IOMMU graphics card

Hi guys, my graphics card is breaking down and it is in need for a replacement soon. Which is a bummer because I wanted to use this card in my build to use as a primary card under linux and buy another card for Virtualization. Beeing that this card would be a powerhog anyway I was thinking of having a lightweight card as my normal driver and having a powerfull card to use for gaming under linux / virtualwindowsgaming. Are there any things I need to look out for? And any suggestions for a lightweight graphics card?

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"lightweight?" http://www.ebay.com/itm/272663154952

or, it's getting pretty easy to find a GTX 750 ti secondhand for about $25 - $50, depending on where you're located.

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you're gonna want and AMD card for the virtualized system, and any cheap low end nvidia card (or integrated intel graphics) will work for the host.

There are some pretty nimble low power cards now with rx 560 and Geforce 1050. Come computex there is a geforce 1030 now too and VEGA.. "Where the hell is vega." official Ryan quote.

It might need a month or so to left the dust settle but IOMMU on AMD. It is up in the air on AMD and on Intel I am sure people here have been doing it for awhile.

I am waiting on VEGA for the more powerful card, and don't have an internal gpu (ryzen build). Are there any prerequisites on the less powerful card for IOMMU to work properly? Haven't had the chance to play with it before (come from a i7 2700k)

@tkoham Is there a reason to have both AMD and Nvidia GPUs?

@_adrian haha, that's pretty lightweight indeed :wink:

it's more lightweight than I realized, actually. It's actually an adapter card for onboard graphics — not standalone; basically just a DVI connector.

BUT there are plenty of older, 256MB-ish actual GPUs on ebay in the $8-$15 range.

it's much easier to pass through AMD cards in general, and if you have cards from 2 different vendors, then you don't have to bother with driver or pci blacklisting. it makes the process much simpler, easier, and more reliable once set up.

Hence, AMD in VM, other vendor in Host = simplest, easiest setup with least headaches.

Any it seems Nvidia are being anal about their consumer cards running in VM's

@_adrian @tkoham @Marten thanks for the info :+1:

this is dumb, I agree; but it is not really difficult to work around. you just add kvm=off to the cpu parameter and everything works fine.

I set up a gaming VM for my son with two GTX 760's. "Same vendor" is not difficult; it only becomes an issue when it's the same chip. And even then, it's do-able. Worked fine on the second try.

What was actually difficult for me was sound, and passing through a UBS controller. Those took weeks to get going right.