whoa whoa hold on a second Linus you can't do that
actually yes we can and today we're
going to be showing you guys a step by step how to build a single tower that
can run two independent gaming rigs complete with their own keyboards mice
and even video cards out of the same box
off the same motherboard and the same CPU even so hit that like button if you
guys are super amped on this topic and stay tuned this is going to be a wild
ride
so let's start with the inspiration for this build cooler master came to us and
they were like hey we want to sponsor like a a build
that you guys do in the master case five it's all modular and there's upgradable
parts and you can like put a lot of hard drives in or you could not put a lot of
hard drives in you could put a motherboard in or lots of graphics cards
or just view graphics cards you could build like anything you want in there
use your imagination i was kind of like okay well my imagination is that i've
always kind of wanted to do like something with virtualization and like
two gaming rigs running off of one computer because when you think about it
looking at the rest of the hardware we're using here and we do this all the
time we build like these super overpowered machines with like eight
processing cores 32 gigs of RAM we've
got like enough usb ports to choke a stallion you got two graphics cards you
throw a couple ssds and a couple hard drives and you go well holy crap you've
got like two computers worth of hardware in the thing why can't you just
legitimately run two computers off of it
so that is exactly what we'll be doing
so our hardware list is a cooler master master case pro 5. we've got a v850
power supply with a neptune 240m water cooler we're using a susex 99 deluxe
motherboard with an 8 core core i7 5960x
extreme edition 32 gigs of Corsair vengeance lpx memory we've got a gtx
titan x a gtx 780 ti and a gt so what is
this a 9500 gs okay i'll explain why we need that later as well as two Intel 730
series 480 gig ssds and two seagate
three terabyte hard drives and what are the hard drives for for a gaming rig
great question we are going to be putting not one not two but three
operating systems on this machine
two copies of Windows 10 and one copy of
lime tech unraid server pro so this
machine will be a nas and it will be two gaming rigs at the same time so let's
start by building the machine so the biggest way that we leveraged the
modularity of the master case five was to
reconfigure the drive cages our plan was
to use two ssds and two hard drives
which gave us a lot of space in the front of the case for a large water
cooling system however in the event that we wanted more emphasis on the nas
portion of our build and we wanted to have a lot more hard drives for storage
we could easily use a different cooler whether mounted in the rear or the top
or just an air cooler on the CPU and fill up the front of the case with
drives
okay so that wasn't the most detailed physical build guide we've ever done but
it wasn't intended to be the hard part today is component selection and
software configuration so if you want to know more about how this case works and
all of its modularity then check out the review video that we did here no we're
going to talk about why we picked the other parts that we did first number one
you will need a CPU with virtualization technology so this will be called vt-d
which is being able to pass through a pci device to a virtual machine very
important for passing through our video cards and the second is
vt-x and this is all applying to Intel cpus and that is the ability to support
virtualization at all step number two
configure your graphics cards appropriately for each gaming machine
that you want to run off of your computer you will need one dedicated
gaming capable graphics card then in addition to that you will need another
GPU for unraid to initialize when it's
booting up so this could be your onboard graphics or in our case we installed a
9500 gs and this is important in the top
pci express slot for it to grab
number three is other devices that you want each
machine to have access to in our case both of our monitors are going to have
support for an audio pass-through jack on the bottom of the monitor so we can
use the HDMI or displayport audio off of our graphics card if we wanted to run
usb sound cards that would be an option as well and would give both players the
ability to use a microphone usb headsets
could work as well but with any usb
devices you may have noticed our peripherals are all completely different
you will have to use different models of usb devices more on this later
and finally for storage we've gone with two ssds this gives us redundancy
effectively raid one of high enough capacity that you can split the capacity
between the two machines so our two 480 gig drives are actually turning into 240
gigs per box of redundant safe storage
and then our hard drives again we've gone with two hard drives because if you
go with more than two then you're going to hurt your right performance and
failover if onedrive dies all the data is there through butter fs is enough for
us for these purposes and we'd like to have the additional write speed we can
do about 100 plus megabytes per second to our array so two hard drives for
redundancy again high enough capacity that we can effectively split them
getting one and a half terabytes of redundant storage per virtual machine
step number one format your usb drive in fat32 calling it unraid in all caps
download the latest version of unraid off of the lime
technology.com website copy all of the files from your download
onto your formatted usb disk then right-click make bootable
and run as administrator and press enter
you can now eject your usb and put it into your computer step two make sure
you're running the latest BIOS for your motherboard change all SATA devices to
ahci mode and enable virtualization
technology in our case it was under advanced CPU configuration and advanced
system agent configuration
within the BIOS now what you can do is use your boot
override to boot to the usb drive that you just created
once the system's booted up navigate to http colon slash tower
in the internet browser of another computer on the same network
at this stage you can decide whether you want to purchase a key or get a trial
key which is limited to three storage devices and stops working after 60 days
it's a good way to try it out though step four hit info in the top right
and double check to make sure that hvm and i o mmu are enabled if they're not
you may need to reconfigure something in your motherboard BIOS to get your
virtualization running with that out of the way go to main
change your hard drive slots to something lower
add your two hard drives using the drop downs
to parity and disk one then
change your cash slots we're using these for our ssds
to to and add both of the ssds
to cache drives
next go to tools then system devices
make sure your devices are showing up correctly we're looking for our graphics
cards anything that starts with zero zero is built into the motherboard while
things that start with other numbers or letters are generally
going to be discrete devices so here we can see all three of our graphics cards
are showing up correctly note this pci device number at the
beginning here this will be important for the next step
now scroll down to iomu groups
find those devices so in our case here we are here are our video cards and
ensure that they are showing up in separate groups
if they're not you may need to enable a workaround but fortunately thanks to the
way that ASUS has implemented things on this motherboard they are all showing up
in separate groups and it will be easy to assign these devices to separate vms
next go to settings and identification here we can change
the name of our server which is how it'll show up on the network so i'm
going to call it unlinus and with this change made we're going to
have to re-navigate to our administration console
i would also recommend at this stage navigating to users
and adding a password to the root user so that not just anyone can dink around
in the administration console next go to settings then network settings
and change obtain ip address automatically to no it's recommended
just for the sake of ease of use later on down the road that you set a static
ip so that it's easy to navigate to this administration console from another
computer on the network now go back to main and start the array
once you see the green array started in the bottom left hand corner click the
yes i want to do this button next to format and click format
it'll take a while for your drives to format and the more drives you have the
longer it'll take now that our format is complete go to shares and we are
actually going to create using the add share button
for different shares note carefully the settings that we're
using for them and replicate these exactly our iso share is for installing
our vms and the associated drivers
our vdiskshare is for the boot drives of our vms they
are running purely on SSD
our docker folder is for if we want to add applications like plex server to our
unraid server install as opposed to our Windows vms
and our final share array v vdisks is
for mass storage drives that are on the hard drives for our virtual machines now
go to settings vm manager change enable
vms to yes change the iso library to your iso's directory that you just
created change the default network bridge to br0 then press apply you'll
know this worked because you'll see a vms tab at the top
next go to the vms tab and click add vm
name your vm and give it a description and if you want it to automatically boot
up when you fire up unraid then change auto start to yes select the appropriate
operating system for Windows 10 you can select Windows 8.1 and that'll work just
fine and change from basic view to advanced
view select the number of cores you want for your vm in our case we're going to pick
eight of our virtual cores so that's four real cores and four hyper threaded
ones and then select how much memory you want
for your vm i'm going to give each of my vms around 12 gigs of RAM
don't change max memory just initial memory to obtain an operating system
install iso for Windows 10 you can simply download it from microsoft and
copy it to the isos folder then for your
vert i o drivers iso click this link and
use the fourth download so
latest vert iso win iso
and copy that directly to the isos folder on your network in our case we
can type backslash backslash unlinus
and navigate to isos
with those downloaded we can select them in the drop down
and set a primary vdisk location in this case user
vdisks choose a primary vdisk size
i'm going to go with 200 gigs press the plus button
then select for the location user array v
disks and for size well let's make it one
terabyte and change your graphics card to the one that you desire for this
particular vm we're going to make this our titan x machine
for sound choose the corresponding NVIDIA device in the drop-down or if you
add additional sound cards then you can definitely do that as well
make sure your network bridge is the one that you created before
and finally select the peripherals you're going to be using for this
particular vm once you're ready click create and the vm will start as soon as
it's finished being created and this my friends is where the magic happens
within a couple seconds you should see the screen illuminate and your Windows
install should begin just as it would if you were installing on a normal computer
okay not quite normal you will need to load a driver
so simply browse and go to your vert i o
vio store the corresponding copy of Windows so 8.1 for 10
and then the appropriate architecture so we're running 64-bit and install
your storage device driver once that's done you should see both of your storage
devices show up and you can install to your SSD storage device
once you're dumped on the desktop there are a few more drivers you'll need to
install so go to device manager and there should be three
exclamation mark items update driver software browse
and go to your vert i o disk press ok include
subfolders and click next repeat this process for each of them
once that's done install your NVIDIA graphics card drivers from NVIDIA.com
and you are pretty much ready to go you can create your second virtual machine
in exactly the same way with the one exception being that you'll need to
change your CPU cores to cores that you didn't already use for this virtual
machine in cases where you want to install some additional applications on
unraid itself you may want to reserve one or two cores for unraid and leave
the rest of them allocated to your virtual machines there are a couple of more pro tips put
your pc in high performance mode disable fast boot sleep and hibernation and
there's a guide over on the guru 3d forums that you'll need to follow
especially if you've got an NVIDIA graphics card and you're using the
onboard audio to ensure that your audio doesn't get garbled it is a registry
hack but it's not too complicated to follow along
so this is it my friends moment of truth time
both of our vms are set to start up automatically once the system is powered
on so in theory within about a minute or so
we're gonna have Windows 10 running twice
on one computer so on raid takes a little while to boot
up give her a minute you know oh there it goes okay my two virtual
machines are starting
other side oh oh this one's already at the desktop
yes my friends there you have it
mouse keyboard star wars battlefront beta
this is kind of it this is the star wars battlefront beta
running at ultra details 1080p
on two virtual machines on the same box
at 106 FPS on this one
and 104 FPS on this one yes we are
getting full discreet performance
on two instances of the game simultaneously
so now that we've gotten this far i mean what's the fun of having a dual-headed
gaming box if you don't have somebody to enjoy it with
let's go get luke admiral akbar
you like bounce around when i hit you it'll show you like a cone of where they
are which is red but then it'll also show you
like red shapes oh there's one left is there behind something like the rocks or
whatever they take a sec to blow up
do you have regenerating health in this game yes
yeah i got an anti-vehicle turret cool and a proximity bomb yeah there's
they're unlocking more waves oh this guy has a shield and a jet
pack so that was fun and to my eye i can't
tell that i'm running on a virtual machine but without objective
measurements i can't quantify the difference for you guys so i've actually
got luke running our standardized battlefront benchmark which was used in
our performance roundup which you guys will actually be able to check out in i
think one or two days depending on how the release schedule goes to validate
how our 980 ti mind you it's running on three CPU
physical cores versus it was running on a six core in there stacks up against
running it on a dedicated machine and i
think the numbers should be with us any moment here
there we go so this is running on a 5960x versus on
a 5930k which is actually a higher clock speed chip not to mention that it has
all six of its cores versus only three of them and the 980 ti scored 120 FPS
average we got 102.5 FPS average i am
feeling pretty fracking good about those
results and this is at 1080p ultra so guys thank you for checking out
this video if you didn't like it then come on
and if you did like it hit that like button get subscribed and maybe even
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way we'll have links for where you can check out all of this hardware as well
as unraid in the video description at the link to the Linus tech tips forum
where you can also contribute to us and i think that pretty much wraps it up
thanks again for watching and uh i will see you guys next time we do a crazy
project like this man this was this was this was a thing