Nem Posted January 20, 2018 Share Posted January 20, 2018 Im planning on upgrading CPU, motherboard, and RAM in my server. Currently trying to find a CPU. Any recommendations for a Xeon that supports the following: - ECC RAM - hyperthreading - VTx and VTd - Integrated graphics The main reason for the upgrade is that I have 2 VMs, both of which need access to 2 separate physical GPUs for machine learning purposes, so I think this requires the CPU to have integrated graphics and support both VTx and VTd I took a look at the ARK website, but there are so many CPUs that meet the requirements. Anything I should pay attention to that differentiates them? Is there a Xeon that is most commonly used in unraid builds that meet the requirements above? Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted January 20, 2018 Share Posted January 20, 2018 Hi - How much horsepower do your VMs need? The E3-12x5 or 6 Xeons have integrated graphics but I’m not sure that’s required, and an E5 might be a better fit. Quote Link to comment
Nem Posted January 20, 2018 Author Share Posted January 20, 2018 Probably at least 4C/8T 3.3+GHz. Not an insane amount of horsepower as the GPUs will be doing the heavy lifting Dont I need integrated graphics in order to do GPU passthrough? I seem to remember trying passthrough with one of the i5s or i7s and it didn't work because it lacked an iGPU, but I may be remembering wrong... Do none of the E5s have integrated graphics? Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted January 20, 2018 Share Posted January 20, 2018 unRAID needs a GPU. An E5 can handle 3 though. That said you just described the E3-1245 or 1246 v3,5, or 6, or the 1275 or 1285. v3 is Haswell (1150), v5 is Skylake and v6 is Kaby Lake (both on 1151 boards). Quote Link to comment
pwm Posted January 20, 2018 Share Posted January 20, 2018 3 hours ago, tdallen said: unRAID needs a GPU. I don't think this is true - you should be able to hand over the GPU to a VM when the VM starts. unRAID would stil have access to a monitor when booting and you can still connect to a ssh console after the VM has started. Quote Link to comment
tdallen Posted January 20, 2018 Share Posted January 20, 2018 19 minutes ago, pwm said: I don't think this is true Yeah, I'm pretty sure you're right and it occurred to me as I was posting that my response was somewhere between overly simplistic and wrong. But, the OP was under the impression that they *had* to have an iGPU in order to do GPU pass-through for the add-in cards. To the best of my knowledge that's not the case. Rather, it can be nice to have an iGPU so you can give it to unRAID and cleanly give the add-in GPUs to VMs. Also, some motherboards insist on having some kind of GPU at boot-up so even though unRAID doesn't have to have a GPU, it can be hard to boot unRAID without one depending on your setup. I should have taken more time to type the first time . Quote Link to comment
Nem Posted January 21, 2018 Author Share Posted January 21, 2018 perfect, I think I'll go with the E3 1245v6, thanks! Quote Link to comment
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