Advice for new build for 70-290 and possibly photoshopping and other stuff

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Advice and new system required
I am looking to build a new desktop machine.

Reasons being, I am hopefully going to be starting my 70-290 mcsa exam and taking a couple of courses for photography as I have recently got a dslr.

My current system is amd 5600+, 4 x 1gb ddr2 pc6400, 90GB SSD, 2TB Sata, Radeon HD3600 Graphics card, BDR Optical drive and a standard HP case.

With my studies I am guessing I will need more Ram and maybe a bit more processing power to run server 2003 and a few machines using VM software. With the cost of DDR2 ram i thought iw ould just upgrade to DDR3 system board.

I have retail win7 32 and 64 discs so an OS isnt needed wither

Hopefully should have about £300 maybe a bit more depending on how much I can flog my current machine for.

Any ideas as I have kept up with any of the new technology and who is leading the war between intel and amd.

Some stuff I have been looking at

G-Skill 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1600Mhz RipjawsX Memory Kit.. | Ebuyer.com

Corsair Vengeance PC Memory 8GB 2x4GB DDR3 SDRAM DIMM 240-pin 1600MHz CL9 XMP | eBay

and possibly a new amd3/intel i processor

All help much appreciated

 

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Yes you would probably want to up the ram by a bit, I found that recently too with ddr2 so I built a new whitebox and sold my old ddr2 based servers. With 2003 you can actually be quite frugal with the memory and 512MB for each vm gives you respectable performance. As too which processor... one mans poison and all that. I would also recommend oracles virtualbox for a free type2 hypervisor for your studies personally I think its the best one unless you can justify shelling out for vmware workstation.

 

Thanks for the reply

This is what has been advised at the moment

Intel 2500K, Z86 1155 motherboard, 8GB DDR3, HD 6850 and Coolermaster 330 + 500W PSU combo

 

I would probably upgrade to 16gb if you can, also depending on what graphics program you're using you may want to have a look at Nvidia cards (it depends on whether they application uses CUDA).

As far as virtualisation software is concerned don't forget about VMware Player, it's free and also a good tool for light hearted virtualisation (Dale, shame on you oh and nice new blog url )

 

Shame on me indeed, yes didn't really think about player that much for freebies though I do REALLY like virtualbox, but have not played with player for a while. 16GB is worthwhile (which is the same amount that I have) I thought though maybe for 2k3 boxes OP could get away with 8 while being frugal with vram allocation the 290 exam from memory really doesn't need any more than 3-4 lightweight vm's running at the time.

Thanks Simon about the url, couldnt get the .com but it expires not too far away so I'll try and snap it up then, as I'm moving away from inhouse support the old blog didn't seem to fit my new direction so I'll archive it off eventually to wordpress.com so I dont have to pay the hosting fee for it.

 

Thanks for the replies

At the moment looking at

I5 2500K
MSI P67A-GD53(B3)
2(possibly 4) x 4GB gskill ripjaws 1600mhz
Gelid Tranquillo rev 2 cooler

This is just a quick look after seeing this months custom pc mag

Will probably do with the onboard hd graphics for amonth or 2

Still looking at PSU and cases although may swing to an antec 100 or a coolmaster elite 430

 

The 290 MSPress book only specifies one 2003 and one XP machine as required.
I have a very similar spec on my main rig as your current rig (slightly slower CPU, slightly faster RAM)and I have no issues running a W7 64 bit host with one 2K8R2 and one 2K3R2 running in virtualbox. I'm only using 3.1 GB (and that's with football manager eating up half a gig) so I'm surprised you're having issues with your current set up.
The 291 only specifies two computers as required as well.

 

Just looking to get a new machine.

Not started the book yet, but expected it to maybe have more machines than that for testing out practices.

 

Looks like i have settled on

i5 2500k
MSI P67a-GD53 B3
G.Skill 1600mhz 4 x 4gb
Be Quiet Dark Rock advanced cooler
Antec 300 2 case
XFX 750W Black Edition Modular PSU

just under £500

Will be adding my SSD 90GB, 2TB hdd and using my crap graphics card for amonth or 2 until i can afford a new one.