Originally, I was thinking of using a bare metal hypervisor (figure out ESXi, or punch the easy button and go with UNRAID) and multiple virtual machines.
With the needs for GPU passthrough, this no longer seems like the best idea. I’m considering a multi-boot.
My needs fall into several overall Categories
Windows Gaming
Windows Work
Linux Desktop for evaluation as a windows replacement.
I could perhaps spin off virtual machines in virtual box or something in the Work/Linux boots.
I wanted to separate Windows Work and Windows Gaming so that all the back-end services related to SQL Server and local IIS or what not etc, are not tying down system resources when gaming.
I’m concerned that the x570 platform won’t have enough PCIe lanes for this kind of setup. So, I have a few questions I would like advice on.
Can ThreadRipper game at better than 60 FPS at 1440 (consider that the lower bound of my desired range.)?
Can it do VR?
I’ve heard that the memory latency gap between x570 and TRX40 is significant. Will this impact gaming?
Is it possible that Ryzen 4000 will have more PCIe lanes (can the socket even support more)?
Am I giving up on something like UnRAID too soon?
Basically. I need to decide if I go x570 or TRX40. Since I would have multiple M.2 drives for different OSes, it seems like TRX40 is the way to go. Also. the Gigabyte TRX40 Designare with its “PCIe over USB-C” (I believe that is what Wendell called it) is appealing, especially since it probably will have some compatibility with USB4, maybe.
Is my thinking flawed? Anyone have any opinions or guidance? Am I trying to do too much on a single system?
Thank you for your time.
Note: I’m coming from the x58 platform, I would like to keep this rig for about the same amount of time if possible (9 years)?
Yes, definitely. For me it is even a weird question. The loss of game performance is small. And it is not to gaming specifically. High core count CPUs do much better at multitasking at the small cost of single task (e.g. game) performance (mainly by having lower clocks to keep the power consumption under control).
The GPU performance matter more.
There is absolutely nothing that will stop Threadrippers from doing that.
Yes you will have few fps less, maybe. I have 3960x and I do not care about such small statistical difference. The GPU is much more important.
This is why:
Performance of programs and games depends on much more than just performance of the RAM. In particular cache is the mechanism mitigates the always extremely slow RAM.
Not at all.
Here are my comments:
Check if MS SQLServer can be dockerized.
Heavy database engines should IMHO always go to VMs/containers.
I personally keep one single OS for gaming-and-work (e.g. IDEs, Creative Cloud, kind of front stuff) and everything more heavy goes to VMs (background services).
While I do not want to have more than one main environment (that has all the main and minor tools I use, multiple monitors) I also keep other things separated (by VMs or by disks).
when VM fails I restore it from snapshot or backup or maybe do a clean install of that one thing
when main system dies I do clean install, reinstall IDEs/tools (games take the longest - they need to download themselves), but all the VMs are on other disks.
I also have two ESXi hosts
on AMD AM1 platform (GIT and Maven repositories)
and Athlon 200GE
both are generally for somethings that A) I do not want to keep on the same physical machine. B) some things that I want to run 24/7 because it to much hassle to start them when I need.
One warning tho, your main machine is not for testing software from a random site - that is what the VMs are for.
@FeeNiX I would still consider an Intel platform instead of an AMD platform, Heres why. Santa Claus was very generous this year and sent the needed parts for a new AMD desktop. It took me 4 days to put all the parts together. My biggest complaint with the AMD platform has nothing to do with the CPU (I love my Ryzen 3700X), but what I assume is the way all motherboard manufacturers design their motherboards. My biggest complaint with the motherboard design is there isn’t any marking on the motherboard, so you have to use the motherboard manual to figure out where everything goes. I found I was guessing a lot where each connection was supposed to go. A secondary complaint I have is the AMD AM4 platform is still very picky about what ram you use. Yes, the original ram I picked was supposed to work on the motherboard I picked out. I guess I shouldn’t complain too much about my ram issues, because it turns out the original ram I picked out was bad.
As to your thought of dual botting, I would just run up a virtual machine to run Linux. Linux is fun to mess around with, but It isn’t an operating system that’s plug and play. I have been running Linux exclusively for about 3 months, and have had nothing but shutdown and rebooting problems. The only reason I haven’t given up on Linux, I am determined to fix my issues with Linux. I will be creating a blog to talk about my experience with AMD’s AM4 Platform and Linux, as soon as I get a chance.
I have posted my build specs in case you are interested.
[PCPartPicker Part List](https://pcpartpicker.com/list/nKvWPn)
Inland Professional 1TB SSD 3D NAND SATA III 6Gb/s 2.5" Internal Solid State Drive
Purchased For $90.00
Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
Total (before mail-in rebates)
$1989.15
Mail-in rebates
-$15.00
Total
$1974.15
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-03-31 09:11 EDT-0400
If you do decide to go with an AMD platform I would suggest you purchase your system from a custom builder like Puget Systems or if you are interested in Linux System 76. I looked into purchasing a system from Puget system and System 76 after I had all the parts, and for about an extra $500 to 1,000 dollars, I could have purchased a system similar to one I have. I would have saved a lot of headaches if I had purchased a system from either one of them.
That sounded weird for me, so I’ve looked the photo of that mobo and I do not see much of difference in that respect from what I used to see from different mobo vendors for different platforms.
That said if you build a machine with black PCB mobo, in a black case with at least half cables black, at night - that was literally my case. Lets be honest if they would use completley white color for the mobo labels - it would sell less (as much less attractive).
All depends on your previous experience with Linux I guess.
For me it literally was plug&play. For my Ryzen 3900X build in July 2019 I’d already read about the AMD RDRAND bugs with systemd boot so I knew Fedora wouldn’t work. I plugged in a Ubuntu 18.04 USB key and ran the whole installation in about 20 minutes. It all worked the first time.
To avoid most Linux problems don’t use Nvidia. Most weird Linux installation problems I’ve seen involve getting Nvidia configured correctly. Or even having Nvidia hardware installed. On laptops for example, Linux will try to autoconfigure Nouveau, but it destroys your battery life since it doesn’t know how to do Nvidia power management.
Anyway, in summary, if you know the problem areas and avoid them Linux is plug&play.
My first desktop build, which was an I5 the motherboard had clear markings on the motherboard, they were tiny, but they were there. To be fair it was 11 years ago before you had RGB, or colors mattered. So I guess my complaint would also apply to the newer Intel motherboards too.
On your 3960 system, are you running a hypervisor (like ESXi or UnRAID) on bare metal, or Windows? I was going to do a dual boot Linux system because I was interested in seeing the state of gaming on Linux, and I figured that running that out of VirtualBox or the Windows Hypervisor (forgot the exact name) would not work well performance wise.
Windows PRO is my driving system. As a hipervisor I use VMWare Workstation. VMware is my choice because it nicely coexists with the ESXi (obviously).
One note: I dont play with the passthrough of any kind.
I personally do not care much about linux gaming. I mainly consume triple-A industry games and those only run on linux in 0.01% of cases. My suggestion would be to do temporary tests with linux (on separate drive/dual booting) before you commit to games on linux - chances are you will be very disappointed.
My suggestions would be to do the list of must-haves and nice-haves, or even rank the needs from 1-10 (also if it is permanent or just for play) . E.g.
must/10: Windows workstation (VM or baremetal) for work (permanent)
nice/3: linux gaming (temporary)
must/nice/8? windows gaming (permanent)
Then decide what is the best OS for that and would it better in VM or on host OS.
Going back to your original list (+ my random comments):
1440p Gaming
definitely Windows
you could do it in VM, but do you want to hassle with additional layer of potential issues on top of usuall issues when I just want to play.
Valve Index VR Gaming
the same as above
Beginning Video editing (Premiere Elements atm)
only windows / max OS (linux??)
does seems that it might work well in VM but, GPU acceleration would go into the same bucket as games - additional layer of potential issues
Beginning Audio Editing (Hindenburg)
just googled, seems to be only Windows or MacOS
but I assume it would excel on VM as well as on bare metal
MSSQL Server / Beginning ML
that again strongly suggests Windows OS
but it would be better in VM/container
Home Lab/Virtualization
You do not seems to be limited here by the host OS (not counting bere metal hypervisors e.g. ESXi).
I doubt any pass-through is currently possible with Windows as a host.
So in general, it seems for me that:
It seems for me like you are bound to MS platform as me. And it should be Windows host.
you want to play with Linux - VMs would be perfect for that (excluding games)
for linux games - well MS do not like dual boot. In fact MS don’t like you to even easily boot to save mode when nothing else works). So… what is your priority for linux gaming?
I had heard some interesting things about that Valve Photon which made me interested in Linux gaming, but you’re right. I could actually just offload Linux gaming tests to my current computer (i7-970 12GB Ram).
So that puts me at W10 Pro (Will W10 Workstation benefit me in your opinion?)on bare metal.
VMWare Workstation Player to spool up a Linux desktop for exploration (non-gaming).
Docker Desktop to kick off any development tools that can be offloaded.
It looks like VMWare workstation will only let me run 1 VM at a time unless I spring for the paid version. Does this mean I can have many images, but only have 1 running at a time?
W10 Workstation - no there is nothing really interesting in here (just ReFS without StorageSpaces, Persistent Memory NVDIMM-N, and better utilization of better NICs) .
VMWare workstation will only let me run 1 VM
I do not know of free Workstation version. And Player is much more less interesting.
For a Hypervisor on W10, check Hyper-V first. In general it should be OK. VMWare is just more mature and more enterprise accepted (also because not locked to specific host vendors). VirtualBox is not bad either. To be honest VirtualBox can be more popular among developers of different kinds as you can have it on Windows and Linux host alike.
It sounds actually like you will be able to figure the best hypervisor for you later after trying each of them and learning in the process.
I actually wanted to have 12 core CPU (moving from 8 core). But I could not bare the limitation of the X570 in respect to the PCIe lanes (here is my previous MB: https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/X99E_WS/gallery/)
The lowest count of PCIe lanes was 8x. And it is not about having 4 slots capable of doing 16x. It is about:
having 6+ slots
having not to worry about physical slot size
not putting 4x/8x controller card in - the only free - 1x slot.
not playing twister game with PCIe extentions.
I’m still disappointment with TRX40 mobos (at least those that were available 1 month ago). The reason is that manufactures go so much into dedicated M.2 slots completely forgetting that PCIe slot that takes the same amount of place is more flexible.
Available lanes and slots, and the flexibility there in, is what pushed me to TRX40. I wish manufacturers had dropped the m.2 on the board and added more PCIe slots and just let you use card adapters (up to 4 m.2s depending on the slot’s transfer rate) for storage.
My original build plan had assumed that they would still release a third generation $1k 16 core ThreadRipper and I would have gone with that. 24 cores is more than I need, even 16 is some overkill.
Sadly, I haven’t found a board with more than 4 slots for TR, but with the Designaire I get 4 slots (16/8/16/8) with 2 slot spacing for each one. Multiple boxes is an option, but I don’t have the room for them, and my rack is nearly full. I have maybe 3U free after I rack up my current computer (I put it in a 4U case When I swapped the CPU and AIO last time.)
In your opinion, is it worth while to drop an extra 200 bucks for dual Intel 10gig onboard so I don’t need to use a PCIe slot later on if I need it? I am looking to add a FreeNAS at some point, but 10Gig may not be widely deployed at home in the next 8 years. although I know 2.5 and 5 are becoming more popular. I already have Cat6A Screened Foiled twisted pair runs around the house. Obviously it is entirely unnecessary to keep up with the internet speed unless something miraculous happens.
Edit: After lurking on the FreeNas forums for over a year I now have the opinion that Realtek is worthless, and Aquantia is questionable at best. Intel is apparently the only way to fly. Although people on that forum are kind of intimidating.
It is as you mentioned in edit. I personally only consider Intel NICs/LANs.
Most (probably all) other brands do following:
it is a cheap alternative, so some hardware functions are moved/available in software (this does not mean much for home use).
it is a cheap alternative, so drivers are only available for windows and linux
most likely forget about support for BSD (and everything based on it), bare metal hypervisors, …
Yea, I manage by installing some additional drives to introduce Realtake NIC to my ESXi I had installed some time ago. It worked till next ESXi upgrade.
Roughly two months ago when I was selecting the TRX40 board, I’ve checked the reputation of Aquantia - drivers only for win/linux (if I remember correctly) - reputation: - shit as hell (mostly about drivers).
I went for dual 10gigs, I know that within next 2 years I will be doing upgrade of the switch. It does not need to be 10G, but sure the dual 2.5G connections will be nice to my NAS.
and those only run on linux in 0.01% of cases. My suggestion would be to do temporary tests with linux (on separate drive/dual booting) before you commit to games on linux - chances are you will be very disappointed.