AMD Desktop IOMMU/VGA Passthrough Board

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[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Apr 12, 2011
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I've been having some issues with a E3-1230 + X9SCM-F-O setup that I've been trying out lately, and feel pretty limited by the 8x slots and lack of 16x's. The board in particular is pretty good, but I've had really odd peculiarities with which slots work with what card, and it did not want to play nicely at all with a 8x-->16x riser for pcie VGA (hardware in general, not even talking passthrough).

After throwing up my hands one too many times with guessing which slot would work with what card, I'm leaning towards swapping platforms. I like the value of the Xeon 1230, but ideally would like to get VGA passthrough working (yes, I know it's not even close to perfect, but it's at least more likely now than it used to be) among other pci-e cards, and the selections are somewhat sparse for Xeon 1155 platform, not in any small part due to the limited pcie lanes.

In contrast, the 40+ lanes on a desktop 990fx make it pretty appealing, but I'm concerned about its compatibility under esxi 5 and/or xen, as well as performance of the 8120 for vm's as opposed to sb. This isn't necessarily for critical applications, so the lack of ecc isn't the end of the world. Anyone have current experience with passthrough on amd, and can comment on pros/cons? The newer bioses for some of the boards like the CH-V or gigabyte UD7/5 look promising, but it's hard to find cohesive answers about this.
 
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Hm, just to add a thought, just saw the 2011 e5 launch...the e5-1620 could be a very attractive chip.
 
not running ESXi 4 or 5 on it but i can say that my GA-990FXA-UD5 BIOS does have Virtualization/IOMMU support. here's a video of this board in use with Xen 4.1.2 and an 8120 running two Win7 VM's playing various games.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_g7ZBMWoLk
 
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Is that your setup or just one you've seen? Have you actually played with the IOMMU support, as the big concern is that even though IOMMU is specified in the 990 chipset, the implementation isn't always done right and can end up being nonfunctional in certain bios revisions. In any case, the ud5/7 appear to at least work in some conditions, so that's encouraging.

My bigger question that I'm curious about is I'm not sure quite what to expect running an 8120 for a vm host. Were you using that board with a P2 CPU or a BD? The phenom ii's that I've played with have always felt a little slower, and namely less "snappy" or responsive, especially compared to i7s that I've gotten used to. Not that they're bad chips, but it's definitely relegated to a secondary/media system for me. With [H]'s review of BD noting the system having a few responsive issues when the system was loaded, I'm not sure how severe people were seeing this, and how that might fair in a vm environment where core loading/balancing is more an issue. If you have experience in comparing BD to SB and/or phenoms, I'd be interested to hear. Thanks!
 
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