Morning all.
I need a new PC and I am planning to build myself but as I dont game much, and really only run my business, youtube etc on my current PC but trying to run a VM is a little slow.
Wondered if anyone could point my in the right direction for Motherboard, CPU, GPU that I should be looking at for a good VM experience. I will be maxing out ram on the motherboard and using an SSD.
Thanks in advance for any help.
David
I’d recommend at least 16GB RAM so that you can raise the VM RAM bar to 4-8 GB RAM (although I use 8GB RAM for my PC and barely manage to scrape through using a VM with 4GB RAM and watching YouTube videos at the same time). I also recommend Intel CPUs (preferably at least an i7) although I use an i5 
(I got this laptop recently when my relative didn’t want this old 2012 laptop anymore) Now here comes the tricky part. The hard drives.
Think carefully and consider the following:
an SSD will allow the system to go very quickly. However, an SSD is not used to continuous writing over and over like downloading required ISO files frequently.
an HDD is better for writing continuously over and over but you have to defragment it about once a month at least. Booting times are slowER (but they are not tortoises). My laptop has a HDD with only 50GB storage left but I find booting time reasonable.
Let me know if you need more help.
Orange Group Tech
I appreciate this is an old thread, but I wanted to post what I did to get a decent setup for running VMs if anyone else happens across this.
At the time of writing, old workstations are cheap. You can pick up an old HP Z400/600 for less than £200. These things have Xeons in them, with >6 cores, and the 600s have dual processors.
You can max them out at 24Gb or 48Gb, depending on config.
So for pretty cheap, you can get a decent setup for running VMs, and anything else you may want to do on the host whilst you have someone connected.
Yeah, no matter what browser you’re using, it’s going to eat a lot of RAM & CPU. In VirtualBox, I usually give my VMs 2 of my 8 cores. On my VM server, I can give it 8 cores of my 24 core dual CPU. So it’s not just about the RAM. If you have the cores available, you should give a couple to your VM as well. I’ve tried 4 cores on my 8 core system (half) and it just bottle necked like crazy. But if I give 4 - 8 cores on my server, then I have no issues. I could probably give a VM 12 - 16 cores since really, that’s the only thing I have running on that server is a VM and the OS to drive the VMs.