hardware Archives - Heiko's Blog

Upgrading my PC to an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X System – Benchmarks

It wasn’t easy this time. Don’t get me wrong – the VFIO passthrough part, though challenging in some ways, went quite well. All in all I’m pleased now with the results. Here the Passmark 9.0 benchmark as uploaded onto their database (for more details, click the frame below):

Upgrading my PC to an AMD Ryzen 9 3900X System

Introduction

I’ve been contemplating a PC upgrade for more than a year (see my post here). At first I considered staying with Intel and getting an i9-9900K CPU with integrated GPU on a Z390 motherboard.

Along came the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X that topped the benchmarks, including the Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop benchmarks (to be precise, it ranked #4 in the Adobe Lightroom benchmark, and a narrow #1 in the Adobe Photoshop benchmark). These good news about the AMD Ryzen 3900X were soon followed by reports about BIOS issues and VFIO incompatibility. At the very least, it looked like VGA passthrough was more challenging.

Then I read Bryan Steiner’s GPU passthrough tutorial for the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and an Ubuntu-based Pop!_OS Linux host. Several users on the VFIO Reddit forum reported successful VFIO VGA passthrough with the AMD Ryzen 9.

Hardware upgrade or what’s holding me back?

More than a year has passed since I’ve posted about building a new PC. So what is holding me back from the upgrade? Time and money are considerations, but not the reason.

On paper, the AMD Ryzen 9 has outperformed Intel in most if not all tasks. The Ryzen 9 3900X beats the Intel i9 9900K as well as the Intel i9 10900X in multi-threaded workloads. The Intel i9 9900K can barely hold its ground on single-threaded tasks. Numerous benchmarks have shown that AMD is a clear winner.

GPU Passthrough with Low-End Intel i3-6100 CPU

For some time I wanted to run a kvm virtual machine with GPU passthrough on a low-end Asus H110M-K D3 motherboard with an i3-6100 CPU and an Nvidia GTX 1060 GPU, but never found the time. Now I finally had a chance to give it a try. While the preparations were easy, I ran into a problem when starting the Windows 10 VM:

Jan 22 15:21:24 alon-i3 kernel: [  108.514992] vfio_pin_pages_remote: RLIMIT_MEMLOCK (16777216) exceeded

Continue reading “GPU Passthrough with Low-End Intel i3-6100 CPU”

New PC Build

Back in 2012 I built a PC around the Intel i7 3930K 6-core/12HT processor which I have been using ever since. While it’s still a strong PC, especially with the upgrades (GPU, SSD) I made, I’m starting to feel that editing photos isn’t as snappy as it used to be. I am also curious in how well the new generation of CPUs lend themselves to VGA passthrough. In short, I’m considering building a new PC.

Memory Failure

I did some overclocking (to 4.2 GHZ) and gave the CPU and memory a trial using Prime95 and other torture tests. Later, much later, I realized that part of my memory was gone!

Checking the BIOS showed memory failures of two of 8 modules, reducing my total to 24GB. I’m not sure it was the overclocking, the torture tests or simply old age (the PC and memory is 6 years old). The funny thing was that I could boot into Linux and run some applications, and whenever I used Firefox I would sooner or later get a freeze. I monitored the processes and saw that the kswapd demon was busy. It took me a little to grasp that I had “lost” memory.

Windows 10 Benchmarks (Virtual Machine)

Benchmarks help us compare the performance of different hardware configurations as well as drivers and operating systems. With regard to virtualization, benchmarks can be particularly useful in quantifying performance differences between an operating system running on a virtual machine versus the same OS running directly on the underlying hardware.

Virtualization Hardware Accessories

In my Running Windows 10 on Linux using KVM with VGA Passthrough VFIO tutorial I introduced different options for using the keyboard and mouse with the Linux host and the Windows VM. Running a virtualized Windows VM means running two separate systems – the Linux host and the Windows VM – both of which require input and output devices.

Keyboards and Mice

I’m the type of person who is learning things the hard way. This is also true for me buying computer equipment and peripherals. I cannot even recall how many times I have replaced my computer mouse and keyboard in the last decade.

One should think that a mouse or a computer keyboard aren’t exactly rocket science – well they aren’t! Yet many popular mice or keyboards are either bad by design, or fall to pieces within a relatively short time.

Below is a list of things you should be checking when buying a computer mouse or keyboard. It is based on my personal experience – your experiences may be different, though.