Hi all, First post after lots of reading.
Any one had any experience of running the new R7-260X on virtual devices? Is it easy to unlink the 2 cards from crossfire and run them as separate devices so they can be assigned to different VMs and then for gaming - add the link back and use them together? I din't know if this is done in bios or via a hardware switch / toggle or even a link cable.
I'll have dual monitors - a 2560x1440 plus a 1920x1200 in portrait (most of the time). The idea of running the latest games in 2.5k resolution is quite appealing
Is there any particular manufacturer that's known to have best success with VT-D and / or Crossfire? Absolute performance isn't critical... I currently play minecraft on an old 2008 Macbook pro with settings all down on minimum. And just scrape 30fps. LOL.
For a bit of background...
I run my own business as an IT freelancer and am currently speccing up a PC to be used as a business machine 9 till 5, but then can be rebooted as a games machine
Full details here....
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/34dva
The plan is to stick KVM or ESXi running linux as 1 boot option, which will run several VMs to do with work (oracle, dev tools, webservers etc).
For games I'll reboot, rather than virtual and go with windows 7 64 bit to get most support - but if possible I'd like to run as much as possible in Linux/Steam. With potential to have a go at running a pair of virtual games machines on the same box (with dual monitors, and keyboard), though only for less demanding stuff like Minecraft.
To complicate matters a bit more, I was trying to make it a hackintosh, but may have to give up as I'm more interested in getting more than 1 graphics card to work in the VMs than I am having a mac compliant hardware list. The nVidia GTX cards don't appear to support VT-D allowing a VM to take direct control of a card. Rather than getting a R9-270X or higher I plan on getting a pair of R7 260X boards which can run in Crossfire to get nice high speed 2560x1440 3D, or I can unlink them and potentially host a second gaming VM running on the same box for stuff like mine craft with my son playing at the same time.
I'm going down the socket 2011 route as I want to be able to swap out the i7 with an upgrade path to a 10 core xeon if necessary. An 1st E5-2xxx will also give me a later option to replace the motherboard for a dual CPU as a follow on upgrade. One of the things I'm planning to develop is a large data warehouse which will scrape data from over the net, index it all and let me generate animated graphics like Hans Rosling does at www.gapminder.org.
I've chosen the MSI board as it has good Xeon support according to the specs. I was going Gigabye until I realised they doesn't support some of the later Xeon 2xxxx V2 processors. It also support upto 128GB Ram if 16GB modules become available at sensible prices(useful for large table joins). What its missing is more SATA-3 6GB ports, but I'll go down the external hot swap NAS route if I need more storage / faster database performance.
I've had to abandon the idea of booting as a hackintosh as it doesn't support AMD cards as primary VGA device. I nearly resorted back to the Socket 1150 with on board graphics, so I can boot off the Intel Graphics HD4xxx and then bring in the Radeon as a secondary device under OS-X. But as I will already have Linux and Win7 I won't need games on the OS-X. A virtual display driver will do and I'll just run OS-X as a VM for any mac stuff I need.
Why mac? Well after 6 years with no hangs, reboots or viruses (and no virus scanner) I find windows constant maintenance a chore. My OH has a Widows 7 laptop, I've had to tune it up twice, remove 3 viruses (1 my fault) and finally got round to sticking ubuntu on it and thought ah, that's better!
Any one had any experience of running the new R7-260X on virtual devices? Is it easy to unlink the 2 cards from crossfire and run them as separate devices so they can be assigned to different VMs and then for gaming - add the link back and use them together? I din't know if this is done in bios or via a hardware switch / toggle or even a link cable.
I'll have dual monitors - a 2560x1440 plus a 1920x1200 in portrait (most of the time). The idea of running the latest games in 2.5k resolution is quite appealing
Is there any particular manufacturer that's known to have best success with VT-D and / or Crossfire? Absolute performance isn't critical... I currently play minecraft on an old 2008 Macbook pro with settings all down on minimum. And just scrape 30fps. LOL.
For a bit of background...
I run my own business as an IT freelancer and am currently speccing up a PC to be used as a business machine 9 till 5, but then can be rebooted as a games machine
Full details here....
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/34dva
The plan is to stick KVM or ESXi running linux as 1 boot option, which will run several VMs to do with work (oracle, dev tools, webservers etc).
For games I'll reboot, rather than virtual and go with windows 7 64 bit to get most support - but if possible I'd like to run as much as possible in Linux/Steam. With potential to have a go at running a pair of virtual games machines on the same box (with dual monitors, and keyboard), though only for less demanding stuff like Minecraft.
To complicate matters a bit more, I was trying to make it a hackintosh, but may have to give up as I'm more interested in getting more than 1 graphics card to work in the VMs than I am having a mac compliant hardware list. The nVidia GTX cards don't appear to support VT-D allowing a VM to take direct control of a card. Rather than getting a R9-270X or higher I plan on getting a pair of R7 260X boards which can run in Crossfire to get nice high speed 2560x1440 3D, or I can unlink them and potentially host a second gaming VM running on the same box for stuff like mine craft with my son playing at the same time.
I'm going down the socket 2011 route as I want to be able to swap out the i7 with an upgrade path to a 10 core xeon if necessary. An 1st E5-2xxx will also give me a later option to replace the motherboard for a dual CPU as a follow on upgrade. One of the things I'm planning to develop is a large data warehouse which will scrape data from over the net, index it all and let me generate animated graphics like Hans Rosling does at www.gapminder.org.
I've chosen the MSI board as it has good Xeon support according to the specs. I was going Gigabye until I realised they doesn't support some of the later Xeon 2xxxx V2 processors. It also support upto 128GB Ram if 16GB modules become available at sensible prices(useful for large table joins). What its missing is more SATA-3 6GB ports, but I'll go down the external hot swap NAS route if I need more storage / faster database performance.
I've had to abandon the idea of booting as a hackintosh as it doesn't support AMD cards as primary VGA device. I nearly resorted back to the Socket 1150 with on board graphics, so I can boot off the Intel Graphics HD4xxx and then bring in the Radeon as a secondary device under OS-X. But as I will already have Linux and Win7 I won't need games on the OS-X. A virtual display driver will do and I'll just run OS-X as a VM for any mac stuff I need.
Why mac? Well after 6 years with no hangs, reboots or viruses (and no virus scanner) I find windows constant maintenance a chore. My OH has a Widows 7 laptop, I've had to tune it up twice, remove 3 viruses (1 my fault) and finally got round to sticking ubuntu on it and thought ah, that's better!
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