Sabertooth X79 + Intel i7-3930k + Nvidia GTX 970

[opentoe]

I have decided to build a new unRaid box, but I'm going to use my home office work desktop as the new build, which currently runs Windows. I will then build another home office desktop to use with the latest and greatest.

 

I wasn't sure to post this in the hardware area or not, but since it directly relates to V6 I decided here. Please move if needed.

 

I did look here, but this list is a little outdated, for at least building a new box.

 

My current home office machine has an Asus Sabertooth X79 - 32GB of high speed memory and a pathetically under used high end video card. I believe it is an Nvidia GTX 960 or 970 with 2GB of GPU memory. Yea, waste of money as I thought I would want to play a few games but never did. This pops up a question, does having a powerful video card relate to having a powerful video in a VM? Is Nvidia the way to go or ATI for good performance in VM's?

 

Anyway the engine powering this box is an Intel i7-3930k 3.2 Ghz 12mb cache hexa-core processor. C2 stepping revision so virtualization is up to par and good.

 

I figure this would be an awesome system for a new build, but was mainly curious is anyone else is running a Sabertooth X79 board or at least an X79 chipset board? I guess I could boot with unRaid from USB and find out myself, right? Doh.

 

I'm surprised Amazon still sells this chip, and only $30 less than what I paid a couple years ago.

[garycase]

That will indeed make a very nice system => PLENTY of "horsepower", and the high-end video card can always be passed through to a VM if you want to keep the "gaming dream" alive 

 

Yes, if you pass the video card through you'll still get the performance you paid for -- but no, it's not likely to really matter unless you're actually doing something that needs/uses that GPU "horsepower"

 

Don't have an X79 system to confirm, but I can't think of any reason UnRAID wouldn't work just fine on it.  As you've already noted, all you need to do is boot with a prepared USB flash drive to confirm it 

[garycase]

The only "flaw" in the system relative to a nice server board is no support for ECC memory.  But that's a pretty minor detail in the great scheme of things.    As for performance ... with quad channel memory and a 6-core CPU with a PassMark over 12,000 you'll have a VERY nicely performing system.

 

[opentoe]

Made my final decision to use that setup as my new unRaid system and then just build a decent home office box, but not go for a $500 processor which I don't need. The only reason why my home office setup is a powerful one is because I do all my SabNAB+ downloading, decoding, file renaming, converting, Sonarr downloading, processing, Plex server, pretty much anything intensive is done on that machine and since it is pretty fast, especially with 32GB of memory in XMP mode it rips through anything. I'm going to stick an unRaid USB stick in it today and see what happens. I bought the highest quality of what I could at the time and I don't think I ever purchased ECC memory before either.

[garycase]

That'll definitely be a nice system.

 

For a new desktop an i7-4790 is generally PLENTY of "horsepower" ... I've built several with it and it's a very nice processor.  Not quite as powerful as your 3930k, but close [PassMark 10072 vs 12100), but a LOT more power efficient (84w TDP vs. 130w TDP) ... and the Haswell CPU's run at VERY low power when idle.

 

My wife's system (I built it ~ 6 months ago) has a 4790, 16GB RAM, a 500GB SSD, and a 4TB WD Red; and that PLUS a 5-port Gb switch plus a wireless router draw a total of 30 watts when it's idle.

 

[opentoe]

That'll definitely be a nice system.

 

For a new desktop an i7-4790 is generally PLENTY of "horsepower" ... I've built several with it and it's a very nice processor.  Not quite as powerful as your 3930k, but close [PassMark 10072 vs 12100), but a LOT more power efficient (84w TDP vs. 130w TDP) ... and the Haswell CPU's run at VERY low power when idle.

 

My wife's system (I built it ~ 6 months ago) has a 4790, 16GB RAM, a 500GB SSD, and a 4TB WD Red; and that PLUS a 5-port Gb switch plus a wireless router draw a total of 30 watts when it's idle.

 

Well, this will be the kind of system I want. I threw my second USB PRO key in the USB slot, booted up and she was up and running in a few seconds. This will be a pretty fast unRaid machine. Confirmed HVM, IOMMU and all virtualization "stuff" is active and ready to go. If I didn't have hard drive cages to deal with, I'd migrate the box today! But since the current computer uses a sealed water cooled processor cooler, I may have to see if that can even fit in my current case or not. May have to buy another CPU fan.

[garycase]

Not sure what you're planning for your new desktop, but you might want to look at some of the mini-ITX options.  It's amazing what you can build in a very small form-factor case these days.  I used a Lian-Li PC-Q08 for my wife's new system, and it works very nicely with an optical drive, SSD, extra HDD, room for 3 more HDDs, and plenty of airflow.  A VERY nice setup.    If you don't need an optical drive or more than 2 hard drives the PC-Q01 is even smaller yet (used it for a friend's build).

 

[opentoe]

Not sure what you're planning for your new desktop, but you might want to look at some of the mini-ITX options.  It's amazing what you can build in a very small form-factor case these days.  I used a Lian-Li PC-Q08 for my wife's new system, and it works very nicely with an optical drive, SSD, extra HDD, room for 3 more HDDs, and plenty of airflow.  A VERY nice setup.    If you don't need an optical drive or more than 2 hard drives the PC-Q01 is even smaller yet (used it for a friend's build).

 

Because of the VM management with unRaid I would look into getting a powerful mini computer for my home office machine.

 

Currently my home office machine, I call it 'the beast' since it's so fast and powerful does ALL my processing. I have all my services running on that one machine. Sonarr, SabNZB+, Handbrake, MakeMKV, GoogleMusic uploader, Plex Media Server, Crashplan, and most likely several others I can't even think of. The machine doesn't even skip a beat when everything is running. I would eventually want all those services to be migrated over to Unraid via Dockers. But since this is all so new right now, I still may build another "beast" just in case the unRaid VM's/docker's doesn't work out. The Nvidia video card is so long it would actually hit the back of the HD cage if installed, so I'll be computer case shopping for a while. I can't use the current case since it has built-in HD brackets and all that. I just need a full tower of complete emptiness. Hard to find these days. Most cases now come with all these brackets and aluminum bracing inside. If installing HD cages, you need everything open and empty. Too many decisions!