The last thing I want to do is dirty up my main computer with study-related stuff so I’ve put together a dedicated sandbox environment. I can beat the hell out of the system and trash it a thousand times. It doesn’t matter if I screw anything up because worst case I’ll just start over.
Here are the specs. It’s nothing fancy. The only thing I was really after was making sure I had good virtualization support since my older AMD Athlon 64 didn’t seem up to the task.
- AMD FX-4200 3.3GHz
- Gigabyte GA-78LMT-USB3
- ADATA XPG V1 4GB DDR3 1600, PC3-12800
- Internal IDE CD-RW & DVD-ROM Combo Drive
- Ultra XBlaster Mid-Tower V2 Case
- ARCTIC Alpine 64 GT Rev.2 CPU Cooler
- SilenX Effizio Silent 120mm Thermister Edition Fan
One thing I’ve decided is that I’m definitely going to bump the memory to 8GB. It’s cheap enough that I could go big but it’s just a test system and I don’t see the need to dump a lot of cash into it. I could probably get by with the 4GB that I have now but with 768MB dedicated to each VM I do notice the host system slowing down with multiple VMs running simultaneously.
The SilenX fan was a new addition. It didn’t even dawn on me that the case didn’t have a fan until I felt it the first night and realized how hot it was. Since adding the fan the case is always cool to the touch. I love the thermister because the fan only runs when it’s needed.
It ain’t a speed demon but it works and gets the job done.