+1 for using virtual machines instead of dual booting
I suggest 8-16GB of memory and a quad core chip, though there doesn't
seem to be much of a point to quad over dual cores for most tasks.
Perhaps the extra cores could be dedicated to running Ubuntu in a
VM...
This stuff is so much faster and less expensive than it used to be that
raw performance has not driven me to upgrade in a long time. These days
it is about features and design.
I think the integrated graphics have finally caught up with Windows
performance requirements, so if you aren't playing games then just
about any board should be good enough
Some considerations:
- *Low power* parts (especially CPUs) need less cooling, and less
cooling means less noise. For the same performance, lower TDP CPUs
are a lot more expensive than their higher power siblings. "A lot" is
in percentage terms. The incremental price is still less than the
price of a few cocktails
- *ECC* memory is seriously worth considering, especially if you
don't reboot often (i.e. suspend/standby instead of a cold boot). ECC
support makes overclocking a bad idea (so I've heard) and rules out
almost every non-Xeon Intel board (Intel has used ECC as a key
feature to differentiate their consumer and enterprise parts even
though there really isn't any incremental cost to support ECC). In
theory all AMD boards should support ECC, but in practice only Asus
has it listed on their spec sheets. Fortunately Asus seems to have
feature-competitive offerings in every form factor
- A *SSD* disk for your OS will provide the a noticeable performance
improvement because I/O is almost always the limiting factor these
days. SSDs are not so expensive and (apparently) when they "fail"
they just become read-only. Storing swap and hibernation files on SSD
makes me queasy, but I do it anyway because they are not terrifically
expensive
--
syburgh
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