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many serious game streamers use a second PC actually so they got one for gaming

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and then another one dedicated to encoding and interacting with their

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audience so we were brainstorming and talking about some cool projects that

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we've done in the past with unread and virtualization technology and well let's

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just say the old light bulb went off what if we could build using an Intel

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high core count core I nine processor a two-in-one solution splitting a single

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Tower with a single motherboard effectively in half to perform both of

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those duties virtually of course would we end up with

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a viable day-to-day streaming solution well thanks to Intel sponsorship of this

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investigation we are about to find out

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okay so let's start with this why would anyone want to run a virtualized

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two-in-one setup as opposed to just having two separate machines I mean bare

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metals more efficient right let's take a

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look at a few reasons why it might actually be a cool idea first and most

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importantly for many is cost unless you

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already have a second computer to dedicate to encoding you would still

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have to buy GPU RAM and storage for two

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but you could save the considerable expense of many other components in

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addition your total power consumption and heat output will be a touch lower

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than running separate PCs meaning your energy bill will be lower - the second

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reason to go virtual is space while it's

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not a concern for some if you're streaming from a college dorm or a small

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apartment this means one less tower taking up space in your gaming area not

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every virtualized - and one has to be this big reason number three versatility

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since the gaming and streaming setups are virtualized not only are any

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potential software issues confined to each VM but they can also be much more

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quickly and easily backed up or cloned

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once you're set up so in the future you can easily hit the reset button in case

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anything should go wrong also thanks to the magic of on raid your gaming /

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streaming machine can act as a file and media server for the rest of your

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household so the plan then is to use a portion of our CPU to encode our video

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stream using x264 with high quality settings that way we can avoid the

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potential for scheduler conflicts without manually assigning CPU

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affinities and task manager like we would if we were doing both tasks on one

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OS well okay Linus this all sounds great

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but there's got to be disadvantages right well there is the fact that when

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using virtualization some devices can't be easily allocated to a VM our onboard

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audio for example shares an eye a new group with the chipset and essentially

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cannot be used same story with USB ports

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each grouping of ports has to be on a dedicated controller in order to pass it

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through so that you can hot plug your devices something that we pretty much

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take for granted these days and finally while it's possible to run on

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raid without its own video card it's a

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royal pain so we grabbed a dedicated sound card for our gaming VM and extra

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USB controller we're using one of the onboard ones for the other VM and an el

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cheapo third graphics card for under 8

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so we are ready to you oh wait so during

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our testing we found that gaming performance was actually best when we

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assigned four cores and eight threads to our gaming VM and in some configurations

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we actually found tests that performed better in a virtualized environment

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compared to an equivalent configuration running on bare metal Y so this is the

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kind of thing that we encounter sometimes when we're running on the

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bleeding edge we spoke with on raids developers about the issue and they're

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putting together some information to share with the Red Hat and KVM

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hypervisor folks so that hopefully we'll see a resolution by the time game's

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demand more cores for optimal performance but for the time being our

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classic four core eight thread setup manages a negligible performance hit

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compared to bare metal and our streaming

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VM can suck up those extra cores anyway so that it could be used for heavier

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video editing and faster encoding for those edited videos that can later be

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uploaded to YouTube or other video on-demand sites alright then so let's

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show off the rest of the setup we're using the utterly unique level one text

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DisplayPort 1.2 KVM from Wendell and his team this gives us support for high

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refresh rate monitors like a Seuss's 240 hertz rog swift PG 2 v 8 q and easy

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switching between our VMs saving us from using two keyboards and mice though it

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should be noted that having an extra one on hand is pretty useful in some cases

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we're using Corsairs massive obsidian

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900 D tower thanks to its ample cooling capacity and we're powering all three of

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our GPUs the 1080 Ti for gaming the 1050

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Ti for streaming and that basic one for

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unrated off of an ax 1200 eye power supply and we've thrown in a monstrous

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on raid array of 712 terabyte Seagate

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iron wolf pro drives for 60 terabytes of

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protected storage that's visible to both VMs not to mention as I said before

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anyone else on the network who needs it allowing us to record our streams

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basically indefinitely so we can make them epic frag vids after we're done

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streaming finally for our capture Carlo and other

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surprise no capture card so we actually

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originally had planned to use one that 4k one from El Gato but this ended up

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being way cooler so our gaming VM is actually transmitting its video and

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audio feed to the encoder VM using the

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low impact OBS NDI plugin which runs

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with very little quality loss over our

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virtualized 10 gigabit network connection between our VMs then from

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there we've set the streaming machines output settings to Twitch's ultimate

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1080p 60fps quality setting and would

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you look at that after a few command-line tweaks we could not only

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encode on the fly but do so at x264

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s-slow preset which is 6 notches up from

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the default potato quality ultra-fast and

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to validate our original hypothesis is

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there some benefit from separating them

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in VMs we pushed our 11 hyper threaded

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cores to their limit in the streaming vm to the point where we forced our encoded

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video to start dropping frames then we went back to the gaming vm to see if

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those resources were effectively being isolated and it was still running games

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like nobody's business so what have we learned then on this

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journey well for one a virtualized dual

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head system with all of its shortcomings has some advantages operating our two

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virtual machines was about as transparent as running two completely

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independent systems whether via KVM switch or with two full sets of

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peripherals this is a use case for many course systems that we've been excited

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about for years now and one that has many applications beyond game streaming

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that is just gonna get better in time and second is that with superior codecs

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such as x265 on the horizon that are

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better optimized not only for image quality but for better thread and memory

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utilization that happens to mesh great with core I nines new cache design

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you'll be able to push the quality even higher with a setup like this all we

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need to do then is wait for twitch and mainstream broadcasting software to

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support it in the meantime though we've still built one of the coolest x264

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streaming setups out there so thanks to everyone for their help with this and

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especially Intel for sponsoring this sick experiment and also you guys for

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watching it so if you guys dislike this video you can hit that button but if you

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liked it hit like yet subscribe maybe consider checking out where to buy the

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stuff we featured at the link in the video description maybe a shiny new core

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I 9 also link down there is our merch storage has cool shirts like this one

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and our community forum which you should totally join