Xeon Gaming Win 10 VM Performance

[defiant]

Hey all, below are my system specs.  Goal of this build was to have a Nas, some dockers(plex, HDHomeRun, Filebot, Sonnar, bit torrent) and 2 gaming VMs running Windows 10.  The processor is not an ES, apparently it was pulled from some large data center.  Seemed like a good deal at the time, however the VM performance doesn't seem great.

 

Intel Xeon E5-2676 V3 (2.4GHZ, 3.0Ghz Turbo, 12Core HT)

Gigabyte X99 Board

64GB non ECC Ram

7 4TB Western Digital Red Drives

2 512GB Samsung 850 Pro Drives for Cache

1 250GB Samsung Evo using unassigned plugin

1 GTX1070 for Gaming Rig #1

1 GTX970 for Gaming Rig #2

1 GTS250 cheapo video card for console

1 USB 3.0 PCIE card for pass through

 

Games just don't seem to run very well.  Some games load slow, and the one rig i play iRacing on apparently is very single core intesive and i don't get great frame rates.  The only thing i see is that my ram is running at 2133MHZ even though it's listed at 2400MHZ.  If i attempt to use the XMP profile in bios, the system won't boot and sends me to the BIOS settings.  All of the VT-D stuff is enabled. 

 

Firestrike Scores for Reference (GTX 1070 with 8 CPU Cores & 16GB RAM)

3DMark Score: 12,160

Graphics Score: 18,095

Physics Score: 9,316

Combined Score: 4,051

 

Here's a comparison when i put my GTX1070 into my older system with a core I5-4690K

 

Maybe this is what i should expect.  Just wondering if there's anything i should tweak.  I didn't spend a ton of money on this processor, but i'm not ready to pay $2k for a different Xeon.  My only other option would be to use an I7-6700 (non-k) processor and give everything fewer cores.  Thanks for any tips or ideas!

 

 

 

[GeekVerve]

I would guess such benchmarks aren't designed to take advantage of 24-threads. If it's limited to 2 to 4 threads (about the best you can expect from most games), then I'd say the E5 is doing pretty well for itself. The i5 has a 28% higher per thread Passmark rating.

 

Still, I might expect the gaming experience to be similar between the two. I hope the gaming performance drop you are perceiving isn't a direct result of the virtualization.

[praeses]

Are you dedicating cores for the VM?

[defiant]

not beyond selecting them in VM creation.  Should i be using CPU pinning(i think that's what it's called)?  Still alittle new to the VM stuff.

[PanteraGSTK]

If you want to even the playing field a bit lower the clockspeed of your i5 to match the xeon. That will give you a more comparable result. Plus, instead of a synthetic benchmark, try using a game with a built in benchmark. More than one if you can. That'll tell you more real world results than 3d mark.

[aptalca]

not beyond selecting them in VM creation.  Should i be using CPU pinning(i think that's what it's called)?  Still alittle new to the VM stuff.

Pinning is selecting the cores that the VM should use. You do that when you create the VM in the unraid gui.

 

It means that the VM will only use those cores, but it doesn't stop unraid or any other processes from using those same cores.

 

Cpu isolation is done through changing the unraid config (syslinux file I believe). That tells unraid to ignore those cores and not let any other process use them. So you can truly dedicate them to a VM.

 

In your case, another process like plex may be using the same cores as the VM,  thereby slowing them down. Isolation would fix that.

[defiant]

well it seems this cpu just isn't up to the task.  Playing a not to crazy game such as league of legends with 4 or 6 cores (isolated) can max it out according to afterburner and i start getting bad lag.  Looks like i might have to go another route