Posts about X399
Asking $1100 obo shipped & insured (EDIT: Please, don't hestitate to make an offer, I am by no means firm on price because I honestly had little recent search history here to reference and otherwise just eBay to establish it. I'll sell immediately for asking or damn near)
This CPU/RAM/motherboard/HSF combo has been in use file serving and running BOINC for the past few years but have moved on to something lighter duty since as the novelty of running a TR has worn off. I had difficulty landing on a price with this as I normally dabble over in r/hardwareswap where I have 41 confirmed transactions.
Hey all. Hoping I can tap the collective brainpower in here for a sanity check on an upcoming project. I'm new to VFIO'ing. Not new to building computers, linux, virtualization, proxmox or gaming - but definitely new to VFIO and I get the feeling I don't know what I don't know yet.
CPU: Threadripper 2950x
Motherboard: Gigabyte X399 AORUS Pro Rev 1.0 w/ BIOS F3a
GPU: Dual 2080ti's
RAM: 96 GB DDR4 RAM
Disk: 2x m2 slots - 1 TB Samsung 970, other empty
Network: 1 Gbit ethernet
Generally speaking, I essentially wanna sling the compute power here around to various workstations/server applications as the need arises. Specific cases include:
Windows software dev/CAD workstation/gaming or VR rig w/ 1 GPU (or 2 GPUs if there's any advantage to doing so, I'm not sure there seems to be with the current state of SLI/nvlink)
Linux software dev/CAD/media workstation w/ 1 GPU
Linux with both GPUs for machine learning experiments or other extra media rendering horsepower
Linux server running various self-hosted ML services (e.g. Stable diffusion)
On-demand virtualized gaming desktops for steam clients littered around the house
I’ve run a windows/Linux dual boot in the past, and I essentially want a similar experience with one caveat - it would be neat to run the windows and Linux stations side-by-side with 1 GPU each. If one workstation is off, it would be nice to reconfigure the other workstation to run with both GPUs. Then I figure - why stop there? It would be neat to morph the box into a few different use cases, with respect to the limitation that the GPU can only be used by 1 VM at a time.
Proxmox VE/KVM seem to be the way to go. I have a little experience with PVE 7.2 on my home lab, so I'd likely start with that unless there's a good reason not to. Linux workstation VM - preferably pop OS. Windows VM. Preferably 10 LTSC for stability/lack of bloat. If 10 pro is a better pick I've got a license key available. /u/Tachyonic posted success with a similar setup which is encouraging. I'll likely follow that alongside a modern GPU passthrough guide (e.g. this one)
I figure it is best to start small. If I can get proxmox running with a Linux and Windows workstation with 1 GPU each simultaneously, that'll be plenty useful for me and I reckon I'll learn a lot.
If I can get that working, maybe it makes sense to experiment with configuring VM's in scripts/software. It would be neat to have a remote controlled setup - like some weird mix of wake-on-lan and “reconfigure this VMs cores/RAM/GPU assignment and launch. Shut down other VMs if you need to”. The proxmox API looks fairly robust. I'm not stranger to scripting, python and ansible, so I don't mind getting my hands dirty in this regard.
Does my hardware + approach pass the smell test when it comes to fulfilling my usecases? Any known gotchas or problems I may run into and could avoid? Is there a better way to approach what I'm trying to do? Is my hardware suitable/appropriate for what I'm attempting?
Pick me apart, I'll answer any and all questions I can. And thank you all for the help