Building a lab machine with good graphics capabilities

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Phixzet

Limp Gawd
Joined
Nov 9, 2005
Messages
196
Hello everyone.

I haven't been much of an enthusiast lately - in that last time I bought my equipment I went pretty high end so I could milk it for years. I think my machine is now about 5 years old... And was thinking of building a machine that would (hopefully) replace my desktop. That is the secondary goal though.

Primary goal is a machine that I can experiment with ESXi or whichever hypervisor is best for my application. I can probably throw up to $2k at it without much pain - in that I again will keep it for the long run.

I'd like to run OS X in a VM as well as well of course Windows and any other OS's I care to experiment with. I'll also run my Unraid media server from that machine.

I do not game on my pc at all these days but I'm wondering how likely it is to be able to support highly intensive graphics work (including gaming) in a VM? (Again my goal is to hopefully replace my desktop in my bedroom with a zero client box)

My budget would allow me to get a high end processor and plenty of RAM. (32-64GB probably)

Any pointers on where to start in terms of processor, ram type, video card, and which hypervisor?

Oh and of course motherboard. I was thinking of the Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F-O - it's overkill in that it has onboard VGA I believe. But it has tons of SATA (although I have a SM SATA board that works great with Unraid)... It has four gig E ports, which would allow me to run pfsense if I wanted, etc..

Appreciate any wisdom you all have in getting me started with researching the right things. Thank you :)
 
Sorry, but if you are running unRAID, why dont you just use that as your hypervisor?

Take that motherboard, add a Intel Xeon E5-2630 v3, and a AMD 480.

Then with the rest of the budget get as much ECC memory you can get.

That will allow you to run VMs (OS x, Windows, Linux), and game on it.
 
Exacly - unRaid will do it without any problem. It was even tested with multiple GPUs
 
I just bought unRAID to use on my dual E5-2699v3 rig.

Got a second GPU, an AMD RX 480 to go along with the R9 285, for gaming and a planned "Mac" for the gf.

Really liking the unRAID "experience".
 
To be honest I didn't realize that Unraid supported it - I guess since it's based on a linux kernel that now has it?

Why the recommendation for the E5-2630 v3?

That's for dual processor systems mostly, right?
 
You can use unraid with passthrough video OR VNC/RDC, etc. Check out this video for running 2 gaming machines on one system.
 
So the real benefit to Unraid over KVM is that it's just easier to manage?
 
Phixzet said:
So the real benefit to Unraid over KVM is that it's just easier to manage?
Click to expand...

I haven't used it yet but from what I understand it gives KVM a usable user interface, and gets rid of most of the cmd line work.
 
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