shadow sponsored this video and the concept behind their service is pretty
straightforward you install their app on your device whether it's a macbook
Windows book full-size computer phone tablet or even an Android or apple tv
you are magically dropped into a powerful Windows machine over the
internet but what actually powers that gaming
experience the cloud gets so often used as a hand
wavy don't worry about how it works buzzword what does a gaming server
actually look like to find out we convinced them to send one over to us
to poke and prod at and this thing is
actually way cooler than i expected
using low latency hardware encoding a shadow cloud gaming server can run it up
to 4k 60fps over the internet and it'll forward
inputs from controllers keyboards mice and even other usb peripherals making it
useful for gaming design video editing
or just about anything else you can imagine but of course the ability to
run those applications is only meaningful if you've got enough horses
to really use them that is why every logged in shadow user
gets their own dedicated hardware
albeit not necessarily in the
conventional sense what i expected to find in here was this
this daughter board is what allows the system to be powered by a single 12 volt
input and this is part of the open compute platform spec that reduces the
cost of individual servers by taking the power and cooling and making them part
of the complete cabinet rather than something that has to be integrated into
every single server so you can see here we've got these gigantic chunky positive
and negative wires here and then everything is split
off to the individual components so these three right here are able to
handle pci express power for up to three graphics cards the fans are handled
right here this is a supplementary six pin pci express connector for the
motherboard this right here is an 8 pin CPU power connector and this right here
is a standard atx 24 pin power connector
that is what i was not expecting to find
inside this chassis i was actually expecting this motherboard to use some
kind of just 12 volt only power input or
something along those lines but because this is just a standard Gigabyte
atx motherboard we can take off this cooler put something else on it and
here we go plug in our own power supply and game on
this thing right here and right now now
when i said that every subscriber gets their own dedicated hardware i didn't
necessarily mean that all of it would be dedicated so here to pop off this shroud
you can actually see that while everyone obviously gets their own graphics card
there's only one CPU in the system so depending on what tier it is you're
going to have either four CPU cores or
six CPU cores that are kind of carved out using virtualization from the CPU
and then assigned a graphics card kind of like what we've done in the past with
things like our seven gamers one CPU project
as for memory because this CPU has a 6 channel memory controller each one of a
hypothetical 3 people who have had this CPU carved up for them would get
effectively dual channel memory worth of bandwidth so these are 8 gig sticks
which means we've got a total of 64 gigs of RAM in this particular system
that can be sliced up that means that as long as shadow has
chosen their hardware wisely other than the overhead that comes along with
virtualization which as we've shown in the past can be pretty minimal you are
basically getting a gaming pc
even though it looks absolutely nothing like one i mean
where's the RGB am i right so let's go ahead and hook
this puppy up shall we we have a small benchtop
variable voltage power supply in the workshop but it is not even close to
what we would need to run this entire machine
off of this i didn't point this out before but you can actually see
where the 12 volt to 5 volt and 3.3 volt
conversion is happening on this daughter board over here because if it's not
happening in the power supply then you're going to need it to happen here for that 24 pin connector everything
else CPU fans pci express that's all native 12 volt so you don't have to do
it just for the 24 pin connector here make sure you're subscribed because i've
got a video coming up pretty soon where we're going to be one of the first to be
hands on with a new motherboard and power supply standard that Intel is
actually co-creating that would eliminate 5 volt and 3.3 volt
from power supplies in general so it would just be 12 volt power going on to
the motherboard come on come out of the thing the cable management is it's too
tight it's too cable managed
for shadow tech watching this going ooh what is he doing
they knew who they sent it to you knew what this was this totally
feels like cheating hooking up to the gaming server directly there's got to be
a 10 gig card over here with sfp plus connectors but we don't have those just
like randomly throughout our office uh usually they're more for fiber so we're
going to go ahead and plug into this puppy right here uh wow that is
that is really tight if we like bend this like this
maybe we'll get that in there yeah there it is oh yeah
oh yeah there you go no problem
piece of cake this motherboard totally forgoes
traditional just SATA connectors uh in
favor of these puppies right here which are breakout connectors into four
separate SATA connectors fortunately i've got an m.2 drive that should have a
Windows operating system on it as well as some games and stuff
and i'm just going to go ahead and pop that in you might have noticed that the
server has no storage in it whatsoever
that's because along with cooling and power
storage is one of the other things that is removed from the individual servers
and just placed elsewhere in the data center so that is what that high speed
network connection is for that way no one's going to have a storage bottleneck
when they're trying to load up their games or whatever let's see if it just fires up when we
give it power oh power supply did
nothing else it doesn't make any noise because all the fans are powered by the
daughter board which is not powered
so i lied we're gonna need a blowy matron
after all here we go boys
whoa i was trying to take off there uh is
that supposed to happen i'm gonna go get a different one that
could yeah not kill but definitely mame
yeah this is less fun but it's definitely safer yeah i think i plugged
into the secondary card which is not what i wanted to do okay hopefully
that's all right no output to our monitor but by pulling
out both of the graphics cards i was able to get into the BIOS on the onboard
video so i have changed active video to PCIe device
and the other thing that i want to change is you can see it set up to
network boot that would normally make sense because the storage should be
elsewhere in the data center i'm going to set it to my sabrint m.2 drive
and hopefully save and exit
show me the
image lttstore.com need some water gotta
replace all the sweat hello ah there you are
yes good job fun fact apparently shadow added 240 hertz support they haven't
completely rolled it out but if you manually select it it should work at
1080p of course this is just running locally over displayport cable so
there's no special magic right now there we go over 100 frames per second
to shadow the tomb raider with a server CPU and a workstation graphics
card not too shabby as you can see no amount of
expensive gaming tech is going to make me good at rocket league but
the good news is that i am getting a locked 250 frames per second how about
them apples oh yeah gaming server for gamers
of course this is ridiculous
nobody's going to use this like this so
i actually grabbed myself an Android tv
box and a tv over there and we're gonna give it a shot like
the real way some people use their shadows as their
like primary computer because why not it's got a fast internet connection
because it's right in a data center you can remote into it from anywhere which
is super cool so obviously two factor
very important feature just a little inconvenient for me right now
4k 60fps
let's fire up a game this uh this is their launcher or you can also just drop
onto the desktop it's actually my first time playing around with it on the
Android tv app even with all their voodoo magic
there's no getting around Windows updates now everything's working properly 24
milliseconds ping not terrible so that's a little less than two frames of latency
which considering that we're connected to a server and our neighbors to the
south actually not bad cool so apparently they've worked on
this so that you can bring up the overlay even when you are in game which
is pretty sweet believe it or not overcooked 2 is a game that i'm pretty
sensitive to latency in i've played a fair bit of this game before the game
launches actually a good time to have a look at what things like text will look
like on a maxed out 70 megabit per second connection in fact it actually
ends up looking quite sharp so there's a 4k display running at 4k and if you go
have a close look at it if you were to just be
working on documents in your shadow for whatever reason
i would say that would be a highly acceptable experience
oh you know what that's interesting the cursor
looks a little weird but the actual text
here is really good i can detect it obviously
like i know what i'm looking for but
this is among the best that i have seen
when it comes to remote gaming image quality where i would really expect to
see a lot of blockiness is in sort of
big gradients like this like this overcast
cloudy business that's going on under our hot air balloon but
it's really not bad at all
this is actually my first time formally trying shadow because last time i had to
go to their office for it because they weren't able to get us hooked up with
anything in canada no wonder people swear by this thing
overcooked ii definitely benefits from its more cartoony art style though when
you're playing something that's intended to look a little bit more
cinematic or true to life the visual
anomalies are definitely more noticeable
but are also definitely acceptable in this
case it's more the latency that i would
notice playing something like a twitch shooter like do maternal
this is on ultra violence mode oh see see the chainsaw there we go all
right and we good oh come on stop
man this game's fun uh yeah i'm basically just playing video
games now that's always a good sign when i'm trying something out and i kind of forget that i'm evaluating and i just
start playing video games yeah you can kind of see it in like the
textures on the floor and stuff like that so when i move they'll get kind of
blurry and then they kind of sharpen up
like it's it's really not bad actually
things that are farther away i tend to find it more noticeable and like when
something rocks the building you can see it go kind of blurry
there and then it sharpens back up so it's definitely noticeable to the
trained eye you'd be able to feel the latency in a game like this for sure
if you're playing something like you know more of like a tomb raider type
game where it's more about puzzle solving and exploration then i wouldn't
consider it to be nearly as much of an issue bottom line then shadow's value
proposition is pretty unique even at their highest tier which is forty
dollars a month for the hardware that they're going to bake into that tier it
would take anywhere from three to five years just to buy that graphics card if
you were paying 40 a month so the value
is pretty good as long as you're willing to deal with remote access
shadow's available nationwide in the u.s but the experience is obviously better
the closer you are to one of their data centers and you can find the most updated information about where those
are on their website there's currently four in the us
the most important call to action today is if this looks interesting to you
move fast because the last time we did a video about shadow we caused a month's
long backlog on new account activations and no i'm not even kidding and if you
want an ultra or infinite tier account once those become available you will
need to already have a standard boost
tier account they're constantly improving the service that overlay is
absolutely awesome that usb pass-through stuff is crazy they're even working on a
couple of really big things for the future so one of them is mouse and keyboard gaming
support that's going to be coming with iOS 14 as well as vr support although it
remains to be seen exactly how well that would work with the extra latency either
way it's worth keeping an eye on these guys because they are doing some really
cool stuff thanks for watching and thanks again to shadow for sponsoring
this video and sending over the server this was actually pretty fun i've never
seen an open compute project server before it's nice to get hands-on