New System Build, any Suggestions?

[HannesDi]

Hello,

now that I have seen some videos of Spaceinvader One and read a lot on the pages here...

 

The question is which board and processor should I buy to reach my goals?

 

Since the financial means are limited, the desired processor is already almost certain. It should be a: Ryzen 7 2700.

 

2 or 3 graphics cards are Avail and could / should be used, in conjunction with 3 VM's but only a maximum of two of them will run  the same Time.

 

1. an NVIDIA RTX 2060 Super
should be used for the Gaming PC VM.

 

2. a Radeon R9 280x
for a MacOS Catalina VM.

 

3. an Nvidia GT630 1GB
for an Allways ON - Windows 10 machine for surfing the net and similar
alternatively a Linux desktop instead of Windows 10.

 

The Mainboard should have as many SATA connectors as possible to complement or eliminate the currently used LSI controller.

 

Does anyone have a suggestion or experience with which board this is possible?

 

Thanks a lot
Greetings Hannes

 

 

[Decto]

The problem with the AM4 platform is a lack of PCI-E lanes to support what you want. 

 

There are boards that can support dual x8 GPU and a third in the chipset @ x4 but this shares lanes with other ports and possibly m.2 drives.

 

You are then limited  to the 6/8 onboard SATA which fill up quick with cache and parity.

 

If you can manage with 2 GPU then you can use an 8 channel LSI card on the x4 slot which will support 8x additional HDD.

 

I don't know how well MacOS runs on AMD so you might want to look at that.

 

As an alternative, 10 and 12 core Xeons such as E5-2660, 2680, 2690 are now priced eur100 to eur200 used and work fine in x99 motherboards with lots of PCI-E. These can often be picked up around eur100 used. Only issue for gaming is boost clock speed around 3.3Ghz which may impact of your looking for high FPS.

[HannesDi]

On 3/8/2020 at 8:38 PM, Decto said:

The problem with the AM4 platform is a lack of PCI-E lanes to support what you want.  .......

Thank you for this very detailed Information, i dont have fully understood this for weeks. but after weeks of checking testing reading and crying... i makes really sense now. i have shrinked my 'project vision' down to 1 GPU and upgraded the processor to a Ryzen 7 3700X but made a big mistake i bought a X470 Taichi ... nice mainboard but big mistake for me.

I run into huge problems... Running the RTX 2060 Super along with LSI Controller works fine and passthrough works fine. But then i would also passthrough one of the onboard USB controllers. Everytime it ends in a Server crash. So i bought a separate usb card and run into other problems. I think this problems is the "lack of PCI-E lanes" i have changed every possible position of slots but allways end up the same IOMMU group and this group looks like is not splitable and i cant isolate this card.

So today i have ordered a another board.. a Gigabyte X570 Aorus Pro as used in other threads here and send the Taichi back.

 

Thank you Again
Hannes