My brand new HD 7850 just arrived :)
I was postponing the decision for too long in part because I'm just lazy. The sheer thought of having to change PSUs between computers made me shiver and avoid the decision.
My i7 3770 powered desktop is running on a 400W OEM PSU while my 525W Enermax 82+ PSU is being used on my lower power server which doesn't make much sense - all thanks to the desktop case not having space for the Enermax PSU due to the case's awkward design. So I'm in the process of change hardware around pretty fun stuff -.-'.
The promise of higher FPS in Team Fortress 2 won me over so I Mann'ed upp (TF2 pun) and ended up ordering a PowerColor 2GB HD7850 PCS+. Why this particular model? Well low noise and availability of 2xDVI (my monitors support VGA and DVI only) were the factors I valued the most while researching of alternatives. So I ended up going with the PowerColor 2GB HD7850 PCS+ after reading several very positive reviews in which it presented the lowest noise.
As to why the Radeon HD7850?
Normally I'd go for nVidia cards as I had good experience with them in the past being great both in terms of performance and Linux/BSD support. However this time around I'm into virtualization with VGA/PCI passthrough and nVidia cards expect the Quadro variant just don't support Xen (and other hypervisors for that matter) properly. The trade-off is that AMD doesn't support BSD so I'll probably passthrough 3770's HD4000 if I feel like having FreeBSD on the desktop as a domU.
With Valve's pressure on AMD regarding Steam being ported over to Linux I'm hopping that AMD own drivers mature making this a good buy in the medium term. For the moment I'm playing TF2 on a Windows 8 domU off Intel HD4000 so has soon as I get my hands on the AMD card I'll fire assign the HD7850 to this Windows domU. Afterwards I'll whip-up a Linux domU and check-out Steam and TF2.
Showing posts with label AMD. Show all posts
Showing posts with label AMD. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Go!
After being able to do Intel HD 4000 VGA passthrough I decided I wanted to try PCI passthrough of a dedicated graphics card. My idea was to buy a AMD HD 7850 but I ended up buying a second hand AMD HD 5450 passively cooled for 15€ just be sure that PCI passthrough of secondary GPU works before making a much bigger purchase such as the HD 7850.
Well it worked.
Passing the AMD HD 5450 to a Windows 8 domU was a bit trickier than passing the primary Intel VGA but still achievable though I found the driver installation awkward.
Some notes:
Well it worked.
Passing the AMD HD 5450 to a Windows 8 domU was a bit trickier than passing the primary Intel VGA but still achievable though I found the driver installation awkward.
Some notes:
- The integrated Intel i7-3770 HD 4000 GPU needed to be set as the Primary Display Adapter in the BIOS thus the AMD HD 5450 was setup as the Secondary Display Adapter.
- Wheezy domU with stock Linux kernel and Xen 4.1.3 were used alongside the xm toolstack.
- The domU was installed over VNC.
- The HDMI audio function of the graphics card also needs to be passed.
- Installing AMD Catalyst froze the VM and required a reboot of the dom0 to restart the Windows 8 domU properly. I worked around this by installing only the drivers with Catalyst Control Center.
- Windows 8 assigned drivers to the AMD HD 5450 that were faster in Windows Performance Score, Counter Strike Source Video Stress and Unigine than AMD 12.8 drivers (!)
- AMD HD 5450 performance is crappy compared to Intel HD 4000 however it's more than fine for Windows 8 non-gaming tasks.
- AMD HD 5450 Team Fortress 2 gameplay was crappy with ~30 FPS.
- I wasn't able to successfully passthrough my 2nd Intel NIC as the VM refused to start and spat out errors.
- I'm too hooked on FT2 having scored 50h since early September which is totally sucked my free time...
- 2 concurrent Windows 8 domUs one running the integrated HD 4000 and the other the AMD HD 5450.
- Clean up the benchmarks I've run on bare metal, HD 4000 and AMD HD 5450 domU.
- Clean up my notes and publish as HowTo on linux-bsd-sharing.blogspot.com.
- Setup Linux domUs with VGA passthrough.
Monday, July 9, 2012
The desktop revolution has started...
... at least for me as I'm finally upgrading my Athon XP desktop from circa 2003!
It sure is about time ;)
These days my web surfing and administration of local network computers is performed on my Dell D620. It's quite a nice machine specially after being upgraded with Intel Core 2 Duo (15€ !!), 4GB, 128GB SSD and HDD drive caddy. It does however lack the graphics card to power Enemy Territory.
For my gaming needs I kept using the old desktop, however the bastard is noisy and has been overheating, so much that I had to drop from 2200 to 2000Mhz so that I can actually compile anything without segmentation faults errors.
But if it were only because of ET I'd keep the bastard. However I long for full blown virtualization, the kind that let's me run 4 machines without sweating, the kind that will let me passthrough PCI devices, the kind that leads me into spending hard earned money :(
The old Athon XP crawled under GNOME3. YouTube movies and Flash websites were choppy. Compiling world in Gentoo took ages (LibreOffice and Firefox have long been the bin kind). On FreeBSD I had to start using packages instead of ports due to the time (and electricity) needed to compile ports. On top of that it meant x86 and no x86_64 and KVM fun.
Also, in the past months I'm getting more and more interested in XEN and KVM namely their VGA and PCI passthrough abilities with proper virtualization instructions from the CPU. Both Intel and AMD have solutions for this however this time I've elected Intel.
I ended up with Intel due to lower power consumption, overall better performance, GPU with more-than-enough-for-ET performance and opensource graphics driver. Funny enough what tipped the scale was the power consumption and opensource graphics driver.
The selected weapons of choice were i7-3770 (non-K), Intel DQ77MK motherboard and 32GB DDR1600. I've placed online orders for all except the i7 but I'll take care of that until the end of the week. To ease the expense I've already started selling all the computer parts I have laying around (DIMMs, SO-DIMMs, graphics cards, NICs, etc), so far I've already scored 50€ with more in the pipeline - not bad.
I'll move my laptop SSD to the machine and re-use my old case and PSU for the time being - though those SeaSonic fanless PSU are damn appealing!
The decision for the non-K 3770 was rather simple: I wanted a fast, energy efficient and muticore processor and this version has that and VT-d support. Combined with XEN and KVM, VT-d means device passthrough to be used directly and natively in the virtual machines.
To guarantee that VT-d is supported I've chosen the Q77 chipset as it has100% guaranteed VT-d support. Some Z77 motherboards have VT-d support however it is un-official as Intel pulled VT-d support from Z77. I didn't want to take any chances so I went for Q77.
Why Intel's own board instead of ASRock or ASUS? For a few reasons: documentation on the Intel board is simply superior, 2x DVI, mSATA and mini-PCIe. Though I wanted the 2x PCI slots from ASRock and ASUS offerings I wanted to keep an eye on the future and for that the extra PCIe slot is better (though that eSATA port should really have been another normal SATA port Intel!).
Now let's just wait for the parts and assemble the machine ;)
It sure is about time ;)
These days my web surfing and administration of local network computers is performed on my Dell D620. It's quite a nice machine specially after being upgraded with Intel Core 2 Duo (15€ !!), 4GB, 128GB SSD and HDD drive caddy. It does however lack the graphics card to power Enemy Territory.
For my gaming needs I kept using the old desktop, however the bastard is noisy and has been overheating, so much that I had to drop from 2200 to 2000Mhz so that I can actually compile anything without segmentation faults errors.
But if it were only because of ET I'd keep the bastard. However I long for full blown virtualization, the kind that let's me run 4 machines without sweating, the kind that will let me passthrough PCI devices, the kind that leads me into spending hard earned money :(
The old Athon XP crawled under GNOME3. YouTube movies and Flash websites were choppy. Compiling world in Gentoo took ages (LibreOffice and Firefox have long been the bin kind). On FreeBSD I had to start using packages instead of ports due to the time (and electricity) needed to compile ports. On top of that it meant x86 and no x86_64 and KVM fun.
Also, in the past months I'm getting more and more interested in XEN and KVM namely their VGA and PCI passthrough abilities with proper virtualization instructions from the CPU. Both Intel and AMD have solutions for this however this time I've elected Intel.
I ended up with Intel due to lower power consumption, overall better performance, GPU with more-than-enough-for-ET performance and opensource graphics driver. Funny enough what tipped the scale was the power consumption and opensource graphics driver.
The selected weapons of choice were i7-3770 (non-K), Intel DQ77MK motherboard and 32GB DDR1600. I've placed online orders for all except the i7 but I'll take care of that until the end of the week. To ease the expense I've already started selling all the computer parts I have laying around (DIMMs, SO-DIMMs, graphics cards, NICs, etc), so far I've already scored 50€ with more in the pipeline - not bad.
I'll move my laptop SSD to the machine and re-use my old case and PSU for the time being - though those SeaSonic fanless PSU are damn appealing!
The decision for the non-K 3770 was rather simple: I wanted a fast, energy efficient and muticore processor and this version has that and VT-d support. Combined with XEN and KVM, VT-d means device passthrough to be used directly and natively in the virtual machines.
To guarantee that VT-d is supported I've chosen the Q77 chipset as it has100% guaranteed VT-d support. Some Z77 motherboards have VT-d support however it is un-official as Intel pulled VT-d support from Z77. I didn't want to take any chances so I went for Q77.
Why Intel's own board instead of ASRock or ASUS? For a few reasons: documentation on the Intel board is simply superior, 2x DVI, mSATA and mini-PCIe. Though I wanted the 2x PCI slots from ASRock and ASUS offerings I wanted to keep an eye on the future and for that the extra PCIe slot is better (though that eSATA port should really have been another normal SATA port Intel!).
Now let's just wait for the parts and assemble the machine ;)
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