February 19, 201610 yr I was planning on building my self a small unRAID system for NAS and media server, but after reading the forums and seeing the cool things people are doing I would love to just upgrade my existing gaming PC to handle everything. Currently I don't have VT-d so I would need to replace some parts but i'm unsure how to upgrade. I would like to run simple user shares and also Plex, BTsync, DDNS, probably a handful of other dockers and a Win10 VM with graphic card passthrough for gaming. My current hardware... Intel Core i5-3570k ASRock Z77 Extreme4 LGA 1155 Nvidia GTX 970 Corsair Vengeance LP 8GB (2 x 4BG) DDR3 (I will be purchasing more ram probably a total of 16GB) Rosewill HIVE-650w Power Supply 80+ Bronze Certified SSD's 250 GB x 2 for cache drives. I will be purchasing high capacity data and parity drives. The way I see it I can just swap out my CPU for a i7- 3770, but will this be able to handle what I want, or will I need more cores and have to move to xeon? My other concern is my ASRock Z77 only has 4 sata3 ports, rest are sata2. If I swap out CPU and Motherboard to get all sata3 ports, should I go x99, z170, or something else? Last thing, I use am Nvidia Shield controller with USB, will I be able to passthrough the controller and audio jacks for the rear audio to the VM? Will I need a second graphics card for unRAID to grab, or can I use iGPU for that? Thanks in advance for any help!
February 19, 201610 yr I should think an i7 quad core CPU will give you enough cores to do what you want, I currently have one in my system and have only dedicated two cores to my windows 10 VM and it runs fine. Your board appears to have integrated video but if you want to game on your windows 10 VM then you want a secondary graphics card capable of playing the games you want, in my system I have an Nvidia GTX 960 and it works great. You will want to buy an SSD for your Windows 10 VM, install Windows onto it and use it exclusively for the VM and the performance will be fine. For the rest of your disks, whether they are running at SATA 2 or SATA 3 shouldn't really matter if you are just them for storage and file sharing and if you run our of ports you can always buy SATA cards with extra ports.
February 19, 201610 yr Author Thanks for the advice, In that case think I should be fine with just upgrading my CPU. I'll be able to at least have both cache drives useing sata3. I have a gtx 970 I want to use for the windows vm, I'm just not sure if I can run unRAID with the CPU's intergrated graphics, or if I should by a cheap-o card for unRAID to grab?
February 19, 201610 yr Does that motherboard support VT-d? I looked but couldn't explicitly find support for it. You'll need it if you want to pass through a graphics card.
February 19, 201610 yr Author Yes, i've checked several sources and all say that the ASRock Z77 supports VT-d
February 19, 201610 yr Author So, the last post got me double checking by sources on the ASRock Z77 VT-d Support... It seems they may have removed the feature with a recent BIOS update. But, people are reporting that it might be hit or miss with this board no matter what BIOS version you use. Any suggestions on which chipset I should move to if this is the case?
February 19, 201610 yr Author Okay, after some digging around what I think happened is in one of the BIOS updates (2.50) they removed the capability to modify the VT-d setting. So VT-d will be disabled for CPU's that do not support it, and enabled for CPU's that do support it and this cannot be modified by the user
February 19, 201610 yr Then you should be fine, also I think you'll be fine running Unraid on the mother boards integrated graphics. What I would do is leave your 970 out and get UnRaid up and running first, then when things are the way you want them, unmount the array and power down and put the 970 in the first PCI-x slot and power up UnRaid with the monitor still connected to the integrated video on the motherboard. Then build out your windows VM with a monitor connected to the 970 and things should be just fine.
May 13, 201610 yr Pandomime, did you succeed with VT-d with this processor (3570k)? I am in a similar situation.
May 13, 201610 yr vt-d is not supported with the 3570k. you would need to upgrade to the 3770. http://ark.intel.com/products/65520/Intel-Core-i5-3570K-Processor-6M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz http://ark.intel.com/products/65719/Intel-Core-i7-3770-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz
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