Elerek

So if the switch is still too expensive, couldn't you use a cheap motherboard with onboard 2.5, toss in a few of those 2.5 pcie cards and a cheap cpu, and make a homebrew switch + nas for ~$300 or less?

@slick Is floatplane still hiring?

all pcie cards and slots pci-e gen 2 or newer are all compatible with each other. Any card will work in any slot and they will communicate and self configure to use the newest protocol and highest bandwidth available. The only exception to this is that some short (x1, x4, x8) slots have a backstop on them that won't allow larger (x16) cards to fit, but electrically they are compatible and if you cut away that backstop it will work.

So lower power consumption and more OC headroom? (albeit probably minor on both) Sounds good.

You don't need to post with no gpu. Your system has a gpu. if you're launching a vm, you can easily give it emulated graphics, it just won't be able to play games.

Integrated graphics are not just something the cpu emulates or creates on the fly, it is a small, low power gpu built into the cpu. Ryzen does not have this. You will need a second gpu if you want to use ryzen. CPUs that do have integrated graphics are intel chips and AMD APUs.

I disabled hyperthreading because it boosts single thread performance specifically for KVM backed vms. That does not mean it will help if you're just running windows. With 32 threads available it's no big deal for Windows to make sure that the sister thread for whatever cpuz etc is running on to sit idle, in which case you'll get the same performance as without hyperthreading. When you're multitasking though but still want the best single thread performance you can get, and you're limited more in cores (split between vms), disabling hyperthreading can help some. I'm running linux on the base machine, and have no need for sleep or hibernation. The system is basically on 24/7 and only the VMs get shutdown. Since starting those doesn't involve long post times and their virtual disks are on ssds, starting the vm is just as fast as resuming, so I just shut them down.

You can always rma the motherboard. Do you have an older low end gpu you can try in it, or can you get to bios with no gpu? (I don't think that's possible)

Looks like it's an issue with the motherboards Bios and initializing the gpu. See if there's a new bios version for the motherboard you can flash.

Your error code is not SP upside down or 5b "D5 No Space for Legacy Option ROM initialization."

Here's the manual for your board: https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X399-AORUS-Gaming-7-rev-10#support-manual

... You mean 5b? An upside down P is a b...

Did you try to look up the error in the manual?

?

I haven't tried the 1060 before, but I was able to stream from the 1070 vm to my laptop perfectly fine. I did that when I first tested the system before I modded the power supplies so I could play in a separate room to avoid all the noise...