *


    * however if you are using something from fashionable (aka slow) who knows.

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    Re: Skylake i7 or i5 for programming, VM's and light gaming

    From a gaming perspective, an i5 generally gives a better price / performance ratio.

    There was a time where an i7 was beginning to have a small advantage in CPU-intensive DX11 games but with the prospect of DX12 basically taking a large chunk of the CPU out of the equation, an i7 is only going to help with things like video encoding and large archiving / mutli-threaded workloads.

    As others have said, your RAM will nearly always run out before you CPU does when running VMs.

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