regression
n00b
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2016
- Messages
- 6
I've lurked hardforum for a decade or more and have always gotten solid advice here so I signed up to ask this. Hopefully VM is the right place for this and not GPU.
I have my ESXi setup on a box with a Xeon 1240v3, 32GB RAM and some local SSDs and a NFS NAS. Had to inject NIC/HD drivers because the cheapo Z87 Extreme4 didn't play nice with ESXi 5.5U2. Nothing Fancy.
To eliminate the computer sprawl and reduce wife-rage I got a refurb 90$ GTX 480, softmodded it into a Quadro 6000 and setup PCI passthrough to a win8.1 x64 VM with an SSD as a SATA datastore presented directly to the VM. This consolidated the *nix servers, sandboxed webbrowser boxes, but most importantly my gaming VM - and this setup has worked great for the last year or so. Windows is good. Steam is good. Most games run reasonably @ 1080 with mid-high settings (I'm not a graphics junkie) and stream to another PCs in the house well post wireless N installation. However after XCOM2's framerate studder at times I suspect the GTX 480 is getting a little old.
I'm not one for overclocking or hardware mods in general. I got the GTX 480 because it was the last softmoddable GeForce (from what I read) before device ID was controlled with resistors and buying $200+ cards to solder worries me.
I'm don't really care about nVidia vs AMD or really ESXi (I was using KVM prior) but I don't want to spend $1k+ on a real modern Quadro just for ESXi passthrough (vDGA) support when a far more modest GPU would more than meet my needs. I haven't considered vSGA due to cost.
My question: Does anyone have any recommendations for stock / non-hardware mod upgrade paths for a GPU in this type of VM setup? Any experiences?
Thanks.
I have my ESXi setup on a box with a Xeon 1240v3, 32GB RAM and some local SSDs and a NFS NAS. Had to inject NIC/HD drivers because the cheapo Z87 Extreme4 didn't play nice with ESXi 5.5U2. Nothing Fancy.
To eliminate the computer sprawl and reduce wife-rage I got a refurb 90$ GTX 480, softmodded it into a Quadro 6000 and setup PCI passthrough to a win8.1 x64 VM with an SSD as a SATA datastore presented directly to the VM. This consolidated the *nix servers, sandboxed webbrowser boxes, but most importantly my gaming VM - and this setup has worked great for the last year or so. Windows is good. Steam is good. Most games run reasonably @ 1080 with mid-high settings (I'm not a graphics junkie) and stream to another PCs in the house well post wireless N installation. However after XCOM2's framerate studder at times I suspect the GTX 480 is getting a little old.
I'm not one for overclocking or hardware mods in general. I got the GTX 480 because it was the last softmoddable GeForce (from what I read) before device ID was controlled with resistors and buying $200+ cards to solder worries me.
I'm don't really care about nVidia vs AMD or really ESXi (I was using KVM prior) but I don't want to spend $1k+ on a real modern Quadro just for ESXi passthrough (vDGA) support when a far more modest GPU would more than meet my needs. I haven't considered vSGA due to cost.
My question: Does anyone have any recommendations for stock / non-hardware mod upgrade paths for a GPU in this type of VM setup? Any experiences?
Thanks.