# mem expansion and gpu recommendation

## DaggyStyle

hello all,

I'm running gentoo on a e8400 with 2X1GB ddr2 800 Mhz and a ATI 3650HD using the opensource stack.

I need to upgrade the system to support fluent usage of xp via vmware which will be displayed on a 37 LG LCD tv.

my mb is GB ep43-ds3l and supports up to 16 GB of ram.

what are the best mem upgrade to do that? a long time ago I've tried to mix different stick sizes and it worked well but I don't know if it can be done today.

on the gpu side, I need a simple gpu (ati preferred) that is supported well by the open source stack and has complete hdmi support.

some side notes:

system will most probably need to support two users at once (not in most of the day) but this is a hw issue so we'll leave it at this

the other user need to use photoshop and ext, now he uses a 1.8M Dotan laptop with 2 GB of ram

I'm currently allocating one cpu and 1 gigs of ram to the vmware

control on the other will be using a wireless mouse and keyboard

I'd prefer if possible to keep the upgrade as cheap as possible.

thanks for the input.

----------

## DaggyStyle

so it seems that I'll have to get a new cpu and mem.

I'll probably get C2Q 9550 and 4x2GB DDR2 800Mhz chip of mem.

any hints on the gpu thought?

----------

## Yuu

Hi DaggyStyle,

there's something I don't understand well : why do you want to upgrade your graphic card ?

I'm asking because, as far as I know, even if vmware products have some 3D acceleration features : your CPU will still do the 3D rendering. On my laptop, I've tested a few 3D games with 3D acceleration enabled, and the 3D performance is just horrible.

So, I just recommend three things : a good quad core CPU (9550 should be fine), a lot of RAM and a good hard disk. Also, I've noticed that even if you set something like "prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "1024" in your /etc/vmware/config file, you won't be able to set 1024 mb of RAM on your guest system; it's more like ~700mb.

Anyway, 8 gb should be fine :]

----------

## DaggyStyle

 *Yuu wrote:*   

> Hi DaggyStyle,
> 
> there's something I don't understand well : why do you want to upgrade your graphic card ?
> 
> I'm asking because, as far as I know, even if vmware products have some 3D acceleration features : your CPU will still do the 3D rendering. On my laptop, I've tested a few 3D games with 3D acceleration enabled, and the 3D performance is just horrible.
> ...

 

I need a new gpu because my current one doesn't have a hdmi output plug.

 *Yuu wrote:*   

> 
> 
> So, I just recommend three things : a good quad core CPU (9550 should be fine), a lot of RAM and a good hard disk. Also, I've noticed that even if you set something like "prefvmx.allVMMemoryLimit = "1024" in your /etc/vmware/config file, you won't be able to set 1024 mb of RAM on your guest system; it's more like ~700mb.
> 
> Anyway, 8 gb should be fine :]

 

you want to tell me that I cannot allocate more then 1 GB of ram to windows when using vmware-player?

----------

## Yuu

Hi again,

sorry, it seems there's a misunderstood :

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

> I need a new gpu because my current one doesn't have a hdmi output plug.

 

Oh sorry, I didn't understand that. In this case, I understand it well :]

 *DaggyStyle wrote:*   

> you want to tell me that I cannot allocate more then 1 GB of ram to windows when using vmware-player?

 

No no, I think that you can allocate as much as memory as you want. I just wanted to point that vmware has a kind of weird memory usage allocation, maybe for caches. Let me explain myself : if you set the global memory usage to 1gb (that's just an example), you won't be able to set 1024mb of ram to a guest vm.

Here is an example : with my 2 gb of RAM laptop, I set my guest vm to 672mb, but It still uses more : 

 *Quote:*   

> $ ps axu | grep vmware-vmx
> 
> yuu      26561  160 37.6 1118528 774780 ?      Ssl  09:45 253:28 /opt/vmware/lib/vmware/bin/vmware-vmx -s vmx.stdio.keep=TRUE -# product=1;name=VMware Workstation;version=7.1.4;buildnumber=385536;licensename=VMware Workstation;licenseversion=7.0; -@ pipe=/home/yuu/VMware/tmp/vmware-yuu/vmx6aa460df2266bbf2;readyEvent=91 home/yuu/VMware/WinXP - New/Windows XP Professional.vmx

 

If you do the math, (37.6*2007)/100 = ~755 mb of RAM used. So, I was just saying something like "don't forget that vmware uses a bit more memory (~10% in my case) that it seems".

----------

## DaggyStyle

I see, either way, I'll have to allocate 4GB to the xp (photoshop usage mainly) so I'll take that in account, thanks.

----------

