New build for VM lab/Gaming

[strike-down]

Hey folks!

Been a while! Just looking for a bit of advice for a new VM workstation/gaming build.
Now I'm moving to the Netherlands this weekend into a new job, and figured this would be a good time for me to get a new build together to use both as a VM lab and my gaming PC.
I don't want to totally break the bank, justifying a threadripper to my Dutch fiancée is not a task for the faint of heart pretty sure I'd be kicked out the house as soon as I'd moved in!
Not including case, PSU (I have a 3 month old RM750x I will be taking with me) and SSD/Drives (Got a nice 1TB Sabrent rocket from prime day), I would want to try and stick to a loose budget for CPU/RAM/Mobo and maybe GFX of £1500. This can be stretched a little bit, however!

GFX isn't a must as I do have a GTX980 which I can take with me and drop in, then just turn settings down for a couple of months.

What would you guys recommend?

Cheers!

Craig

[DanceswithUnix]

Really depends on what your VM farm is going to be doing.

I'm typing this at a small office where the company VM server is a Ryzen 2600X on an B350 motherboard with 32GB of ECC DDR4, 4TB of mirrored hard drives and for when the memory pressure gets a but much a WD Black 250GB NVMe SSD just for swap. That runs our software and FPGA development including Jira, source control and automated build.

So on that budget, I would wait for Nov 5th and expect to get a 5950X on watercooling using an X570 motherboard. If "workstation" means you want ECC ram, then get an Asus or Asrock board.

Edit: As a no effort starting point: https://www.scan.co.uk/products/3xs-...-corsair-h100i

[[GSV]Trig]

As above, what VM sort of stuff do you want to play with?
Could setup a VMWare machine and carve up part of the system (hardware permitting) and use it for a gaming VM with direct access to the GPU/USB etc.

Or, if you're thinking lower end, Windows 10 gaming rig, install the Hyper-V role and then just have additional storage and NIC for them VM's to sit on.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

AWD-IT sell Ryzen 9 3900 non-X bundles which are decent value. For under £500 you can get the Ryzen 9 3900 non-X with this Asus motherboard:
https://www.awd-it.co.uk/asus-rog-st...ocket-am4.html

[b0redom]

In my experience vms are way more RAM hungry than CPU hungry - just something to think about.

Most places I’ve worked at are moving towards cloud stuff (instead of vms) too - with a (very) few specific use cases which need on premise stuff.

If I were you I’d focus on gaming and spin up some free vms in the cloud (unless you meet one of those very specific use cases).

[strike-down]

Thanks for the replies!
Sorry I've not been responsive, just made the move to the Netherlands on Sunday and got myself setup here!
I do have one of the specific use situations with my new job - I know they have their own private cloud that I will be involved in managing as well as an Azure component and in the job description they actually said a home lab is an advantage, so I'm taking their word for it!
To that end, I will most likely be running esxi to do all of this with a win10 VM for gaming. I am waiting for the new Ryzen chips to release in November and was looking at either the 5900X or the 5950X paired with the Strix X570-E (Seems to be a good all round board and I do have a bit of a brand preference with ASUS).
VM's will probably be a mix of server 2016/2019 (AD + SCCM), a couple of small Win10 instances and a few Linux instances predominantly with docker/kubernetes.

Have to see what the release pricing is for the new Ryzen chips, but I will probably go with the 5950X and 64GB RAM (2x32GB), can't see me needing more than that initially. I can upgrade the memory if needed in a couple of months if I need to. I'm guessing no word yet on what memory speeds are going to be best suited to these new CPU's?

[Kanoe]

Probably the same as before, you want to match the Infinity Fabric speed so that it runs 1:1 for best. No point going over the Inifinity Fabric speed as this will bottleneck things to a degree. If you do go higher speed it may actually be better to underclock the RAM but tighten the timings to give slightly better performance.