Experiences with Unraid and EVGA SR-2 / NF200 chips?

[bimmerman]

Hi all,

 

I'm in the planning stages for a project, with the goal to have 3-4 VMs for gaming in one computer. Why? Every year we have a LAN party for new years eve, which is slightly complicated by the fact that most of us don't live close enough to bring a gaming rig. So, after seeing some videos on youtube, the idea was planted to build a 4 gamer 1 tower type build, utilizing spare parts that haven't sold on craigslist yet (eg, GPUs, HDDs). That way we can all play together without spending a ton of money, all things considered.

 

I am familiar with the X58 Xeons from my own rig and thought that the EVGA SR-2 would be a good 'budget' option for the project. You can buy them with CPU+cooler+mobo+ram right now on ebay for $600-700, and that nets you 12c/24t, with 4 full x16 PCIe slots with double spacing. Cool!

 

There's a downside, from the googling I've done so far-- all those x16 slots are behind Nvidia NF200 multiplexer chips. From doing some reading on evga forums, historically these chips have been a huge pain to enable GPU pass through with due to some technical reasons I don't understand fully (something about IOMEM?). None of the posters there seemed to have tried Unraid and were instead using more customized/more involved methods for creating VMs.

I know a Threadripper is a good option, but is ~2x the cost. Supermicro/old server boards are cheaper but ultimately the processors seem to be slower clocked than the X58 xeons would be, even before experimenting with overclocking (as the SR-2 allows for that).

 

So, my question for all of you-- has anyone tried using unraid on an EVGA Sr-2 board for GPU passthrough to the VMs, or if not the SR-2, has anyone tried it on a motherboard utilizing NF200 chips? Thanks!

Edited October 21, 2018 by bimmerman