so we did a really cool project a little while ago we called it two Gamers one
CPU you can check it out here where we' got one gaming tower with a couple
graphics cards in it extreme Edition processor all that stuff and it runs two
separate instances of Star Wars Battlefront and we used a software for
that called unraid that um while they
kind of came back to us and we're like yeah that's really cool they were also
kind of throwing in Hay but that isn't really the point for most people and so
they decided to sponsor a video where we show off a more practical application
for this virtualization technology that let us run two gaming rigs in one Tower
and this time instead of using crazy Overkill Hardware we're using I'd say
Enthusiast but not completely overthe toop stuff to have a single gaming rig
pull double duty as a gaming rig and also as the file server for the rest of
the household so stay tuned guys we're going to be doing a gaming rig and a Nas
in one
box the Logitech g303 features a lightweight design an advanced Optical
sensor with Delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting check
out the link in the video description to learn more so let's go through the rationale
of all the hardware while we we assemble the computer itself for our CPU we chose
a core i7 6700k skyl processor in any
case where you're going to be using virtualization you will a need a CPU
that supports virtualization and B want
one with more cores and or more thread
so hyperthreading on this CPU is a definite Boon we're going to be
installing that in a z170 deluxe motherboard from Aus it's a fully
featured board and has lots of PCI Express Lanes and dual land if you you
know wanted to team your Nicks or something along those lines in the
future and also has the virtualization
support that we need in terms of RAM
ddr4 is all you're going to be able to use in this case the speed doesn't
really matter however the one thing to note is that the more virtualized
operating systems that you're going to be using the more you will need in this
case we're just demoing a gaming rig and a NZ so there's really no need for us to
go completely Overkill so we've gone with 16 gigs of RAM the casee was a
pretty tough choice cuz I wanted something that would allow for more hard
drive expansion remember this is a Nas
also in addition to being a gaming rig but that wasn't going to compromise the
cooling Andor expansion capabilities of the gaming rig itself so I settled on
the Silverstone tjo for bew and then Silverstone also sent over
a 750 W power supply giving us lots of room for hard drive expansion in terms
of the power budget as well as this is
cool so this is a brand new thing their fs305 so this is a 5x3 and 1/2 in
toolless hot swap hard drive cage thing
that we're going to be mounting in the front of the case this is very nazzy
whereas the inside of the case is very just normal gaming Towery and I felt
like this combo was a really really good one which brings us to storage now we're
using Kingston's 1 tbte KC for 400 ssds
note that I say ssds because we have two of them the reason for this is that
while you could pick any other capacity of SSD that you want it is important to
have two of them because this gives us two advantages one is it protects Us in
the event of a hardware failure and two
actually that's really the main advantage unraid is going to really want
you to have these protected so uh yes we'll be running them in a butter FS
raid one next up we've got our hard
drives so we're using seates Enterprise capacity V5 SATA hard drives for Nas
functionality these are about as fast
and reliable and just generally ba as it
gets but once again in terms of what you're going to be using you have a lot
of flexibility in terms of both the hardware as well as the capacity that
you want to go with in this case at least two drives is recommended again to
keep your NZ safe in the event of a hardware failure but you get much better
scaling in terms of the capacity per investment if you go to three drives or
more and use a parity setup versus a
raid one setup so we're going to have five drives so we can fill up that front
Bay device that we have the video card
was an easy choice I basically grabbed whatever was on my test bench and threw
it in our motherboard has Onboard video so that takes care of running the web UI
for unraid and then that video card is going to be passed through through to
our Windows 10 VM for its full we hope
functionality in games we could use any card AMD NVIDIA it really doesn't matter
One Challenge we ran into was that our
hot swap cage didn't actually fit in the
front of this case without removing some small little tab shelf things designed
for normal 5 and a/4 in devices like Optical drives but that was nothing that
we couldn't solve With a Little Help from our friend Miss Mr Dremel and our
other friend Mr vacuum cleaner okay so now that the system is
physically constructed there's just one little trick when you're plugging in all
your cables plug your display cable into the dedicated graphics card for now then
power on the system for the first time press delete to get into the BIOS and
we're going to change a couple small settings here go to Advanced system agent Graphics configuration set your
primary display to igfx and igpu multim
monitor to disabled this will allow unraid to grab the onboard Graphics
leaving the discret card free for your gaming VM make sure that if you're
planning to use the unraid desktop goey you've got your monitor plugged into the
onboard Graphics now after you make this
change another small setting that you're going to have to enable is
virtualization so go ahead and make that change as well go to another PC and
create a bootable unraid USB drive according to the instructions on their
site plug that into the back of the computer and get her booted up once you
reach the web UI go into settings identification and rename your Tower to
something more recognizable on the network enable network bridge under
Network it's normal to lose connectivity here for a few seconds and then if it
doesn't come back right away use that recognizable name that you set to
navigate to it in a web browser next navigate to the main Tab and assign
discs to the array and to the cache the
array is your slower larger magnetic storage devices your hard drives and the
cache is those high-speed solid state drives that we installed next start the
array you can see that a parody sync is running we can start using the system
immediately to continue setting it up but you should be aware that data on the
array is not protected until the parody
sync is completed this takes quite a while but it's worth it because it
allows a failed drive to be replaced and the data to be rebuilt in the event of a
drive failure format the unmountable
discs please note that this will wipe all data off the discs then refresh and
it should be done within a few seconds next let's go over to shares and
start creating we're going to do the nas shares first and here's some general
rules if you're going to copy data over the network to this share then you'll
want to enable this share to use the cash everything else can be default
although minimum free SP is kind of important to set you want to
set this to a value that is larger than the largest file you could see yourself
copying to the share this will prevent out of space errors so for example for a
media share you might set this to 25 gigs next we're going to create another
share for backups for this one we are going to enable the use of the SSD cache
so we can take advantage of faster local network transfer speeds remember data
from the cache moves to the array nightly we're going to create a Shadow
play share for game footage you know this is supposed to be a gaming machine
and all that but for this one there's no need to enable the cash because Shadow
play won't write more than 5 megabytes per second at a time and will never
exceed the speed of the array even if we turn off the faster writing speed option
another cool share to create is a game Library share so if you predominantly
use steam you can actually map a network drive in the OS later and we'll show you
how to do this and throw all of your steam gains especially the ones that
don't suffer from slow loading times or that are large or you don't play that
often and throw them onto the magnetic storage rather than taking up space on
your SSD the last thing that you'll see here is US setting up our domains and
isos shares for VMS um we're doing this
manually the same way we did in the two Gamers one CPU video but by the time 6.2
goes public beta uh this will be done for you and you won't have to worry
about it please note these ones are not exported which means that they won't be
browsable by other network attached devices this is fine we intend them to
use on the local machine next we're going to enable VMS in settings VM
manager click the download button next to vert iio driver then we need to copy
a Windows ISO this can be downloaded legally from Microsoft directly to the
iso's folder using another networked computer in my case I've got it on a USB
stick on this computer in front of me now this is an advanced and therefore
optional step it's possible to not only
manually assign plugged-in USB devices to your VM before you boot it mice
keyboards XLR audio interfaces Etc but
it's also possible to completely pass through an entire USB controller to your
VM so we threw a random dual USB 3 Port
PCI E card into our system and we're going to show you guys how we can pass
it through to enable hot plugging in some cases you'll be able to assign some
of the onboard ports on your motherboard to your VM while leaving others to
unraid to deal with but this varies from motherboard to motherboard and platform
to platform Skylake for example for the same reason we couldn't pass through our
onboard audio can have trouble with this
using putty a free tool log into your server using the unraid username rout by
default then run this command to see all USB controllers in the system our NEC
PCIe USB device is the one that we added ourselves the next command shows us the
vendor product ID which we've highlighted then we go back to the
unraid web guei and in the main tab we click the flash device then put pc-
stub. IDs equals and paste the ID we got
from before and hit apply the system will need to be rebooted at this stage
so stop the array and reboot once rebooted we can start the array then go
to VMS and add our first VM just click Windows 10 change the name to what you
want assign CPU cores I generally recommend assigning the hyperthreaded
cores and the physical cores to the same assignment we've gone with 12 gigs of
RAM for games and chrome we're going to
pick our Windows installation media for storage we're going to assign most of
our SSD space to our VM using just a little bit for our cash then we pick out
our video card we pass through only the NVIDIA HDMI audio due to immu issues
with the onboard audio then we're passing through the USB devices that we
recognize so you'll see three Logitech ones for our keyboard mouse and USB
gaming headset then that optional step from before we can pass through our NEC
USB controller which gives us those hot pluggable ports so we don't have to
restart our VM to plug in a USB drive or something along those lines all right so
we are finally finally at the end of our journey but first this is very important
this HDMI cable comes out of the Onboard
video and goes into our dedicated
graphics card because otherwise when we boot up the VM there's going to be no
video output because we assigned that dedicated graphics card to our VM so
here we go oh
yes 12 gigs of system memory tested okay
is amazing so now we install Windows the way that we just kind of normally would
mostly stay tuned okay so here's the
trick you're going to get to the point where it asks where you want to install Windows and there's nothing there so you
want to load drivers click browse and
then you're going to navigate to your CD drive convert IO win
0.1.1 then go to the Vio store folder
then you're going to go to Windows 8.1 amd64 and press okay then
next yes third times the charm now we
can install Windows next so now that TR at the
desktop you'll have to install drivers for any devices that are missing them so
for any of the stuff you don't recognize you're probably just going to navigate
to your ver iio and manually add drivers and then you're probably going to want
to throw some graphics drivers on and
then actually there's some other post Windows installed tuning things that you
might want to check out from two Gamers one CPU but other than that that's
pretty much it so I'll show you guys how to utilize your array shares to make
mapped network drives so that you can have all your Shadow play stuff go to
one place uh so that you can have all of your Steam games install in another
place um but really the sky is the limit here you can create as many shares
within unrate as you want and then you can map as many network drives as you
want as well anytime you want to make changes you just go into a browser go to
gaming Nas in our case or whatever it is that you want to call it and then you've
got access to the entire unraid console to create more shares change any
settings or do things like oh hey I'm going to for stop my VM I wouldn't
recommend doing that that'll shut down the computer you're using immediately so
all that's left now is the day-to-day usability so you can set your VMS to
auto start by just going to the VMS Tab and going yeah anytime I turn this
machine on I want my gaming rig to start up and my monitor to turn on and all
that stuff and then yeah I guess there's a couple little things that you might
want to invest in to make your life a bit easier like having an extra keyboard
and mouse as well as an extra display cable so you can use the multiple inputs
of your monitor to switch if you're desperate and you have to get it the
gooey because you can't access it over the network or whatever else but the
cost of those items compared to if you had to buy a standalone NZ for your
household is much much lower but of
course that would all be meaningless if the performance of the finished machine
wasn't still you know pretty much on par
with the gaming machine that you intended to buy for yourself so let's
have a quick look here boom Crisis 3 my
friends and check this out I'm going to initiate a file
transfer to myself gaming Nas media and check this
out no frame rate dip copying at 100
megabytes per second and if we Tab out check this out we can even see real time
stats of what's going on with our storage and our networking and the
transfer is done already so that was fast so there you have it guys it
actually worked there is more to UNR than this especially if you want to
start tinkering with other virtual machines and all that kind of stuff but
I thought that this use case scenario was super applicable to our audience
where you've probably only got you know one BA gaming rig in the house you
probably have a use for network attached storage and sharing uh off-site backup a
lot of the other functionality that you can dig a little deeper and get at with
Docker containers and stuff like that so being able to combine that functionality
rather than buying a separate uh mother board separate CPU separate case
separate power supply being able to do all of that off of one single high
quality machine I personally think is pretty darn cool so let us know with a
comment and a like below if you agree
which I guess leads us pretty well into our sponsor for today's episode Logitech
we've actually had a lot of Logitech stuff going on in here we got the g91
and Spark we've got the g502 Proteus core but the focus today is the g633
emis spect headset it's been completely redesigned by Logitech from their
previous headsets to be better in well pretty much every possible way it's USB
with support for surround it's more comfortable it's more durable it sounds
better and with the uh that's actually
that's a lot better it was a monitoring is on so I can hear myself talking and
with the fold out and extend perfectly positionable microphone you will sound
better to your gaming friends as well we've got a link in the video
description where you can learn more about this puppy you can be like oh yeah
I want to know more about the you know 40 mm prot tuned drivers and I want to
know more about the you know comfort and the shape of the ear cups that is
actually the shape of ears I mean does anyone on Earth actually have round ears
I don't know I've never actually seen one so check out that link in the video
description all right thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video
you know where that button is but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed and maybe even consider I
don't know uh supporting us by shopping on Amazon we've got the instructions for
how to do that up there you can also buy a cool shirt like this one or you can give us a monthly contribution through
our Forum get yourself a Nifty little contributor badge now that you're done
doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next and hey how
about you go back and watch two Gamers one CPU if you hadn't already it's also
using un raid but in that case we actually ignored the nas functionality
entirely and did two gaming VMS off of a single machine both with pretty much
bare to the metal performance it is pretty darn impressive