I did mention there’d be computer assemblage porn in my last post but in the end that didn’t happen. I guess at some point I’ll need to have the side off to connect some of the extra ports that were included though so there is some potential for computer pr0n yet.
I did, however perform some comparison with the i7 CPU in that machine doing some useful real world task: compiling Firefox (from mozilla-central) and Thunderbird (from comm-central) on Linux.
VMWare Workstation only allows the assignment of a maximum of two processors to a VM, but it still manages to do the job ~25% faster than my laptop (Dell Latitude D820, T7200, 2GB RAM running Ubuntu), churning out a completed build of either from scratch in about twenty minutes.
Running Debian in a virtual machine was always going to be a requirement (it’s useful for a lot of things, including some far too risky to attempt on the live machines; it’s something I also do on the X2 3800+ and something the i7’s extra 6 “processors” come in handy for).
The machine was running the Windows 7 Release Candidate, but using either VMWare or VirtualBox on there is just one big clusterfsck. The Debian installer locks solid at some point along the way in both, and using NAT in VMWare is also busted.
Fortunately I’ve got spare Vista licenses up the wazoo, so it wasn’t hard to step back to Vista Ultimate while waiting for a fixed VMWare and the release of Windows 7.