Im considering ditching my faithful ASRock C2750D4I home server, for something with a bit more kick. At least enough to run a Windows VM with KVM passthrough to stream my Steam games to my HTPC and the dozen or so containers im already using. Im not a hardcore gamer, the heaviest games i play the most is Civilization6, Rocket League and PES2015 i would like that my next upgrade to the server would just be GPU+RAM upgrade, lets say a 3 year lifespan.
I’m a bit lost on the hardware that would meet these requirements, i could just build a gaming PC but i like having a IPMI interface, support for ECC RAM a bunch more SATA ports, low power profile and multiple network interfaces.
My current my server build:
4 * 4GB of DDR4 ECC memory
6 SATA disks, 2 SSD’s 4 HDD’s
500W PSU
GTX 780
So, what parts would you recommend to build such a machine ?
For a server, the board you have is a pretty amazing platform, but for gaming that CPU is pretty weak, especally due to very low single threaded performance.
I’d suggest continuing to serve on your current setup, but shift the graphics over to your HTPC (which may involve an upgrade to it) instead of trying to game stream from the server directly.
If you really do need more CPU power, you can get C232 and C236 chipset LGA1151 boards that will take your current ram, will provide respectively either 6 or 8 sata3 ports straight off the chipset, support ECC and Xeons while being inexpensive. Sadly Duel NIC’s are harder to come across, but in a mATX or similar form factor a cheap 1x PCIe card will happily give you another 4, and you can get a xeon thats basically a 7700 with slightly lower clocks.
Or you can get ryzen, the 1700 will support ECC, just only a couple of motherboards list any QVL ECC DIMMs, and then only 2 sorts, but buying specifically its ok, its just not going to work with your existing 16gb. You loose any server type management going this way, but gain lots of raw performance without doing badly in games.
If event that won’t do you your looking at proper server gear… older stuff like LGA1366 duel sockets will do the raw performance for lots of workloads without breaking the bank, but if you also want to game on it you ahve a very few workstation options… or probably more economically AMD Ryzen thread ripper, which DOES support ECC, and will multitask to game while running the server without issues… but 2 machines could likely be cheaper by this level still, which is my I suggest making a stronger HTPC as the gaming device then running less gaming suitable hardware for the server.
I dont think you’ll find anything with IPMI though. AFAIK ECC shouldnt be a problem but you might have to buy new ram as the stuff you have might not be on QVL. I dont think you’ll have a problem with sata and multiple nics could be handled with a card. You didnt mention a budget or form factor requirements, so if it were me:
This bad boy has support for ECC and 10 sata ports. Add in one of these bad boys and now you have 5 networking ports to play with. Coupled with a R7 1700, you will have a mean machine.
Of course you could always just go with something a little lighter on the wallet like a 1600 or 1500.
I considered just turning my HTPC into a console, but i figured that it would be just as good as having the GPU on my desktop, which i use mostly for work. I imagine that moving that GPU into my server i could more of GPU-As-A-Service type of deal and do a couple more interesting stuff other than gaming.
Having all that goodness plus an wifi card, thats pretty awesome thanks! What about PCI Passthrough ? I though Ryzen wasnt that good for those features.
IIRC Wendell made it work with this board and a gigabyte board. I could be wrong as I didnt pay a lot of attention. I’m still rocking the 7700k myself and have no need to virtualize really.
While it is true PCI passthrough is possible with some motherboards you are forgetting the performance hit between AMD and KVM. For now performance on Intel is better than AMD. I am no expert in this subject matter and there might be some hope. I think I remember watching a video where @Wendell was working on a guide using Xen instead of KVM which should increase the performance on AMD CPU’s.