I am an amateur homelaber who has built a router and multiple NAS machines. I now about to build my first virtualization server and could use some advice.
Use Case: A Proxmox sandbox where I can play with lots of containers and virtual machines. I also plan to run Home Assistant, Ansible, a Mindustry server, and possibly an AI that does not use a GPU. 1 Gb ethernet connection required with the ability to upgrade to 10 Gb. The system will be low wattage, but still have enough power to let me learn what I like to run without worrying about overload.
I narrowed my choices to the following 2 options:
ASRock B660 DeskMeet
i5-13600
NVME boot drive
128 GB DDR4
2-6 GB of SATA SSD’s
Intel X550-T2 at some point
Ryzen 5950X
ASRock Rack x470d4u motherboard
NVME boot drive
128 GB DDR4 ECC
2-6 GB of SATA SSD’s
Intel X550-T2 at some point
Questions:
Do the 5950X’s 18 cores really provide for more virtualization than the i5-13600’s 8 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores?
Will I notice the i5-13600’s increased speed for my use case? I know that the answer to this question depends highly on what I choose to run.
What cooling options do you recommend for both builds? I’m worried about a mini PC’s ability to cool itself, though I did find this post on Reddit.
Is it possible to install my own PSU on the B660? How do I find out which ones are compatible?
What mini and micro ATX cases would you recommend for the 5950X build?
How much does RAM clock speed and latency matter when running a home virtualization server?
Any suggestions for other game servers or world simulations that I can run? I really like the idea of having a bunch of little worlds in a box on my shelf.
I went back and forth between a Ryzen 3900X and an i5-13500 for my virt server build. And on the Ryzen side I went back and forth between an X570D4U and a “prosumer” X570 board. Both platforms have their pros and cons. Here are some of my thoughts:
If you’re running “heavier” VMs, go with a Ryzen 9 platform for more P-cores and better L3 cache topology. E-cores are marvelous but all else being equal I’d rather have one Zen 2 core than two Gracemont E-cores. You can pin a VM to one CCX of a Ryzen 9 3900X or 3950X with its own L3 cache region in passthrough mode and get great performance and isolation. Or if you need better IPC then Ryzen 5000-series is great, but you’ll end up with half as many L3 cache regions.
If you have two “heavier” PCIe expansion cards that need to be connected directly to the CPU—e.g. two dGPUs or one dGPU and a 100GbE NIC—go with Ryzen. It’s just easier to find an AM4 board with x8/x8 CPU-attached expansion slots, not to mention cheaper. This is the major miss with LGA1700 (and AM5) IMO… x8/x8 boards start at $330 and go up (way up) from there. You also get more USB controllers out of the box with AM4 and (on X570 at least) one of them is almost always in its own IOMMU group.
I wanted to like the X570D4U but if you can’t find one with 10GbE under $400 then it’s simply not worth it. You’d be better off with a cheap-ish board that meets your other requirements and a Pi-KVM. It’ll cost about the same and the Pi-KVM can be re-sold or re-purposed in the future. The X470D4U is a definitely more affordable but you might run into issues with IOMMU groupings, CPU cooler clearance, and NVMe performance in the second M.2 slot. Just my 2¢.
If you have several “lighter” PCIe expansion cards and a bunch of M.2 storage, I actually think an H670/H770 board is a great option and kind of the dark horse of this whole discussion. H670/H770 gets the same DMI 4.0 x8 chipset link as Z690/Z790 so you end up with a ton of PCH bandwidth to throw around. I have an Asus PRIME H670-PLUS D4 with four expansion cards, two NVMe drives, a 2.5GbE NIC, and a ton of USB peripherals hanging off the chipset—plus another expansion card and NVMe drive connected directly to the CPU—and it doesn’t break a sweat. It was $130 at Micro Center before any combos or discounts. My main beef is that it doesn’t support ECC UDIMMs.
If you need at most two GPUs and one of them can be kind of crummy—i.e. you just need it for video encoding and/or RDP acceleration—then I think that’s another win for LGA1700. While it’s true that you can get an X570 board with x8/x8 CPU-attached expansion slots and run a crummy dGPUs in one slot, it’s kind of a wash vis-à -vis an H670/H770 board with a single x16 CPU-attached expansion slot and an iGPU.
This is turning into a short novel so I’ll stop here. I settled on the 13500 because I mostly run containers, I wanted to use the iGPU for Plex, and I had a bevy of peripherals to stick in there. Ultimately I’d like to end up on something EPYC, but this is very capable and budget-friendly and I can flip it as a gaming rig in a year or two.