My boyfriend and me want to ditch our two dedicated gaming systems and put them into one server in the basement. I have already experimented with a rather old i5, gtx1060, two SSDs and 5 HDDs. With this setup, it is possible to game in 1080p over steam in-home streaming or parsec over ethernet. It is lacking both the power and die PCIe lanes for running two gaming VM simultaneously. My boyfriend wishes for an update in raw CPU power for encoding and stuff too.

 

So the goal for the system is:

 

• ATX (there is no 19" case which has space for E-ATX + disks and fits in our server cabinet)
• enough PCIe lanes for 2 GPUs 
• at least 8 cores (4 for each gaming VM) and enough power 
• if there are not enough SATA ports (at least 10) enough PCIe lanes for an HBA 

 

GPUs, case, power supply and disks are already there, so it ist just mainboard, RAM and CPU. Budget is 1000€ to 1500€. If possible, there should be room for upgrades in the near future.

 

The plan at the moment is a 299X platform because the lack of suitable threadripper mainboards and the price bump of nearly 1000€ for comparable server grade hardware. The lack of ECC RAM and IPMI is IMHO reasonable for a home system without critical data.

 

• Intel Core i9-7920X, 12x 2.90GHz (1050€)
•  (200€)
• 2x 16GB DDR4 2066 (ca 300€) (yeah, not quad channel, but the first one to upgrade with another 32GB)
• Cooler: Noctua NH-U9DX i4 (50€)

 

As you can see, we are slightly over the budget. The question is if we can go for an i7 8-core skylake-X for only 500€ which provides only 28 PCI-Lanes. Would there be real problems with it? is it possible to run one GPU at 16x and the other at 8x without passthrough problems? Has anyone other ideas or improvements?

 

FYI current GPU’s struggle to saturate PCIe 3.0 8x lanes
From memory only the TitanXP actually comes close, even my 1080Ti doesn’t push enough.

Your issue with an 8 core is that you will be left with nothing for the OS as it favours Core-0 which is also a physical thread not a HT.

Can you fit 4RU in your cabinet?


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Hello and welcome.

 

The 44 PCIe lanes gives you so much more flexibility.  Unless you specifically run both graphics cards at x8 (which won't hamper them much, admittedly), you're not leaving much for storage.  It's not unusual with unRAID to give VMs their own SSD, or even x4 NVMe.  It also sounds like you want a decent size array.  You could fit into 28 lanes... but you're starting off constrained already. 

3 hours ago, miniwalks said:

Can you fit 4RU in your cabinet?
 

 

Yeah, the problem is more the depth which is limited to about 50cm.

 

1 hour ago, tdallen said:

Hello and welcome.

 

The 44 PCIe lanes gives you so much more flexibility.  Unless you specifically run both graphics cards at x8 (which won't hamper them much, admittedly), you're not leaving much for storage.  It's not unusual with unRAID to give VMs their own SSD, or even x4 NVMe.  It also sounds like you want a decent size array.  You could fit into 28 lanes... but you're starting off constrained already. 

 

Yeah, thats exactly the problem. On the other hand, the much lower price for the 8-core i7 is very tempting. 

I do not really see the main system hogging too much CPU cycles to hinder gaming performance on an 8-core system. There is always the possibility to give the VM with the smaller need only 3 cores (with HT). This should still be enough for the most of the games out there.

My biggest worry is still the passthrough of the cards. Are there known problems with multiple GPUs on x299 systems? I can imagine that the many different lane setups could cause problems.