[yitzhakbg]

I have a Gigabyte GA-8IPE1000G motherboard and memory which we don't want to switch. We want to exchange only the Pentium 4 CPU with a VT enabled model. Is there a VT enabled chip which can run on this M/B?

[edman007]

nope, you need to get a new motherboard and CPU, a low end C2D system will do just fine and will run twice the speed of your current system, you will probably need new memory too

of course you don't need VT, VMWare will run just fine without it, maybe 20-30% slower, but its still very usable without it

[yitzhakbg]

of course you don't need VT, VMWare will run just fine without it, maybe 20-30% slower, but its still very usable without it[/QUOTE]

Is VMWare (I prefer Parallels) really just 20-30% slower? I thought it would be much slower, over 50%. If it's 20-30%, then I could live without the VT processor. Do you have performance figures?

[matkisson]

Originally Posted by yitzhakbg

of course you don't need VT, VMWare will run just fine without it, maybe 20-30% slower, but its still very usable without it

Is VMWare (I prefer Parallels) really just 20-30% slower? I thought it would be much slower, over 50%. If it's 20-30%, then I could live without the VT processor. Do you have performance figures?

For performance figures as far as processors, please read the thread i last made. If you need a specific processor just ask, im sure i can get results from a friend.

[yitzhakbg]

Originally Posted by matkisson

For performance figures as far as processors, please read the thread i last made. If you need a specific processor just ask, im sure i can get results from a friend.

Which thread? Can you send me a link? Thanks

[edman007]

His benches didn't contain anything about running inside a VM, so i would say its not really helpful (and it was not a bench designed for a VM, so it wouldn't be accurate)

as for what i have found, the wiki says this about VMware

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

VMware Workstation takes an even more optimized approach, and uses the CPU to run code directly whenever possible (as, for example, when running user mode and virtual 8086 mode code on x86). When direct execution cannot operate, VMware software re-writes code dynamically. This occurs with kernel-level and real mode code. VMware puts the translated code into a spare area of memory, typically at the end of the address space, which it can then protect and make invisible using the segmentation mechanisms. For these reasons, VMware operates dramatically faster than emulators, running at more than 80% of the speed that the virtual guest OS would run on hardware. VMware Inc. boasts an overhead as small as 3%-6% for computationally intensive applications.

and Parallels should run with similar speed, with the VM programs out there today most will be very fast provided the guest OS is using the same type of CPU as the host OS, as they let as much of the code as possible run directly on the CPU and try to catch the chunks of code that won't work, and only emulate those parts, the VT technology in the new CPUs only provides a bit more support in that it offers ways to find those pieces of code and run them in hardware without affecting the host OS or the need to emulate it, but since the majority of the code just runs on the regular x86 stuff without the need for VT its not going to help that much

i don't think its really worth the upgrade as you would basically need to replace everything, but then again with a socket 478 it wouldn't hurt to buy a new computer anyways, and a whole new computer thats 3 times as fast as your current box may be worth the upgrade

the other thing is you can't just look at benches for a VM, most are not applicable as the system clock can go off a bit and drastically throw off the bench results, time in a VM can be very far off so its very hard to get an accurate bench