If each NVMe is 4x PCIe 4.0 (say Samsung 980 Pro), then chucking 4 of these into an extender and into a 16x PCIE slot there will be no bottlenecks what so ever.
I initially wanted to do 5950x because it’s a good balance between gaming and workstation, then people on Reddit suggested TR 3000 because they overclock well and has decent gaming performance.
Epyc is out of the picture both money and gaming wise.
got the MSI trx40 pro wifi and the only thing i can complain about is the lack of selecting the main gpu. IMMO groups are fine and overall pretty good for the price.
There was an article about 8 channel RAM on TR3960x and can’t remember excactly, but the sweetspot for 8 dimms (256GB) was 32GB 3200cl16 if iam not wrong, just try to google it.
For the VM’s:
do they need GPU’s aka Passthrough?
how many will run concurrently?
Performance vs easy to use vs stability?
Guest os?
For the Host:
KVM/Esxi? or something like the VMWare Workstation Pro?
PCIe cards? 10gbe, nvme-expander, etc.
Just a hint, if you need fast drives in every vm, than go the lvm route and passthroug every vm a volume.
For ~450€ the msi trx40 pro is pretty good and you get a nvme expander perfect for the last x8 Slot.
There is no “bad” trx40 mainboard… if you don’t overclock, the only difference is the bios and how they use the chipset lanes. (and some rgb bling bling)
Need more than 4 nvme drives -> fine buy a expander for 80€
Need Wifi/BT -> take the wifi edition
Need 10gbe -> take the 10gbe edition
Wanna include watercooling? -> check on both editions
Need bifurcation -> check
Need space (dark rock pro) -> check
Need 4 x16 slots? -> check (x16x8x16x8)
Need a x1 slot for IPMI? -> check
Quiet chipset fan -> check
Need boot gpu selection -> nope, maybe a bios update in the future
Only the Asrock TRX40 Creator board is the weakest of the lot in regards to the vrm implementation.
But that board is still totally fine for the 3960X and 3970X cpu’s really.
And for the people who have the money and need the performance of the massive 3990X,
will generally not look at the entry level trx40 boards anyways.
So that is totally fine.
The Msi TRX40 pro 10G is indeed a pretty interesting board.
I think it offers a pretty decent feature pack for the money.
The only downside is indeed the boot gpu selection.
But other then that, from a feature / doller perspective Msi is offering a pretty nice package there.
But yeah in the end, the main thing that matters is that people just buy,
a good product for the money.
For the people who don’t like Msi, there is plenty of other choice really.
In the end every company has their pro’s and con’s.
To me the most important thing is the component quality used on a said board,
the vrm components and how stable and good a bios is.
And from a vrm perspective, every company has great and crap boards.
But in regards to trx40, there aren’t really any bad ones.
It’s just that the Asrock Creator has the weakest vrm of the lot.
For people who are interested in vrm spec information,
which components used on several trx40 boards.
i made a topic about that a while ago.
Because they uses 1 controller, I suspect that they cannot keep up with 4 4.0 nvme ssds. Also, the extender is MSI board only drawback so I would buy an extender and eliminate that drawback