phoenixflower

Heya there Wyon,
So TR4 is definitely a weird place to be in a non-enterprise/workstation environment.  Zen++ definitely does not have the best single core IPC but can certainly be accounted for in various scenarios.  The first thing to denote when using Ryzen is that Zen++ is very sensitive to RAM speeds.  The first thing to consider is what kit your using with your threadripper and if you should tighten the timings or try for a faster RAM OC.
 
I have a 2950x, a 2700x, and 3900x.  The 2950x has the worst performance of all of them in gaming work loads (it's in my ingest station/services platform).  The 2920x has a little bit of a better chance because of the reduced amount of cores thus more headroom for overclocking.
 
Virtualization on modern platform only has a 2-5% performance hit.  You wouldn't see much better numbers on bare metal.  As Linux has a better scheduler then Windows 10.  You may even see worse numbers on Bare Metal until that problem is fully resolved with the Windows NT kernel and how it interacts with Numa nodes.
 
 
The second thing you'll probably want to do is not choose "host" for CPU passthrough as threadripper has the same "stability" associated with it as EYPC CPUs.  Usually choosing Penryn with hardware pass-through options or simply choosing something like Haswell will make Windows think it's on a different system and may add some uplift to your performance.
 
The last thing you'll probably want to do is try you installation with Proxmox VE 6.0 as it has much better support in different aspects.  It has the full support of the Debian Team alongside the Vienna team that directly supports Proxmox.  UnRaid is certainly a nicer UI but it's not as feature rich.
 
I run my 3900x with Proxmox VE 6.0 as my daily driver with Windows 10, Mac OS X and various Linux Distros installed.  I've ran bare metal and in the VM scenario and I literally don't notice a difference other then not caring when Windows decides to BSOD because of a NVIDIA graphics update.  I also use the virtio Drivers developed by Redhat with Proxmox and haven't had a reason to switch over to PCI-E passthrough with an NVME SSD.  I use 64 GB of RAM alongside ZFS to literally just put stuff in memory though.
 
If you need help tuning it, I can provide some tips but honestly for a gaming workload the 8600k just wipes the floor with threadripper.  The TR4 socket in general was designed as a services platform with some emphasis on workstation workloads.  The whole gaming with Threadripper thing was never an emphasis on the platform.

Windows 10 Pro includes features such as providing RDP server services, access to Windows Storage spaces and features related to business applications.  Windows 10 Pro also includes Hyper-V in comparison to Windows 10 Home (which does not).  These are all tangible feature differences and are all completely unnecessary for gaming.

If you're not married to team green then you'll find that the 5700 xt is a great value buy as it was originally targeted at the 2070 (which is now the 2060 super) and in many cases will either just barely come in contact with the 2070 super in most titles or lose in a minor way.
 
NVIDIA has a great software stack which includes RTX, Geforce Streaming, Ansel, Shadowplay and a lot of other cool features.  I personally have never used anything except Geforce Streaming.  I have a 1080 ti and a 2060 (no rtx is not fun on it).  
 
AMD is aware of their inability to create a feature set that can compete with Geforce Streaming and may come out with an answer to it one day.
 
A lot of the third party cards came out which will help with some performance increases but will mostly be about keeping a normalized 40 dba while using your video card at full load.
https://www.newegg.com/powercolor-radeon-rx-5700-xt-axrx-5700xt-8gbd6-3dhep-oc/p/N82E16814131751 seems to be getting some nice press at the moment and is probably a good start.
 

If you're not married to team green then you'll find that the 5700 xt is a great value buy as it was originally targeted at the 2070 (which is now the 2060 super) and in many cases will either just barely come in contact with the 2070 super in most titles or lose in a minor way.
 
NVIDIA has a great software stack which includes RTX, Geforce Streaming, Ansel, Shadowplay and a lot of other cool features.  I personally have never used anything except Geforce Streaming.  I have a 1080 ti and a 2060 (no rtx is not fun on it).  
 
AMD is aware of their inability to create a feature set that can compete with Geforce Streaming and may come out with an answer to it one day.
 
A lot of the third party cards came out which will help with some performance increases but will mostly be about keeping a normalized 40 dba while using your video card at full load.
https://www.newegg.com/powercolor-radeon-rx-5700-xt-axrx-5700xt-8gbd6-3dhep-oc/p/N82E16814131751 seems to be getting some nice press at the moment and is probably a good start.
 

Yes, the 3900x will be on average be higher binned and will experience a higher boost sometimes when you're in a 4-8 thread workload.  After 8 threads it just kinda gets stuck at 4.2 (which is fine!)
 
I also concur with fasauce about the vast increase in price.  Especially because the price difference is enough to put you into another GPU price bracket (which will directly increase FPS).

The 3900x and the 3600 do not serve the same purposes.  You can just use task manager to prove it to him.  The 3900x has 12 cores 24 threads.  When you run the game see how many cores are consumed by the game if it doesn't exceed 12 (as the 3600 is a 6 core 12 thread CPU) then the 3900x extra cores would be pointless in that workload.
 
If your friend wants to do anything except gaming then it becomes a more complicated scenario.
 
You can also look up Cinebench's single thread IPC tests, you'll find that the 3600 and 3900x will have roughly the same single Core IPC.
 
The 3900x applications revolve around virtualization, video editing, game development, general development, CAD software, and other workstation like activities.
 
 
You should probably clarify if this is a new build or a build being upgraded upon.

Heya there NIne!
 
Your use case is perfectly valid; however, you'll find that plenty of reasons exist to utilize the other PCI-E slots (otherwise the board vendors would've stopped making it available in their lineup).  PCI-E storage, PCI-E USB, Sound Cards, extra network cards and more recent years thanks to AMD creating fully visualized workstations.  In some cases like with the x570 Taichi it even supports thunderbolt 3.0 add-in cards.
 
The Ryzen platform offers features that would normally be limited to enterprise environments such as SR-IOV with true hardware support ath x470/x570 level.
 
I personally got tired of dual booting, and it allows me to not have to turn my computer on/off while switching between LInux, Windows, custom operating systems that can boot off of UEFI and virtualized Hackintosh.
 
 

There definitely seem to be a lot of answers that come from a good place in this post but may find themselves a little bit overwhelming to someone new to the server space.
 
If you want the coding "Hello World" of servers
 
https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/socket-programming-cc/ (it's very crude by illustrates the point).  It's the simplest client/server model in which the client and server are physically located on the same machine.
 
A lot of the above answers make an assumption that you either have a background in networking or understand what networking can be used for.
 
 
 
Eli is great at taking what I would describe as super hard topics and breaking them down into core points.
 
If you wanted an actual C++ example and not just a C example as posted above https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_68_0/doc/html/boost_asio/examples/cpp11_examples.html
 
https://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_70_0/libs/beast/doc/html/beast/examples.html
 
C++20 will bring a lot of that into the core library, but you'll have to wait a little bit
 
I recommend watching Eli's tutorials before moving onto the C++ examples as you'll probably need some of the background.  I hope this helps you

Installing the drivers can be hard/annoying/confusing.  Download the version of Pop OS! with your intended Graphics solution.  Choose Intel/AMD for iGPU/AMD solutions.  Choose NVIDIA for team green.   The driver is pre-installed for you  
 
https://system76.com/pop

Anydesk is a particular bad product, it was a great idea but sadly falls short.  NoMachine (Nx 4) based on the Nx protocol is pretty good.  If you wanted to use a completely open source product you can use X2Go (Nx 3).  You can also use RDP although I would recommend choosing a port other than the default port.
 
Mikrotik is great except for the fact that they suffer from a legion of security vulnerabilities.  Their software is also quite complicated so kudos for learning how to manage a Mikrotik router.  They provide great performance, I just find it hard to trust their software.
 
I've always been a fan of Pfsense because it's based on FreeBSD which is the backbone of enterprise.  If you want a more industrial choice.  Sophos is pretty good all around.  Both can be installed on random hardware.  Be sure to include AES-NI in your build specification to fully take advantage of hardware feature sets.  If you want a recommended built specification I can provide one, just specify how much traffic is going through it and what feature sets you want to turn on such as VPN traffic, Snort, Surricata, QoS, etc.
 
If you want a NAS, FreeNAS is great because it's literally based on TrueNAS and uses FreeBSD (again, the backbone of enterprise).  It also has integration with Backblaze for NAS offsite backups.
 
For monitoring I recommend the following
https://pulse.alphametric.co
 
NetData (
)
 
 
I hope you find the info helpful
 
 
 
 
 

The only thing that could possibly impact your performance is that most x570 boards are 6 layer PCBs which allow for higher memory overclocks while x470 have 4 layer PCB most of the time.  It probably won't impact your performance a whole lot.
 
 
 
 
 
 
The confusion is lead at how the lanes run electrically on the motherboard.
 
So GPU -> Motherboard Lanes -> direct CPU path -> CPU.  You can ask the CPU to to only be at PCI-E x1 or at PCI-E x2 electrically if you want.  They will remain wired at PCI-E 3.0 on the specified CPU.  I'm not sure if the BIOS will expose that option, but it's completely possible.

if you want to develop video games and you"re worried about catering to various operating systems  then you should use a KVM solution.  Using UnRAID or Proxmox as your base operating system then virtualizing the target operating systems.  You can limit the core count and impact how much RAM/CPU compute units will be readily available to the VM.  You can even go about simulating the various storage solutions for each VM.  If you want to simulate the iGPU that most macbook pros have then just get an underpowered AMD GPU.  If you put your motherboard in UEFI boot mode (csm compatibility off) then you can have 3 GPUs.  One GPU for your base operating system.  One GPU for "high performance" and one GPU for "low-mid tier performance".  If you do go this route I suggest using Team Red's platform as it will be less confusing because of the maturity of the 64 bit stack.  If you forgo having some peripheral PCI-E device then you have 4 GPUs.  1 GPU for high performance, 1 GPU for mid tier performance, 1 GPU for low end performance and 1 GPU to get your system to POST.  You'll need a pci-e x1 graphics card to make this feasible (https://www.amazon.com/ZOTAC-GeForce-Profile-Graphic-ZT-71304-20L/dp/B01E9Z2D60/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=pci-e+x1+gpu&qid=1564784905&s=gateway&sr=8-1).  As a side effect this will also empower you to develop for the various distributions of linux with minimal effort.
 
I've found that this works relatively well for application deployment.  Mira does have a point though, if you want to make sure your system work on an Apple platform, you will need an Apple platform (although I've yet to run into this problem).