2014 - What's better, Laptop or Xeon desktop

[Phillip Brooks]

Perennial question for the forums, what to buy? Looking to keep costs < $900.

 

I'd like to build up my VM and SCC skills, so I thought a desktop would be the best.

 

I happen to have qty. 12 8GB DDR3 1066 ECC DIMMs and am thinking of building my own Xeon based desktop using a ASRock 216 WS. I'd save ~ $400 on RAM and could buy more SSD or a faster CPU.

 

I have a 23" display and several 2TB disk drives laying around, and a 3 user Windows 7 license pack, so I only need a case, PS keyboard, mouse and cables.

 

I've seen HP laptops with i7 processors and 1TB disk with 8GB RAM for ~$900.

 

I've got an older i5 4GB HP laptop that runs LV OK, but I always feel like it's somehow clunking along slower than my i3 desktop I built for the kids. No amount of tuning and crapware removal seems to bring it around. 

 

My wife doesn't want another boat anchor taking up space on a table (dining room?) collecting dust and insists that laptops are the only way to go. I understand that, but at the same time don't think that I will have a positive experience trying to thrash a laptop to run virtual machines and such.

 

Help me spend my money. Which way should I go? 

 

[Tim_S]

I have a Win7 laptop with i7 with 8GB and a 240 GB SSD. The machine boots up very nicely and has excellent performance for having a virtual machine open. We're using the native virtual machines, which are adequate for what we need. I keep most of the virtual machines on an external USB drive as each one can take up quite a bit of space. I would rather have at least 1TB as 240 GB really isn't enough space. The only other issue I've run into is having two virtual machines running (hibernating counts as running) will crash Win7; I don't know if this is an issue with Win7, Bitlocker, the standard configuration from IT, etc.

[Darin]

You need A laptop.  You seem to have at least one so when it comes to bang for the buck I lean to desktops myself.  With a laptop you are always buying a monitor and a keyboard, with a desktop you are just buying the business end.  I tend to go a step further, I scour places like EBay for used components on the cheap.  If you know what to look for you can get great deals, usually by finding the lowest-end machine with an upgradable motherboard and over time plugging in better CPU, RAM, Hard drives, etc.  It seems that more people have stopped undervaluing the old parts these days, so this is getting a bit harder.

 

You may have fallen into a common marketing trap for laptops.  The processor in you laptop could very well be underclocked to save power, the front side bus is perhaps a step slower then the desktop, and the hard drive probably has a smaller cache.  You should benchmark the two (at least with Windows Experience) and see where the differences lie.  In short, an i7 in your laptop is likely (a little) better than an i5 in your laptop, but not as good as an i7 (or perhaps i3 or i5) in your desktop.  Think of the CPU like the engine of your car, and the body (laptop or desktop) is like the tires.  At some point extra horsepower only spins your wheels it does not get you anywhere faster.

 

And I would not place the desktop on the dining room table, I would probably shove it into a corner and run it headless using your favorite VNC software.

[shoneill]

Stick a decent SDD in your old i5 and you should be fine.

 

Programming LV on a SSD is amazing due to the multitude of small file accesses.

 

Shane.

[Phillip Brooks]

I've just ordered a SAMSUNG 840 EVO 250GB.

 

I'll try this in the i5 laptop and then go from there...

 

Still have 96GB of ECC RAM that I want to put to use. Maybe I'll build a FreeNAS server...