I am planning to upgrade my PC soon-ish,
how soon will depend on how much it is going to be, but thats not a big issue
Part i am going to keep from my old pc:
Case: Fractal Design R5 (until i can get my hands on something like a SG-0 maybe)
PSU: some corsair 860 W unit, modular (there should be no need to replace this)
GPU: sapphire nitro amd 480 (although i plan to upgrade to vega 64, more questions about that below)
New Parts:
CPU: Ryzen 7 1700X
Motherboard: Asus Crosshair VI hero wi-fi ac (although i am not sure how well wifi on archlinux / manjaro will work)
or
Motherboard: ASRock Taichi (i do not liek the looks as much but if it performs better on virtualizing windows…)
Memory: Trident Z RGB 16GB 3200 (2x8 GB)
GPU: AMD Vega 64 (i think i heard some vega cards will support SR-IOV, i hope the consumer models too)
i added the taichi because @wendell recommends it for virtualization and i do nto want to block myself from doing that in the future
my workloads are mostly going to be developer-like, rather light
quickly setting up VMs or running images pulled from proxmox or such will be very helpful
i also do gaming sometimes, rather light titles, should work fairly well in virtulaization
as well as VR gaming for which i might need to fall back to dualboot until it works butter smooth
i am concerned about ram compatibility… there are conflicting information out there but this memory seems to be what level1tech suggests works fine, i am not sure though on how performance scales on 2 vs 4 sticks on the 2 channel memory controller
upgrade to 32 GB ram later by adding the same kit ?
or if i should just get a 32 GB kit now to avoid having to deal with problems ?
(but 4 sticks with rgb on them look better than 2)
and there are no 2x15 modules of Trident Z RGB
another concern is Aura / RGB control in linux, but according to ( Asus or Asrock AURA Sync Linux ) ASRock has it built into the UEFI/BIOS as well now
(i do not particularly like having to boot into the BIOS to change the colors but i do not see myself doing so very often… and hopefully it provides some cool options like temperature indicators or so)
about the dual GPU situation, it seems like either i can use just a VEGA for host and guest system if it does support SR-IOV
if it does not however, i can disable one card during boot and use it in the guest system
mixed graphics card would probably break dual booting unless i remeove the card whenever i want to directly boot into windows (which might be fixable by using grub and telling windows to not load that card…no idea)
last issue that might occur is the weird windows 10 hardware registration stuff… last time i checked windows 10 would complain being booted directly or from a virtual machine… i used virtualbox
i know these are bunch of random thoughts and rambling, but i tried to explain my reasoning behind my decisions so far to get contructive suggestions from people with experience with the IOMMU passthrough thing and ryzen users in general