The recent network stress test here in our gaming center was a huge success.
Unfortunately, we also found a big issue that night.
See, it was the vibe. Just, it kinda sucked.
When we did land parties at my house, we had people in the theater room, kicking back, playing couch games.
We had a table set up for board games. We even dragged the bubble hockey game from our staff lounge
into my foyer for some epic late night puck battles.
Which got me thinking. Whale Land needs more than just rows of BYOC tables
and people sitting gaming shoulder to shoulder. What it needs is experiences.
I'm talking like things people wouldn't normally do, like multiplayer VR gaming
or bringing out the stereoscopic 3D gaming setup.
Oh, not that again. That can come later. The first thing I want for our first inaugural third Whale Land
is a rapid deployment 8v8 gaming station that's designed specifically
so that you can look your opponents right in the whites of their eyes
while you roll over them in your warthog. See, that's a big thing you miss out on
when your teammates and your opponents are scattered like ants across a large arena.
I also want no bulls*** to sit down and game.
So the machines need to be preconfigured with their game installs and updates
so that we can pack as much gaming goodness into the weekend as possible.
But managing 16 computers, kind of a big undertaking.
How do you manage all the game installs, all the accounts? Do we do 16 physical computers
or can we do it with virtual machines? Can we design it so it can be deployed
in less than 30 minutes? I'm gonna need some help with this.
Well, sounds good. I'm in. What's my budget though? As much as you want.
But don't waste any money. Okay, but how do you want to do this?
I trust you. As fun as it would be to go balls to the wall
with daddy's credit card. He did actually give me some off-camera guidance.
First is about deployment. This thing is for live events,
so we need it to be ready to go in as little time as possible.
And second is power consumption. We obviously have ample power at the badminton center,
but we don't want to be wasteful either. And many local land games
are kind of on the older side anyways. So no 5090s.
And finally, we want easy maintenance for the machines.
It would be pretty annoying if you guys came and sat down at a ready to go system
and were interrupted by updates. I have some ideas on this.
Some are actually inspired by Kenton's Epic Landhouse that Linus got to go visit.
But I'm gonna circle back to them later because I actually need to decide what hardware first.
And for that, I've got two solid ideas, both of which actually use a server rack
since it can be wheeled around easy for deployment. And I might get some bonus points from Linus
because you know, me and him are both rack gaming bros. Idea number one is less interesting,
but it's probably the simpler to build. And that's 16 individual machines in two separate racks.
One for each team. The advantages are that it would be using consumer gear,
which is quite typically quieter. And I would expect performance
to actually be a little better as well because they won't be sharing any of the system resources.
More on that in a second. The disadvantage is that while there is management software
out there for maintaining a fleet of systems, it's either non-user friendly, expensive, or both.
And that's where idea number two comes in, virtualization. You've probably seen us build multi-headed gaming systems
on this channel before, but if you're new to the idea, instead of building a whole bunch of decent systems,
you build one mega overkill system with enough CPU cores,
system memory, and storage that it can actually be split across as many players as you need.
And then you give them a dedicated GPU to each of those virtual machines.
A major advantage is that server hardware is designed from the ground up
for the best reliability and easy management. However, server hardware is typically louder,
and in a room that will already have several hundred people and machines,
I'd rather not add any of this.
You just taken in the noise? It could also be more expensive,
depending on the kind of system we choose. An individual Epic CPU can easily run 10 grand or more.
But on the other hand, it can run like 10 systems.
So maybe it works? I think I'm getting ahead of myself though, because I think a bigger challenge
is actually going to be anti-cheat. Some games just refuse to work
if they detect that they're running on a virtual machine. And while there are ways to mask it,
I don't want to constantly be updating or fixing this every time a game decides to update.
I think I need to do a little bit more research.
I think I have a concept of a plan.
I think I'm going to borrow elements from both ideas. For the computer, I think 16 individual machines is the play.
That's because while Linus might be okay playing older games, like Halo CE and Worms Armageddon,
I don't want to be locked in the past. Plus, with a single machine,
a single hardware failure takes down the whole setup. I'd rather hedge our bets.
Also, I think I found a solution to make a multi-PC deployment a bit more manageable.
I'll show you that a bit later, because first, I want to actually build
one of the 16 systems here. And we're going to be starting with this.
The mini's form BD790IX3D-US.
That's kind of a mouthful, but it's also a hardware full. This mini ITX board includes a Ryzen 9 7945HX3D,
another mouthful, a total power draw of just 100 watts
thanks to its mobile CPU, enough I.O. for our gaming peripherals,
and maybe more importantly, a 2.5 gigabit onboard network connection.
This is key, because if we end up deciding
to boot over the network, like Kenton did, this will be a major advantage
over a standard 1 gigabit connection. While it's a great board, it does have some drawbacks,
like we're stuck with sodom memory, but we did find a decently priced G-Skill RipJaws kit,
which runs at 5,600 megatransfers per second, and we're going to be loading these up with 32 gigabytes,
which is great for now, and I shouldn't need to upgrade these down the line.
To get to our storage, we just take off these two little screws. There we go,
and we're going to be installing one terabyte drives. It's more than enough to handle a handful of games
and even throw a quick game on it if we need to, but we're probably not going to use this drive much,
unless my management solution fails, which it might because I picked it,
but I'm crossing my fingers for now. Building computers goes really fast
when the CPU and the cooler are already pre-installed, and I don't even need to put this in a case,
more on that later, because we're already onto our GPU, and some of you are probably going to be surprised
to hear this. We're going AMD. An RTX 5070 would have also been a very solid choice
because of its low power consumption and not to mention all of the NVIDIA features like DLSS,
but in competitive games, especially older ones, we're not going to need any DLSS frame gen.
We'd rather just have raw gaming performance, and that's why we chose the 9070XT from Power Color.
Well, can't really see it. Give me one second. Strongest tape in the world, my goodness.
There we go. It's got 16 gigabytes of VRAM, which buys us a bit of future-proofness
and has measurably better performance in traditional raster rendering,
though it does kind of come at the cost of extra power consumption and money.
$600 MSRP times 16 of these bad boys.
Maybe Power Color is willing to send us another 15, and then Linus won't be mad at me.
Power Color, please.
Please. Last but not least, we need to power the whole thing,
even though it doesn't look like it needs much power. So we picked up a C-Sonic Focus SPX 750W.
We're kind of riding the line here a bit on what AMD's recommended PSU is for this GPU,
but it's C-Sonic. It's quality, quiet, and decently priced for a small form factor unit.
Should be fine. Now that this is booted, we're just going to get it updated to be
as close to as final as possible so it can give you guys an idea
of what we're expecting from these systems. I was wondering why my Windows updates
were taking so long to download, so we opened up hardware info here.
My CPU is at a crisp 100 degrees.
I didn't take that into consideration, so we're going to throw a little fan on it.
There it is. Here you go. The one computer that we're going to be using,
well, we'll need 16 of them. Building one of them was kind of the easy part.
Let's talk about managing them. As I mentioned earlier, IT managers will have lots of solutions available to them
that they can scale beyond our dozen machines or so,
but dealing with game updates and installs is a little bit different
than dealing with Windows updates, which is why we're going to be stealing,
borrowing, that Texas land house idea. Thankfully, Kenton actually documented
the entire process on his GitHub. All I have to do is kind of follow along.
It's a little bit involved, but the TLDR is this.
Before every LAN party, we just set up one of these machines. I'm talking driver updates,
Windows updates, game installs, game updates, any other software we might need,
like Discord or Epic Game Launcher. You know, the entire works.
Then we copy that entire Windows install and create a bootable disk image.
We then copy that image to our central storage server,
which was upstairs, not here, but at the Padminton Center,
and our 16 machines will boot over the network
using that image, meaning the only manual step
is actually going around and signing into each one with Whaleland 1,
Whaleland 2, or whatever we decide to name them.
This approach is not only easy, but it offers protection for the player and for us.
That way, users don't have to sign into their own accounts on our systems,
and then we can easily wipe the computers in the event that someone tampers with them.
I shouldn't have to say this, by the way, but if you do that, you will be banned for life from Whaleland
and maybe prosecuted or made fun of. Maybe the entire thing.
Just don't do that. Let's play some games. I want to see what kind of performance
we're getting out of this system. Max FPS, 300 right now.
Our 1% lows are about 120. We're at 1440p, I should mention,
at 144hz on the monitor. That's as high as I'd want to go
for our esports-ish settings. There's no need to go 4K,
and we might even go 1080p if it means we get higher FPS.
You know, I'm seeing a lot of 1% lows in the 120,
but it doesn't feel itchy. Like, I'm not noticing the hitches right now.
You know, just an easy 860 FPS in Rocket League.
I don't know how much of a LAN game this is, but, you know, it's a type of game
that people might play. I've never played with keyboard and mouse. This is terrible.
Our 1% lows, though, are 800 as well. So this is going to feel so great.
No hitches, and I mean, I've only been playing 30 seconds.
Maybe once this heats up, we'll get some hitches. But for now, this is doing pretty great.
More than enough power for gaming, especially some of those lighter esports titles.
But there's a major problem I haven't even brought up yet. Even if I manage to squeeze each of these systems
into a thin little 2U chassis, that's 36Us.
Plus networking, plus power distribution. This thing's going to be the size
of a full-height server rack, not to mention really loud,
because I'm probably going to need fans in those 2U cases. Also, I'd be spending like $5,000 on just cases.
What am I going to do now? Do I have to start over?
Throwing out all of my hard work? It took me so long to find those GPUs.
Do I have to go back to a virtualization setup? Server hardware costs so much money, though.
But I don't want to do virtualization. Then I'm stuck playing Linus' Boomer games.
I don't want to play Boomer games.
I don't know what to do. Why don't we just make a custom case that can house all the computers?
What? I said let's make a custom case to put all the computers in.
That's genius! Then it'd be small enough to fit in a server rack,
and then we can play it at Whalen. Well, in part two, I'm going to be buying 16 computers,
assembling them in a server rack, deploying them at Whalen, and then we're going to test drive it
at the very first Whalen.
I just hope my check doesn't bounce. If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out the video we did a couple months ago where Jake and Linus built a Steam cache,
and they tested it with 100 people at a private LAN. It was pretty cool.