I am performing a new build and I am just stuck on which GPU to get. I would like to keep the price under $150 and would like to do passthrough with KVM. Any recommendations of known working GPUs would be helpful.

 

Another question I have is many posts I see reference VGA passthrough. Does this mean that HMDI/DVI would not work and I wouldn't be able to use a multi-monitor setup?

It is hard to recommend a GPU in general.  Best I can say is that I am doing GPU passthrough with an nvidia 750 TI.  It works for what I need it to.

 

As for passthrough, once you pass the device to your VM, it works in the VM.  You should be able to connect HDMI/DVI/VGA to it.  It isn't available to any other "machine" though, host or another VM.  Not sure what you are asking in terms of multi-monitor.

Thanks -- I'm just trying to gather up a general list of cards that people have gotten to work for them and then go from there. I would like to avoid this issue if possible.

I don't need anything extremely powerful.

 

I figured I should be able to use any of the GPU outputs, but I just kept seeing references only to VGA so I wanted to be clear. And yep, I understand it would only work for one guest at a time.

 

As far as the multi-monitor question, I was trying to say that if I was only able to use the VGA output on the video card, then I would have only really been able to use one monitor off the video card, but that is not the case as you already said.

I use an EVGA 750ti for GPU pass-through using KVM. It works just fine. You can use any of the video card outputs. I have even done multi monitor with it playing Battlefield 4 using 2 monitors. The card is listed in my sig.

 

I was experimenting with KVM last week and I had 1 VM running Emby server (MB3) and it was streaming / transcoding to 4 clients and started up another VM and played BF4 on it. It worked really well. No problems with the videos or gaming. I was working the CPU and memory pretty hard and wondered how stability would be. Was rock solid for over an hour during my testing.

 

Gary

The #1 thing you need to determine is just how much graphics performance you need.    As already noted, the GTX 750Ti passes through just fine, and it's a very robust graphics card which I suspect will provide plenty of performance for whatever you want to do in your VM (gaming, 3D rendering, etc.).    The card scores 3688 on PassMark's G3D test, which is a very respectable score ... about the best you can do within the $150 budget you're shooting for.

 

There are plenty of cards in the $100 or less range that will also work well, but they'll score well under 2000 on the G3D, so if you plan on doing any gaming I'd just get a 750Ti and be done with it