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Comment by lhl | Hacker News Reader

ECC support is built into the IMC (on the CPU) so de facto, every single Zen chip (except the non-PRO APUs) usually have support, but official support is still on a per motherboard basis (and you'd probably want to check the memory QVL as well) if it's important for you (it was for me) so it's best to check each board model's specs.

The Asrock X570 board mentioned definitely has support, as do the other high-end X570s I looked at like the Aorus Master, Asus C8H, Pro WS, etc.

Based on X570 BIOS updates so far (and their overkill VRMs this gen), I think the Gigabyte/Aorus boards would be my pick atm (I went w/ a C8H and I'm somewhat unhappy w/ the CPU/memory voltage wonkiness when tweak, but it does give me 30 IOMMU groups, so I'm able to do GPU passthrough via VFIO to a Windows VM w/o any issues).

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Thanks for the information. Does GPU passthrough to Windows allow high-end gaming from Linux (running a windows VM)? What specs would I need to look for in a motherboard to support that?

Yes, that works. The motherboard doesn't need to do anything special so any should work, unless they did something silly like forget to put the IOV toggle in BIOS.

Caveats:

- Anti-cheat systems used in multiplayer games generally don't like running in VMs. - Consumer Nvidia cards don't get reset on VM reboot, you need to reboot the machine. - IIRC Nvidia cards need a KVM hack to get the driver to work.

Actually, it's AMD Vega cards that have a PCI reset issue that doesn't work well with VM cycling. There's a new kernel patch just the other week that fixes this: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/vega-10-and-12-reset-applica...

Nvidia cards do require a config workaround for VM detection but the workaround is relatively straightforward (and works w/o further mucking).

Yes, although it's not entirely straightforward and there are many sharp edges, so it's maybe not for the faint of heart. Since I just did it, here's a guide I wrote up with my specific hardware and some of the issues I've encountered to set up my system specifically for VR passthrough: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/zen2-ryzen-3700x-and-x570-as...

Note: I haven't dealt with sound yet, which is another potential sticking point if you're doing gaming (most people seem to use a separate sound device, although I've seen some people use network sound when running into issues; HDMI sound I assume would work fine if you're doing GPU pass through) since I was just focused on getting my VR HMD working, which has it's own sound output already.

IOMMU groups are defined by AGESA and the X570 boards in general seem to have much finer grained groupings vs earlier AMD chips/boards (although people seem to have done ACS workarounds). My recommendation is to find something that someone has gotten working already and just follow along (the VFIO subgroup at level1techs and r/VFIO on reddit seem to be the best resources).

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