Dual Boot vs. VMWare

Good Day All,

Alright, I've decided that I want to make Sabayon my primary operating system on my main rig. The specs are:

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ (Possibly to be replaced with Athlon 64 X2 3800+)
2GB PC3200 RAM (Possibly upgrading to 4GB)
2x Seagate Barracuda SATA II HDD in RAID 0
2x MSI GeForce 7600GT in SLI

Catch is that I will still need to run Windows, primarily for gaming. The most intensive of which would be Battlefield 2, and the Special Forces Expansion.

Now, I would prefer to run all this in a virtual machine on the Linux host, but I'm uncertain whether this is a suitable environment. Assuming I did the upgrades listed above, can anyone comment whether I could get this humming along at all tolerably?

Obviously, this would work well in a dual-boot scenario, but I would prefer to avoid it to make partitioning and backup simpler.

Thanks for your input,

Milty

 

Milty,
I have no Sabayon experience, but have recently experimented with several OSes on VM's and this is what I found: Limited access to hardware, clunky operation of the OS on the VM, and a generally unsatisfactory experience.
Since then I have dual-booted several machines and have had wonderful results - I'd never go back to a VM, except for software testing purposes when I do not wish to actually install. I would think that, for gaming purposes, you'd be dissatisfied with VM's.
Shadow_Puter_Dude's sticky at the top of the Linux forum worked wonders for my understanding of the process and Knoppix with QTparted did the tricks needed with ease.
Just my 2 cents, for what it's worth.
Blessings,
Port-O-San
P.S. Holler if ya need help!

 

Dual boot every time - for games anyway. I have run nearly every version of Windows inside Vmware in Linux, and for general computing it runs at an acceptable speed, but for games, especially those you mention - basically forget it, the emulated graphics and sound just aren't up to it.

Sabayon is pretty hungry resource wise to start with, but I wouldn't even attempt it in a lighter version of Linux either.

3500 to 3800 X2 (dual core) ? Hmm, well if your board supports it, I'd say go ahead, but then I see your RAM is DDR which is expensive and probably means the motherboard is quite old. If you're into games, a new board that supports DDR2, PCIeX graphics and SATA II might be a better investment than buying DDR which is slower and currently more than double the price of DDR2

I wouldn't even bother upgrading from 2 GB myself though, unless you run Vista which will at least 'see' all of it - XP won't, but Linux will, of course.

If you've got a reasonable system, the graphics card will be the bottleneck for games performance, and upgrading from 2 to 4 GB of RAM won't change that much, if at all

 

Motherboard is an ASUS A8N-SLI

Should mention that I'm only using 64-bit operating systems (Sabayon x64, and XP Pro x64), so I'm not concerned about memory limitations.

Nor the cost. You are right about DDR costing more at most retailers, but that's not where I would be buying from

I've got the specs to handle just about anything I throw at the machine, and was only really considering these upgrades to support my hypothetical environment.

This is what I was concerned about. I've got all the graphic processing power I need, but whether or not its available to the virtual computer, where I would be needing it......