I’m building a virtualization PC but I’m having a lot of trouble finding information about what supports what on the AMD side.
For the CPU I’m going with a 5700G as it probably has the whole virtualization shebang. Admittedly I couldn’t find much info on CPU support but I did get a confident statement that all modern AMD CPUs have full virtualization support, probably.
But when it comes to motherboards I’m not even having that much luck. All I could find was that the B450 and B550 chips support it kind of but aren’t ideal.
I plan on using the computer for VM gaming and as general hypervisor machine. What chipsets work with virtualization and are better for that purpose?
What I really want to know is what has you concerned to this level of FUD with hardware selection.
Lack of virtualization support is not something I’ve had to worry about in desktop PC building in ages. It’s mainstream. The 5700G supports it.
Motherboard is even less of a factor on the topic since it’s the CPU that mandates whether or not virtualization is supported. Now, while you didn’t mention this, the only virtualization-related topic I can think of involving motherboards would be how well they behave with isolating segments, which we call IOMMU groups, of the motherboard to give to VMs (passthrough) and this varies by motherboard manufacturer moreso than chipsets afaik. This doesn’t have any bearing as to what virtualization is or is not supported. Just dictates how flexible the mobo may be for sharing devices to VMs…which is important almost exclusively to gamers and cloud providers.
Any mobo you pick for the 5700G is most likely fine. Look up specific motherboards to find out people’s experiences with them and possibly also look up their IOMMU groupings.
I just haven’t been keeping up with hardware stuff in a while. My current PC is a 15 year old intel machine, even on the official intel forums the standard practice for computers this old is to just assume the motherboard chipset doesn’t support any virtualization unless stated otherwise.
If it’s that common with current hardware then it makes things way way easier. Thanks for the help.
The 4770 from 2013 had VT-d, VT-x, and basic SR-IOV, I made use of those with VMware Workstation. (Granted the K editions did not)
I’d assume any AMD chip has the same a full decade on. I will grant AMD’s spec page is rather useless since it only says “virtualization” is supported, but it appears even first-gen Ryzen supported all three of those. My 7700X certainly has them, I remember seeing SR-IOV when browsing through every UEFI submenu.
The only real issue with virtualization is that it usually ships disabled in the BIOS and you need to enable it before it will work.
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AM5 is significantly better for VM gaming than AM4, at least if the integrated GPU is sufficient for what you need for the host system and you want to use a dedicated GPU for the VM.
The motherboard should also support an x8-x8-x4 configuration, such as the ProArt B650-Creator, which also has very good IOMMU groups and has no problems with DPC latency.
15 years—yeah, that is definitely a long time. I guess I understand now. Like others have also indicated your virtualization needs should be covered by pretty much any recent AMD chip that you’re likely to use in a PC build, even if it’s not really advertised in detail.
I use an AM4 server board and am able to play stuff like Apex in a VM just fine, though the fact that most AM5 CPUs (all? I haven’t been keeping up) come with an integrated GPU does make shopping/building easier.
My home desktop is about 5 years old 2400G running virtual machines as well as light gaming. So you’re not going to have problems with any current generation AMD processor.