PCI passthrough question

[Dexter82]

First time poster here and Home lab noob . I’ve thrown together this setup from spare parts laying around.

I have plex running on an i7 Nuc

I also have a seperate DIY NAS tower running Open media server with all my mechanical drives.

My question is. In my NAS build I have an GeForce 210 doing nothing. Can I pass that card onto my proxmox server Nuc machine or does the pass through hardware have to live on the PVE host device ie nuc.



I haven’t experienced any Network transcoding issues yet. I do notice using the Ubuntu VM whilst using the built in Vnc the display can start tearing and get laggy despite ram and cores idling ok.



Reason why I moved proxmox to the Nuc is because the motherboard in the NAS build does not support UEFI where as the Nuc does.



DIY NAS TOWER PC specs

Samsung evo SSD-Operating System- Open Media Vault


I7 cpu 960@3.2

20gb ddr3 memory

GeForce 210

Gigabyte mboard

RAM 20gb

6 mechanical drives



PROXMOX HOST MACHINE

I7 Nuc -

16gb ram

Nvme drive running PVE OS

Main VMs

- Ubuntu LTS for everyday pc use

-Ubuntu 20.4 ( plex media server)

 

[leesteken]

PCI(e) passthrough has to be a PCI(e) device connected to a PCI(e) bus connected to the machine that runs the VM. If you (hypothetically) could connect the GPU of one machine via PCIe (Oculink or Thunderbolt or USB4?) then it could be possible (but it's not in your case).

 

[Dexter82]

PCI(e) passthrough has to be a PCI(e) device connected to a PCI(e) bus connected to the machine that runs the VM. If you (hypothetically) could connect the GPU of one machine via PCIe (Optilink or Thunderbolt or USB4?) then it could be possible (but it's not in your case).

Thanks for clearing that up. So theory is if I have If I got a thunderbolt PCI card for the nas build and connected it to the Nuc it’s possible?

Is thunderbolt uefi compatible only? In that case I would have to upgrade the mboard and then the rest of the components for that NAS, which isn’t really necessary.

Appreciate the info!

 

[leesteken]

Thanks for clearing that up. So theory is if I have If I got a thunderbolt PCI card for the nas build and connected it to the Nuc it’s possible?

No, since the GPU is not connected to the thunderbold PCI card and the CPU of the NAS would be the host, not the NUC. I just wanted to point out that it does not have to be inside the machine, if you use PCIe cables. That does mean you can go connecting machines and it will magically work.

Is thunderbolt uefi compatible only? In that case I would have to upgrade the mboard and then the rest of the components for that NAS, which isn’t really necessary.

I don't know (what your question means). Please don't go clutching at straws when I use an analogy that happens to mention grain stalks.