I ' ve never actually been to one of those utopias , probably will never go as getting a passport is too much of a PITA for me to bother with . We could actually all strive to be better people who care more for our fellow human beings , though . That ' s an honorable and worthy goal , even if you do it in the smallest ways like holding a door open for someone or letting someone in to traffic when they ' re using their signals . There are myriad ways to contribute to helping make our society a better , more meaningful , and successful one . Even if you can ' t do the bigger things like help implement renewable and sustainable energy you can do the smaller things . <| sep |> I built a similar system back in 2012 . It was designed for virtualization , compilation , and Verilog synthesis RAM intensive but CPU bound . I built my system around a 3930 K , 32 GB DDR 3 , and a PCIe SSD RevoDrive X 2 . I recently upgraded to an Intel SATA SSD but the system will otherwise last me many more years . You ' ll probably benefit from a processor with more cores . Depending on how many VMs you run simultaneously 16 GB might be fine and you can always upgrade later . I would look to upgrade your SSD maybe to something on PCIe and not SATA , if it has Linux drivers .