B450 made me sad, was it the chipset or me?

[Born8bit]

I know, the title is somewhat bait and I do apologize.

But it's not easy to put in words, alas here I go:

 

I made the step from a Xeon e3-1231v3 on an ASUS Z97 Pro Gamer to the Ryzen 5 1600AF on an AsRock B450 Pro 4, and despite it being the newer and according to numbers more potent system, things weren't smooth:

• Getting the VM with GPU passthrough to run took a lot of time, HDMI sound was crackling until I did some MSI tweaking in the Windows VM which took care of 90% of the issues. Linux I could not get it to not sound crappy.
• VMs experienced short stalls, like hitting CPU limit, but htop showed no such condition. Happened many times with no obvious reason (just browing websites in the Windows VM eg.)
• on board sound could not be passed through due to being in a shared IOMMU group (despite ACS override)
• USB soundcard was just like the HDMI sound, but this time no fix through MSI

 

So after a lot of trying, asking and trying more, drinking and then trying crazy stuff I gave up and reverted.

 

VM with GPU went up instantly, on board sound can be passed through and is almost perfect, USB not tested yet because not actually needed.

 

So my question, is the B450 just a "bad" platform, would an X_70 board make things better or is Intel simply the better platform for unRAID? I am no side's shill, I run AMD on 3 game/surf/work machines in the house and they are great.

 

As stated above, this is no request for tech support, rather getting feedback from others that had similar issues, B450 victims users preferred

[whipdancer]

I've been running a B450 based Unraid system since the board came out. No issues.

Did you do any research on using Ryzen as a platform for a Win VM on Unraid?

[Mrtj18]

Now I will admit I run an x570 3600x amd system with an rtx 3080. And I initially ran into issue after issue trying to get a windows 11 VM to boot and recognize my video card. 

 

But after a while I was able to solve my GPU black screen issue, audio cracking issue ( by passing through my windows drive, using virtual disk didn't help) my setup runs as intended. 

 

Now I need to spend more money to get a better CPU lol