I like building with AMD chips - and feel Intel is the chip manufacturing quivalent of MS !!

You mean, like, producing superior quality to the competition?

(I go for best bang for the buck, and have been through various Intel and AMD CPUs. AMD haven't been doing much good lately - same goes for AMD/ATI vs. nvidia, with nvidia also having the upper hand wrt. stable drivers).

Plus you can guarantee with AMD systems that you activate VM technology - with Intel it is hit and miss even within the same product series.

How bad is this, really? Don't you just have to look up the CPU model on Intel's site?

Carol

Sorry if OT, but do any of AMD CPUs come close to Intel's Sandy Bridge/equivalent ?
Are they hotter, need better heat sinks, coolers etc, can they withstand higher temperatures than Intel's CPUs ?  Various hardware sites just say Intel is better, what do you feel ?

Pls PM if OT - thanks

SKA

How much estimated ram is needed for how much HD space for it to run decently. (Let's say cheap HD and not SSD)

32-bit Win7 : 3-4GB RAM, 7200 rpm /10,000 rpm hard disk
64-bit: 8-16 GB RAM, 7200 rpm /10,000 rpm hard disk

SKA

Going for that amount of RAM warrants looking for a descent mainboard first. One that supports this memory, and some extra if you might later need it. These boards support VMX in all cases, and the high-end CPU's supported also do.
Maybe you should go for a server mainboard, it can be had with multiple CPU sockets, so if a quad-core isn't enough for running all your VM's, you can add a couple more. Hm, then go straight for a XEON system, of the latest X56xx series, it really has superior VM performance, and is available on systems with lots of memory. But I'm not sure anything but Server OS's (Windows Server, VMWare ESX, Linux's) can boot from that board and what storage should be connected. 

Oefff, I got a little excited , but it was fun

I use a cheap 870 version of the mentioned Gigabyte motherboard with cheap 4x4gb ram. And amd 965be, works fine. Don't need server specs but might be good to check ram vs. motherboard. With 4x4gb lowering ram speed is hopefully enough. When I first clicked them in bsods came quickly, 1333 -> 1066 necessary. Good thing is timings are a lot better at that speed, in real life no difference outside benchmarks or special task.

I would get a 6 core cpu and manually oc my way to more mhz. X6 1055T does not cost much more than a 965be does it?

Don't forget to buy a bunch of monitors or you will get dizzy from alt-tabbing

4 is enough but I am confident your Gigabyte support x6. Even my old GA-MA790FX-DS5 does. They are good with bios updates. I did not take advantage of that for long but one of the positive things with AMD is you can start with a Sempron and end up with X6 on same motherboard, using same DDR2 ram as well.

One thing that annoys me about 965 is the lousy std. cooler. I guess they figured most will never tax all cores so why not save money on that. May be also a matter of bios and rpm management but mine was over sensitive. Reacted instantly to even minor tasks. Was also not comfortable doing stress-tests, temp got a bit high. Over their recommend max actually. Was better when I used cpu on that old motherboard because rpms were insane, up to 7500rpm if I remember correctly. Newer max was 3500 regardless of bios settings. Open the door for problems and strange bug reports, when some say cpu overheat with no overclocking they could be right. I think 7500rmp is the correct number once all cores are hard at work - which is like never but encoding videos can do it. 3500 is fine for games and such. Also possible 7500 was a bios bug, seems to fit cooling need in extreme situations better though.

If Intel can change vm support randomly AMD can also silently change or fix cooler. What you get might work better.