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Comment by soulnothing | Hacker News Reader

Another Ryzen owner here. I came from mobile 2nd and 3rd gen i7s.

The price to performance is insanely good. I'm on an x370 desktop, with 2xrx550 and rx560. I'm using it as a virt/dev host. I have 16 docker instances running on the host os (Arch Linux).

Then 3 vms with PCI pass through. One for windows gaming/development. Until about three weeks back I was getting a solid 60fps @ 1080p on high across most games, but recently it's been down below 10fps. The next VM is a Linux developer desktop. Lastly, an emulator box connected to a projector away from my desk.

To switch between I just have dongles, 1xhdmi and 1xusb, behind my keyboard, and alternate the plugs. I did this because I couldn't find a good hdmi kvm that did 4k above 60hz.

This year has really been amazing for enthusiasts.

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Why has the framerate dropped so much?

I have no idea, to be honest. I tried different driver versions in windows, host kernels, etc. Even booting back into native windows OS, no KVM in between. It was showing the same frame rate drops. My 3DMark was also just about halved as well.

Sounds like an awesome setup :) How much load does your cpu have running so many containers and vm's? I have heard of software solutions for io switching. So you could get rid of usb switching.

I run an Arch host with passthrough myself but it was really a long project setting everything up just right. Especially for gaming.

Really looking forward to buying a Ryzen or Threadripper to go further and virtualize my working enviroment etc.

External public link, I also just realized my monitoring isn't fully active but you can see historical trends.

https://animusnull.drunkensailor.org/grafana/dashboard/db/no...

The CPU is barely breaking a sweat. I wouldn't mind a thread ripper so all VMS can get a quad core. But right now it's plenty powerful.

The input was the biggest pain in the butt. Especially on windows... I've seen the evdev passthrough and hot swap but didn't have the best luck with it. While hacky. Assigning a USB controller to each VM has worked best.

I agree it's a long setup, and still requires some care. It's not straight up and running like a linux/windows desktop. I've had windows just mark the usb controller as inactive, and I then need to reboot the entire host. Something I'm still digging into. But there is much better documentation out there. Things like project looking glass are also impressive.

Only KVMs that I'm aware of that'll work for this are expensive and display port rather than HDMI (not a big deal, passive adapters exist).

https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-single-mon...

https://store.level1techs.com/products/kvm-switch-dual-monit...

> This year has really been amazing for enthusiasts.

I mean, graphics card prices have been pretty horrific, but I agree on the CPU side.

RAM prices are through the roof as well. SSD seems to finally be stabilizing somewhat though.

Right? I can’t wait for Bitcoin to crash. Let us do something of real value than mining coins.

Awesome, what do you use to run the VMs ?

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