Good Intel Setup for 3090 passthrough and VFIO

I’m currently decided to upgrade to 3090. Right now I have a n intel x299 chipset mobo housing a 2080ti (passthrough) and a 1060 (host). My X299 is a great passthrough mobo and I’d look for something similar that:

  1. Has enough slots/room for both 2080ti and 3090
  2. Has good iommu groups for passthrough
  3. Works with intel i9-10900K

Any suggestions?

What’s your current CPU? X299 is a fairly modern chipset. There really haven’t been notable improvements to the Intel product line yet.

I personally would stick with X299

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I Could say use AMD so PCI 4.0 is a thing ?

But you may be just playing CSGO. Why Have 24G Vram and half the bandwidth ?

current CPU is a i9-7940x. Figured I’d try upgrading to i9-10900K so I won’t be CPU bottlenecked. Anyway, I use a gigabyte x299 ud4 and I’d like a new mobo with built-in Wifi and enough space between PCIe so I can run both cards. I heard the 3090 will take 3 slots, and the 2080ti itself takes two.

AMD is a pain with vfio, I like Intel since it’s basically been plug and play.

I’m actually looking to play all the new AAA games on an ultrawide screen monitor, so a 3090 build is my goal.

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mainstream Intel (not x299, z490) has poor iommu groupings. Stick with what you have. If you aren’t playing at 1080p high refresh, but rather at a higher resolution, the CPU isn’t likely to be a significant bottleneck with anything that performant anyway.

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Being higher than 144hz.

Never heard that about mainsteam intel boards? Is that really true about poor iommu groupings? I do think the x299 has really damn good iommu groupings and very convenient for my setup. I guess I could look for a larger x299 mobo that could fit both cards…

Yes, it is. Intel product-segments their good VFIO stuff and ACS for HEDT. I can do one card passthrough, using my integrated graphics as the host, on my ASRock z490 Taichi, but lots of stuff has the same IOMMU group on my z490, and it’s the same for anyone’s mainstream Intel motherboard both now and historically. I’m seriously thinking of going back to HEDT (my previous system was x99).

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Yep. My Z170 board was a fucking nightmare.