Hello folks,
I'm here today to ask something quite specific about hardware stuff.
I know this period is quite weird in term of hardware and all but I'm planning a new setup for an home lab (with pseudo-gaming capacity).
I've no urgent needs, so if it's worth to wait 2 or 3 extra months I'm OK with that.
I'm looking for an upgrade of my current PC to fit some of my new needs.
At the moment my custom build PC is :
I5 2500K OC@~4.3Ghz (With an HYPER TX3 cooler)
GTX 970
24 go of 1600 DDR3 RAM
128 Go SSD
2To HDD
P8Z68 deluxe IIRC
Old but good 850W power supply from Corsair
To add a little bit of context, I'm looking to setup an home-lab with Windows (10) + Linux (Probably Arch / Ubuntu based) running simultaneously (hypervisor with 2 VMs : 1 Windows and 1 Linux.
It will run some FPS games on the windows host (so with a GPU pass-through) and some other program that must run on windows (not some wine or similar stuff).
For the games, CSGO / PUBG and Factorio are a must.
My Linux setup is mostly for my nerdy hobbit (Dev, Automation, Security research, heavy computation...). I'm also planning to move some of the game server that I'm currently hosting on my VPS to this setup (Maybe even on an another Linux VM or at least on some containers) (CSGO, Factorio, mostly). I would like to switch from time to time the GPU to the Linux VM to try some linux-only programs with GPU support.
My budget is around 1000€ but somewhat flexible.
I want to keep as much as possible from my current system for cost reason.
After some research I've come up with these things:
24 to 32 go of DDR4.
CPU : I don't really know, I need "high" cores count and individual core speed... AMD / Intel doesn't matter. I'm just worried about AMD compatibility with some hypervisor and with Intel hyper-threading recent issues...
I'm thinking about 8~ cores CPU : 4 for Windows and 4 to the Linux to still be able to do some heavy compute tasks.
For the motherboard, support for over-clock and support for PCIE SSD + GPU(s) should be enough (1 PCIE slot for GPU + 1 for the PCIE SSD ? and maybe another one for a small GPU if the CPU doesn't provide any ?). It will obviously depend on the CPU and I don't care about RGB stuff (my case got red only fan)
PCIE-SSD (Optional but that's seems cool for a setup like this)
I've build 2 systems on pcpartpicker :
AMD Based Intel Based
I'm probably asking to much for that but if anyone got some compatibility issue with my peripherals on this type of setup, please let me know :
Razer Deathadders
HyperX cloud II
Corsair K90
VG248qe monitor (144hz) and another 1080p monitor
For the software side, I don't have strong knowledges in the hypervisor world, so which one is recommended for that kind of build? KVM ? EXSi ? XEN ? other?
I'm OK to tinker with some system things.
Additional questions:
Is changing OS on the fly possible ? I don't want to restart the whole machine every time I need to go back on the other OS. I've seen some Windows vm inside a linux switching easly, but not VM to VM.
Does a multi screen system with different refresh rates can cause problem ? (144hz and 60hz) and will the 144hz work ?
Can I switch the GPU from VM to VM just with a restart of the VMs and a little change in the config file ?
I will not be able to run VM (like virtualbox one's) inside the guests OSs right ?
Thanks for any tips and suggestion !
(If you see any mistake, please let me know)