Which motherboard for a 2950x/X399 VFIO workstation?

Hardware Build a PC
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I’m building a Threadripper workstation for development, passthrough gaming, and audio production. Which X399 motherboard has the best combination of VRM/UEFI/IOMMU groups? I understand that TR will be challenging to overclock, especially with the slower ECC RAM, but I would like the capability to push it as far as it will go.
My priorities are stability, virtualization ease/support, and lastly overclocking.

My budget is ~$550 for the motherboard.

Current parts:
RAM: Samsung M3​91A2K43BB1​-CRC 16GB ECC DDR4-2400 UDIMM (2)
GPU (Guest): Asus GeForce GTX 1070
GPU (Host): Gigabyte GeForce GTX 770
Case: Fractal Design Define R6
PSU: SeaSonic Platinum 860W

Planned parts:
CPU: AMD Threadripper 2950x
Motherboard: ???
Cooler: Noctua NH-U14S

Future parts:
SSD: Samsung 960 Evo 500GB M.2 (2)
SSD: Samsung 960 Evo 1TB M.2
RAM: Samsung M3​91A2K43BB1​-CRC 16GB ECC DDR4-2400 UDIMM (2-6)

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Added ‘helpdesk’ Tag so people know you need help.

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@psycho_666

You think you can help out in this thread? I don’t think you know the virtualization stuff tho. But you know vrm stuff.

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I don’t really, I am still learning and am taking notes, but here’s the deal - the more phases - the better…
I have a rule - stay away from MSI and AMD combo, no matter they have the best VRM X399 board.
I am tempted to just say “get the TaiChi” and be done, but honestly, I have no idea what the X399 boards are and what’s good and what is not…

1 Like
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be aware that you’ll either be patching or recompiling your kernel on threadripper VFIO systems to get it up and running

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From my research it seems like the MSI MEG Creation has the best VRM, but their history with UEFI updates for other X470/X399 boards hasn’t been great regarding VFIO. I’ve seen folks on here having success with the ASRock Taichi, and less commonly the ASUS Zenith / Gigabyte Designare. It is just difficult to differentiate them when there are so few reviews mentioning virtualization.

I’ve been a Linux user for a long time, so kernel compilations shouldn’t be a problem.

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I’ve been leaning towards the Taichi myself, but I’m wondering if each pcie slot has its own iommu group and if certain slots go to certain NUMA nodes.