Good passthrough GPU for OpenELEC or Windows 10?

Hey guys!

After several years of not looking at NAS solutions, I'm just now finding out about Unraid 6 and the virtualization upgrades it's gotten over 5. Holy smokes, it's freaking sweet! I gotta build me one to replace my little Windows 7 software RAID1! Here's the details on my current setup.

The machine runs (well, ran :'() Windows 7, sits next to my TV which is its only monitor, and acts as a media (plex, subsonic, sickbeard, couch potato)/ file (smb, ftp)/ dedicated game server (minecraft, terraria, starbound, space engineers to name a couple), plus watch movies and play the occasional lightweight game (SNES emulation mostly). I've currently got all this running on an i3 with 8GB ram, but recent tinkering has blown up my primary OS drive, and discovering unraid 6 has given me a reason to upgrade to something with vt-d.

Prospective Hardware:

Haswell i7-4790

ASRock Z97 Extreme6 mobo

16GB DDR3-1600

460 watt fanless PSU (for that sweet silence)

2x6TB drives + 2x4TB drives for 14TB Usable & 1 500GB SSD for cache

Here's where I'm alone in the dark. I would like to keep power usage, noise, and heat to a minimum as this system is always on. The current machine just uses the Intel 3000 onboard GPU and I've never had any problems with it, (I have a gaming rig in my office for fancy graphics games), but from the forums it seems onboard graphics don't play so nicely with the GPU passthrough.

So finally, here is my question:

Can I assign the Intel HD4600 GPU off the i7-4790 to a VM with unRAID, or do I need to use a discreet GPU?

If I do need a discreet GPU, is something small & fanless like an Nvidia GT720 compatible with unRAID for say, presenting Windows 10 or OpenELEC to the TV?

If anybody has something like this in their setup, I would be especially happy to hear about how it performs!

Thanks,

Rattle

So finally, here is my question:

Can I assign the Intel HD4600 GPU off the i7-4790 to a VM with unRAID, or do I need to use a discreet GPU?

If I do need a discreet GPU, is something small & fanless like an Nvidia GT720 compatible with unRAID for say, presenting Windows 10 or OpenELEC to the TV?

 

If anybody has something like this in their setup, I would be especially happy to hear about how it performs!

 

Thanks,

Rattle

You will need a discrete GPU.

I recommend the GT720, it works extremely well!

I use 2 simultaneously to Windows 10 VM's with SeaBIOS.

They also work well in OVMF mode, tested with Unraid Openelec template.

I even started a thread I was so impressed!  http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=41742.0

That's great! Exactly the info I was looking for :-)

Thanks Bungee.