Upgrade build

Hardware Build a PC
1

hey Team,

So I currently have a i5-4690K with an EVGA GTX 1070, and a Gigebyte Z97 mobo. I’m looking into upgrading, and I’m wondering what to upgrade to.

I’m new to the forums, but I’m an avid gamer and I want to move away from windows as much as possible.

I was given a macbook pro for my new job, and I honestly love using it for productivity (from a primarily windows past), and I want to use my (windows) gaming rig for gaming, but on linux. And I want to help the community progress for equality in gaming.

SOOOO, my question is what can I upgrade to, in terms of hardware, in order to help this forum and help linux gaming in general?

Thank you for all your suggestions,
Chwaee

2

Hi Elliot and welcome to the forums.

There are many options but what you are describing seems to meet the specifications of a system capable of VFIO VGA Passthrough.

Personally I would recommend a Ryzen 7 system or better, nothing less then 8 cores and 16GB of RAM. The 1st gen ThreadRippers are great if you intend to run multiple VMs simultaneously, but because they are a NUMA chip you might find that those extra cores go unused due to infinity fabric latency. Personally I would wait for the new TR (I already have a 1950x, it’s not fun to balance your VMs between nodes properly).

NVMe storage is great too, but if you can afford it get a separate drive to run a Windows VM on as a dedicated pass-through device.

Two video cards are required for this configuration, one for the host linux system and one to give to your VM for it’s use. If you only plan to game and/or do 3D in Windows then your Linux GPU can be something fairly cheap/budget, your 1070 would do fine if you are upgrading your video card.

As much as I hate to say it, at the moment I do not recommend AMD GPUs for a guest VM due to the ongoing reset bug issues. This might be an issue with what I am about to suggest next though.

For OSX you could run it as another VM and boot up windows or OSX on demand, getting it running is actually pretty easy, but AFAIK you want an AMD GPU for it as there is limited/no GPU support for modern NVidia cards.

If you decide to go down this route, there are plenty of people here that can and are willing to help you get such a configuration going. There are also a ton of guides around on how to use libvirt for exactly this setup.

1 Like
3

You have a pretty nice GPU, tbh. Maybe go Ryzen 3 series of you plan on running VMs, compiling or some other work load that benefits from more core.

Maybe upgrade storage to NVME.

But don’t just upgrade to just upgrade.

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A more complete list of current parts would help.

Along the lines of:
CPU: i5-4690K
Cooler:
Mainboard: Gigabyte Z97
GPU: EVGA GTX 1070
PSU:
Case (form factor?):

The 1070 is a very capable card and worth taking with you to the new build.
If you don’t have already, get an SSD to boot from, and depending on what you do, maybe a second one (for video editing).

Case wise, do you want to keep using your current one?
If not, what type and style are you looking for?

CPU-Cooler wise, moving to a different socket may require getting an adapter kit.