Awesomeb Posted December 18, 2019 Share Posted December 18, 2019 (edited) My wife and I are discussing getting new gaming rigs and I mentioned using Unraid + GPU Passthrough. Is it practical to have 1 machine with multiple gaming VMs? Our monitors are all within a few feet of each other, basically a big lan party. Planned Specs: 1. AMD RYZEN 9 3900X 12-Core 3.8 GHz 2. 64 GB Ram 3. Motherboard with 3-4 PCI-E GPU Support (if it exists) 4. Nvidia 1660 ti x3 or 4 I would give each gaming rig 1 dedicated GPU, and 16GB of ram + a 512GB ssd drive. All 3 VM's would get 4 cores, unless we go with 4, then I would possibly look at the 16 core. A positive to this approach is that the system is contained within a box with an exhaust fan sucking the air out keeping the room cool. Edited December 18, 2019 by Awesomeb Quote Link to comment
testdasi Posted December 18, 2019 Share Posted December 18, 2019 5 hours ago, Awesomeb said: My wife and I are discussing getting new gaming rigs and I mentioned using Unraid + GPU Passthrough. Is it practical to have 1 machine with multiple gaming VMs? Our monitors are all within a few feet of each other, basically a big lan party. Planned Specs: 1. AMD RYZEN 9 3900X 12-Core 3.8 GHz 2. 64 GB Ram 3. Motherboard with 3-4 PCI-E GPU Support (if it exists) 4. Nvidia 1660 ti x3 or 4 I would give each gaming rig 1 dedicated GPU, and 16GB of ram + a 512GB ssd drive. All 3 VM's would get 4 cores, unless we go with 4, then I would possibly look at the 16 core. A positive to this approach is that the system is contained within a box with an exhaust fan sucking the air out keeping the room cool. 2-games-1-PC is relatively easy to do with Ryzen. You might want to make your life easier with Threadripper for a 3-gamers-1-PC build. X570 motherboards have at most 3 PCIe x16 slots and the bottom most one will cover up the internal IO (you just need to have a look at a X570 motherboard picture to understand what I mean). So assuming you can pass through all 3 (the bottom one will certainly need ACS Override), case choice and PC building finesse will be important. 4-gamers-1-PC = definitely need Threadripper. You need to leave core 0 free for Unraid so whatever the core counts of your CPU, what is practically available for VM is n-1. You then also need to take into account Ryzen architecture idiosyncrasy with CCX and CCD and latency penalty when crossing CCX / CCD. So the TL;DR: with the 3900X, the best config for gaming is to have 1 full CCX per VM = 3 cores per VM. Something you have not considered for practicality is USB hot-plug-ability. You will not be able to have USB hot plugs for all VM without additional USB cards (even Threadripper only has 2 passthrough-able onboard USB controllers). For some, that may be a show stopper right off the bat. Quote Link to comment
jordanmw Posted May 28, 2020 Share Posted May 28, 2020 Yup, possible and not terribly hard but I will say that threadripper is certainly what I would recommend. I initially got a 1920 and went to a 2950 after finding that the extra cores are almost a necessity if you want to run anything else- maybe a docker or two. My wife and I built our beast to do our weekly lan party with another couple. They don't have to bring anything over to play, and I don't spend all evening setting up their machines, getting updates, ect. I also have 4 kids, so 4 gamers 1 cpu was a need more than a want- and boy has it come in handy after the lockdown. You can check out my profile for build specs and challenges that I ran into. Quote Link to comment
Nono196962 Posted February 17 Share Posted February 17 Hey ! Which CPU are you recommanding at this date for this use Quote Link to comment
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