chopinrlz

Hey @Crunchy Dragon Thanks for the tips! I've noticed the unbearable cost of DDR4 memory (~$700 for 64 GB). I like your plan, been doing some poking around on ebay and it looks like ASUS makes an LGA 1366 server motherboard, dual socket, in ATX form factor which will host a whopping 96 GB of RAM, the Z8NA-D6C which comes in right around the $150 mark and the X5650s are a steal at $30. Stumbled upon the Z11PA-D8 which will accept up to 1 TB of DDR4 memory if I win the lottery.

I have a gaming rig that I love: i7-4790K / 32 GB RAM / GTX 1080 / 4 TB RAID. Built it over 3 years ago and it handles modern titles in 4K without breaking a sweat. However... it's not quite powerful enough, or upgradeable enough, to run a virtual machine farm. RAM is maxed, LGA 1150 CPUs do not scale beyond quad-core... I can run a couple VMs, even while gaming, but my goal is to run five (5) VMs concurrently on Windows 10 with VMware Workstation: Active Directory domain controller, SharePoint 2019 server, SQL Server 2017 server, and 2x Windows 10 client machines (one on domain and one off domain). What I cannot decide is: what platform should I build this on? Here are my build constraints: minimum of 8 CPU cores, minimum of 64 GB of RAM, minimum of 6 x SATA for 3 x RAID 1 (would be willing to add a RAID card if needed). My research so far: Z370 is attractive from a cost standpoint and the i7-9700K is an affordable 8-core CPU. X470 and the Ryzen 7 2700X is even more affordable, yet I'm not sure how well it handles virtualization. LGA 2011-v3 has the Broadwell line of CPUs and the X99 chipset, but at a significant cost increase for 8 or 10 cores whereas the Threadripper 2950X on X399 makes more sense here jumping to 16 cores for ~$900. Then there's X299 and the i7-7820X. As nice as a Xeon/Opteron would be, it's way outside of my price range, and I need a desktop PC so I can hook it up to my TV and use it for media streaming as well as a VM mule. I might throw in a GTX 1060 for some lightweight gaming. I added a poll for tracking with an Other option. I'm curious to know what the community recommends. I'm trying to keep the build under $4,000.