Upgrading to support VFIO / GPU passthrough - buy secondhand X99 or pony up for Ryzen?

I’ve recently been getting more and more into Linux. I’ve been dual booting Ubuntu with Windows, but I’ve found that if I boot into Windows to play a game, for example, I end up staying there, even though I prefer Linux the more I use it. So, I want to build a system that has proper VT-D support and can do GPU pass-though.

My current system is a i7 3770, 8GB DDR3 1333, Gigabyte GA-P61-USB3-B3, GTX980ti, Crucial MX300 250GB (Windows), Crucial BX100 120GB (Linux). Everything in my system, except the motherboard, which I bought in 2012, is secondhand. Like a lot of guys here, I’m on a budget, working and studying part time.

I’ve saved up some cash, I’ve been looking at X99 based systems secondhand, and they don’t seem that crazily prized. I’m not in the US, so US deals unfortunately don’t apply for me. Z97 based systems with a 4790K show up quite regularly as well, and are cheaper than X99 based, but have an even limited upgrade path. Also, with only 4 cores and 8 threads, it would limit the plan of running a Windows VM under Linux.

I do x264 encoding using Avisynth and MeGUI, so have those extra two cores on the 5820k would be nice.

I was wondering if this would be worth it. I could probably haggle some more off the price.
i7-5820k - R2600
MSI X99A SLI PLUS - R1200
8GB for R1000 or 16GB 2666 DDR4 - R2000 ( I could always start with 8GB and add another 8GB a month or two down the line)

To put that in perspective, a new Ryzen system would be something like
Ryzen 2600 - R3399 or Ryzen 2700 - R5100
MSI X470 Gaming - R2600
16GB 3200Mhz DDR4 CL16 - R3100

I could easily sell my current mobo, CPU and RAM for around R2200-2500. I’m wondering if it’s worth it to go for the secondhand X99 system, or pony up some more $$ and go for Ryzen? With Ryzen, I’ll have a potential upgrade path with the 3000 series, but it does also cost quite a bit more, and it’ll take me a couple more months to save up.

Personally I would be leaning towards a Ryzen setup over the X99 build.

Not that the X99 build isn’t good but it is used hardware so there is always the risk of it not lasting as long, it consumes almost double the power over the Ryzen setup, and you don’t have much of an upgrade path if needed in the future.

The 2600 seems to be about par with the i7-5820k from what I’m seeing online, obviously depends on the task. It uses a lot less energy which may not matter to much to you but it’s something to note and the socket is going to be support a lot longer so if you decide to upgrade to a 3rd or maybe even 4th gen Ryzen chip you would have the option to do so without having to change to much in your system.

Those are just my thoughts on it though, I do love going for used hardware because bang for your buck it’s usually the best deal. I build a lot of systems on the side for friends and clients and that’s usually the route I go.

I am also still rocking an Ivy Bridge system and have been thinking of upgrading but for most of what I do it’s been holding up fine. I may hold off for another year or two and go for a 3rd gen Ryzen setup. My media PC is a 2400g build and I do have to say I’m damn impressed with how it performs even with day to day tasks. Things feel nice and snappy!

Good luck on your future build with whichever route you choose to go. Both are definitely great options and I would lean towards either of those two over the 4790k setup you mentioned.

Secondhand x99 will give you a much, much better setup experience for VFIO.

Out of the box working IOMMU, no kernel patching, no weird bios tweaking or shuffling cards around. If VFIO is your primary use case, stick to intel server/hedt for now.

Ryzen is Quirky both setup and performance-wise, newer Z chipsets from intel need patching in some cases, and TR needs patching in all cases.