[krylon]

Just out of curiosity, do you have an idea how much power that system uses?

I will probably get myself a new desktop computer sometime this year, and those specs sound pretty sweet. But I want to keep an eye on power consumption, too, and I don't my desktop to either melt or have its fans create a tornado in my living room... ;-)

[anderspitman]

I went ahead and rebooted it so I could plug my Kill-A-Watt back in just for you ;). It idles at right around 110W. I did a quick sysbench to peg all the cores and it goes up to about 300W. Note that I have some other things sipping from the meter so it's actually several watts lower for just the tower. With the Windows 10 guest running (host using GTX 950, windows RX 460) it idles between 190 and 250.

[anderspitman]

BTW I couldn't really tell any difference in the fan noise levels when the CPUs were pegged, though the temps went from ~40C to ~60C. It's already pretty quiet. Just barely above the level where I notice it.

[krylon]

Thanks! That is less than I would have expected.

[andwur]

I'm really interested in this too. I'm tossing up between something like this (maximum thread count but probably high power usage) or a Ryzen build (simple and low power).

That CPU has a TDP of 115W but I can't find much information on the idle power usage.

I would also like to see a write-up of the GPU pass-through setup since that's something I've been wanting to have on my local system for ages, i.e. vm host system => dev vm 1 ... vm N, Windows VM + dedicated GPU for gaming etc.

[anderspitman]

If I were doing a build today, I would be sorely tempted by Ryzen, mostly because it would be new hardware and the AM4 platform. That said, having a server board has turned out to be really nice for a lot of things, such as ECC memory and nice virtualization features. It looks like Ryzen has some issues with kvm passthrough so far[0]. My favorite resources are [1] and [2].

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO/comments/5yo83m/ryzen_pcie_pas... [1] https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PCI_passthrough_via_OVM... [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/VFIO