portions of this video are sponsored by lastpass like five years ago on the lan
show luke and i made the prediction that even if cloud gaming could never solve
its problems with latency and game licensing the hardware that was used to
run it was gonna get so powerful that it
would be feasible to use a single computer as like the computing brain of
your house and run all of the gaming machines under a single roof off of a
single box and my friends
it has happened AMD's epic lineup of
server processors are available in configurations with up to
64 processing cores guys that is enough CPU
resources to run 16 virtual machines each with a quad
core processor off of a single chip in a
single socket and guys these are not weak cores so we don't actually need
quite that many of them for my house so we've gone with an epic 7502 p that's a
32 core processor that runs that 2.5
gigahertz base and actually boosts up to 3.3
gigahertz so we're going to be using this as well as
all of this to convert all my computers
to run off of a single motherboard
my personal gaming rig which i also use for streaming very occasionally my
wife's rig which she uses for work and also very occasionally gaming so i like
to still keep it up to spec this one's not actually running right now because we got a
broken Thunderbolt optical cable the gaming machine that runs the world's
most comfortable gaming setup my nas that i use for bulk storage and as a
plex media server and finally the home theater pc slash vr gaming rig that's in
my living room so managing credentials between all of these different machines
can be a bit of a hassle thanks laspass for sponsoring this portion of today's
video that's why i use our sponsor lastpass and i've been using them for
years now lastpass's browser extension and app makes signing into your accounts
across all of your devices fast and easy
without writing down passwords learn more about it at the link below or by
waiting until the end of the video thanks to lastpass for sponsoring this
portion now on to the rest of the video
what does a machine that's powerful enough to take the place of four to five
others look like let's walk through all the specs starting of course with the
processor so our 7502p here it's 32
cores 64 threads but more importantly than that it's got
128 pci express gen 4 lanes on it that
means that almost no matter what we plug into this thing whether it's m.2 drives
for high speed storage or regular SATA drives or a ton of pci
express expansion cards including graphics cards everything is going to be
getting the full bandwidth that is absolutely incredible and all while
consuming only 200 watts which sounds
like a lot but remember that's gonna be four to five cpus so
now as for what we've got it installed on this is a Gigabyte
mz32ar0 this is one of the few standalone extended atx motherboards
that has full support for pci express gen 4 almost across the board pun
definitely intended it's got an incredible amount of connectivity
including a bunch of NVMe storage regular storage seven pci express slots
uh only two of them i think are even gen 3 which is
unbelievable and it's got a remote management port as well as one of these
ocp mezzanine card ports where we've got an ASUS dual 10 gigabit lan card so this
thing is going to have high speed connectivity both in and out
now as for our graphics cards unfortunately unless you go full
enterprise NVIDIA doesn't currently support splitting a GPU into multiple
virtual machines the same way that a CPU manufacturer does so we've actually got
four total graphics cards one for each of the gaming rigs provided by NVIDIA
and then of course ASUS rog so an rtx
titan for my gaming rig a 2080 ti for the vr rig and then a couple 2070s for
the ones that just need to be like basically up to spec
finally this is amazing we have
512 gigs of ddr4
2666 memory from micron they sent this
over for this project today and it's running in eight
channel mode that means we have a ton of bandwidth each of my individual vms is
going to have effectively dual channel ddr4 worth of memory bandwidth that is
unfreaking believable not to mention that each one could have over 100 gigs
of RAM by the way if you're into tons of RAM make sure you're subscribed because
we've got a project up coming soon where we're gonna have two terabytes of RAM on
a single epic processor now in a perfect world what we'd really
like to do is install all of our graphics cards directly in the slots put
water blocks on them so they only take up a single slot and you know water cool
the whole thing so you get that that density
but because we're at the really proof of concept phase right now we're just going
to use these pci express extenders
here we go to run the cards out of the motherboard
like this and then we'll run our power cables a little something like this it's
not the prettiest way to do this but
it's functional and uh you know all we need to do is plug into
it so you know the card can just kind of sit there the last thing i'm installing
here is a couple of usb 3 cards we're going to need to pass through usb 3
ports to our virtual machines in order to have usb 3 ports and unfortunately
this motherboard only has three of them one of which is going to
be taken up by this usb drive that we're installing our os on i'm going to be
using unraid just because i'm most comfortable with it and also because i
use unraid for my personal nas at home so if this works amazingly and we end up
deploying this in the long term that is how i would end up using it just with a
bunch of hard drives connected as well oh actually wait i forgot about the
internal usb 3 ports
there we go we can use that for our os so now that our machine is assembled
we've got all this power but we don't really have a solution for
how to pipe it around the house so to speak now
we used to do this with Thunderbolt back when i set up my gaming rig in the next
room over along with my wife's but between the reliability issues with the
Thunderbolt 2 optical cables random weirdness like displays see look at this
this has been sitting here since we started filming this failing to go to
sleep and the lack of especially server
motherboards with like four or more Thunderbolt ports on them we needed
another solution now display was easy this is a 50 foot
light link DisplayPort connector from sewell direct that they sent over
actually for an unrelated sponsor spot a few months ago hey these are finally
come in handy but usb 3 was shockingly
difficult until we found this this nondescript brown box is from icron
technologies who are shockingly headquartered about 30 minutes from my
house that's super cool this is the raven
3124 usb over fiber extension and this
is the only usb 3 extender on the market
that uses multi-mode fiber with backwards compatibility for both usb 2
and even usb 1. trust me guys we looked
everywhere they have extremely low latency on the order of microseconds
which is very important for our vr gaming setup and thanks to their
extreme usb technology funny branding aside they can go up to
200 meters with complete transparency
that means no drivers and no funny business whatsoever
the problem is that this right here is a connector
that you are unlikely to find in the average house
so uh colin hasn't actually said much up until
now in this video and you're probably wondering why he's here well you're
probably not wondering that because you haven't seen him uh he's gonna be running
these what are these and what's special about them so these are fiber optic cables um
we have two different ends here strictly because we want to connect them into
these wall plates oh okay these wall plates the only option was an sc
connector so we're taking this sc connector
oh i broke that good thing we don't need it anymore not
anymore and everything with fiber optics has little plugs on it because we want to
keep these fibers really clean and so we will plug in the sc connector
on one side of our box and then on the other side we're going to plug in the
same sc cable and that leaves us with two lc ends and these lcns are what
interface with our boxes and now it's as simple as that
plug and play it's not that hard just don't break these cables they're very
fragile and expensive and expensive they actually weren't that bad well in the
context of how much this costs they're not that bad
these are really cool plates where did you get these so these are data pro uh
they're a company down in the states somewhere might be canada i can't
remember honestly but they do custom wall plates and you can get them laser
etched and you can get whatever you want they have a real cool configurator on
the website you can just plug in all the ports you want and uh they even send in
the the keystone connectors so we plug in like our fiber optic DisplayPort
into here and then we just have a port so normal and then a normal plug so we
just throw this Linus and Yvonne's machines we throw that in the wall there
we just plug in normal cables bippidy off you go so this is the one for the vr
machine and then this is the one for world's most comfortable yeah that is
sick we're going to start with a vr system run so what challenges are we
expecting so the hardest part of this whole ordeal is keeping these cables
from breaking we have to be very gentle it's just a glass fiber so we're going
to gently attach them to this fish cable and we're going to fish it
all the way to the server room and then we're going to drop some down to the vr
setup and then bring some all the way around to here by the way if you smell p
around here it's because our old cats used to pee here so it's p
so in order to get access to the wall here careful careful it's cable managed
real tight back there so you want to just spot me while i pull it out okay
move the speaker we good we good
okay so to get access to the
uh to the wall back here we're just gonna need to pull the media console out
is that enough yeah i think so okay and what we're gonna do is we're actually
gonna use the same wall box from the existing Ethernet run except
this time we're gonna bring it down with fiber and DisplayPort and then we're
going to use that usb extension which
conveniently also has Ethernet yep pipes the right through
to go ahead and provide Ethernet for the rest of the devices here now it's not 10
gigs so at some point i'll probably run another one you know just diva thing
it's only five gig for now we're no no the Ethernet is probably one gig
which is like realistically fine yeah okay let's go do
that okay uh bye bye colin bye
also there's definitely something actively in here what yeah there's like wet spots
and i'm like if my roof is leaking no it kind of smells like pee
i wonder if the cat got in there either the cat or something like there's
like so many dirt ah sorry it's okay
i just have to wash my pants wash everything wash all the
things yeah so full self really need this to boot up like now okay let's go
what's going on here why is it not booting i have drilled a hole in line
with this pot light and i'm really hoping that the fish tape that i shove
down that hole into the wall is going to line up with
the uh the plate here i kind of doubt it
it's it's like a foot too far in but worst case scenario i'll
go back drill another hole and just try to get in the next wall space so this is
the Ethernet that was run outside
so i can't really use it to fish my fiber optics back up the hill
so to speak um all right so i think what we're going to
do is unplug all the graphics cards get this booted up and then start
plugging them back in one at a time we've seen this before with six workstations one CPU and the good news
is because we haven't water cooled it all together and created a custom
chassis there's plenty of time to sort out these kinds of issues the big thing
we're testing today is whether the fiber optic usb and displayport solution is
actually any good ew dead squirrel
what what there's a dead squirrel in here
oh my god that's disgusting yep okay how old is it uh
it's not moist anymore if that's what you're wondering
okay sorry i've shoved the fish tape all the way
down but there's no saying it so
and i'm in line with this box i think
so i'm in the next wall space over so i think i'm going to
mark out poke a hole and
pray and we're going to see if we can find the tape in there
i get to wreck Linus's house yes i think i have like a 50 chance of
finding it in the wall you said 70. i did say 70 earlier i just dropped it
down to be realistic um so i found the
edge of the next stud yeah and so that's where i think i am in the wall given the
pot light so i'm ready to poke a hole i just need to kill the power okay and
then we can fish the cable down and hope we find it okay well there's nothing powered up
over here that matters so go ahead and start flipping breakers i they're sort
of labeled oh that helps why did i drill two holes because i
should have put the first hole on the edge of where i need to cut so i can get
the saw in there
hey there it is okay
so i think i know what the issue is this board is still running the release
BIOS from four months ago so there's a new one
that apparently fixes blue screen issues with graphics cards
apparently fixes issues with Intel network cards which is
exactly the kind of nick that we had plugged in so
um cd fs zero
current directory not specified
what does that mean so we've put a uh a hole in the wall
this guy fits quite nicely if i do say so myself
and uh now i'm going to go up to above this and uh
let's try and show the fish tape down there and see if i can find it
like a fox did you get it yeah nice
nice uh this sc connector is too big to fit
in the hole that i drilled in the joist upstairs so we're going to run the lc
connector which is what actually plugs into the devices
this guy will screw onto the end here i'm probably doing this wrong so any
electricians or people who pull data lines professionally
don't at me we are going to take
the actual usb fiber not just the display
port fiber this nice small end
that i can actually fit through the hole i drilled i'm gonna try and pull mostly from the
plug in the jacket boom we've got a nice little missile
to drag up okay so BIOS update seems to have worked i am in unread everything is
behaving as it should but i have a couple problems to solve
one is that my old vdisk so with a Windows 10 install on it it doesn't seem
to be booting for some reason not sure why oh i think we're stuck in a boot
loop you've got to be kidding me oh i think we're stuck in a boot loop you've
got to be kidding me i see that that's the same thing you brought me last time
oh there's a pattern in there where'd you get that
from my chair what the heck
please just need these graphics cards to show
up
wow i still need a few more things to go right but okay so devices that we need to plug in
then um oh
here's something i really didn't think of uh colin yes sir how many display
ports did we run down here just one
that's all you said to run um thinking
yeah there's no way to like get another one down here quickly and easily we
don't have another one thinking okay i have an idea we are
going to plug the primary display in upstairs we will plug the vr headset in
down here oh why how did i not think of this
let's try it just with the main tv first then
okay so things we need plugged in this
that's our keyboard mouse dongle doodad
is there a front one no i guess they're all in the back okay that's fine
i pulled the plugs off
we're connected and now we have the correct connector
to go into the back of the extender pull the little plug
send it Linus
oh it said it said HDMI displayport no
signal should we just test with something that
we know works yeah sure uh why don't you go ahead and plug it into the blue one
over there the blue one yeah in the back okay oh
yeah i gotta be that katarsonist again hold on a second what
did you unplug it no it was just sitting there
oh did you not plug it in
plug into the 2080 ti then i guess uh 2080 yep
no signal that's heartbreaking
okay we're locked in displayport so hopefully at some point it'll just go
nothing yet but the little light at the bottom is flashing orange wait
what am i plugging in the wrong thing these are directional
i didn't realize they were directional oh wait wait wait
got it okay
new plan since we had to rerun it anyway
we're gonna run the two here so we can have the tv and the vr setup running at
the same time i mean hey
look at that it's up yeah yep
oh okay honestly i think we got to call it here
today and pick this up again tomorrow with GPU pass-through working now we can
focus on setting up all of our vms and getting our peripherals working
as you guys might be able to tell i was up for quite a few hours last night
getting this all configured so not really feeling my best anymore but
the good news is we're ready to show you guys all four machines are running super
smoothly right now i'm just extracting a copy of the cinebench benchmark the only
real way to tell the difference between them is to fire up task manager and look
at their different specs so this one's got 128 gigs of RAM six cores i actually
have smt disabled on the CPU due to a
BIOS irregularity on our motherboard so those are six true cores and these are
eight true cores as opposed to uh you
know a virtual core and a true core so
eight true cores and finally what's this one got
a true course now remember guys individually these scores might not be
crazy impressive or anything but you gotta remember that this is four
instances running off of a single chip
so let's go ahead and go run run
run and we are two cores short because i've
reserved two of them for our virtualization hypervisor
they are all lit up right now ladies and gentlemen
this thing is working hard now let's just see how they do in terms
of performance here we come in at anywhere between around 2700 and 2000
but that's without having our smt enabled and that's with all of them
running at the same time so what i'm expecting is that even without altering
the core counts i'm gonna run one of these again we would actually get a
higher score if not all machines are going full tilt at the same time which
would be a pretty unlikely scenario and as expected we got
2900 points without changing any configuration just thanks to our CPU
being able to boost higher so that's great everything is performing
as we would expect so it's time to throw some gpus back into the vms and try and
light these monitors up okay
in theory everything's linked up so now it's just a matter of unplugging my
Thunderbolt dock here and switching over to optical displayport and optical usb
oh execution error oh crap okay uh one moment please
all right
peripherals lit up so our usb 2 backwards compatibility is running okay
so now what we need to do is get evons turned on
this is great so we had a connectivity issue there our usb 3 was flashing all
we needed to do was unplug and replug our fiber pass through and we're good to
go oh
150 gigs of RAM ladies and gentlemen
so uh this is it colin and i are going to try
and game on both of these machines at the same time over fiber optic
connections you might say we're gonna game at the
speed of light
you were waiting to do it if i didn't in case you're wondering why it's rise
of the tomb raider and not shadow of the tomb raider um i set up the vms with
really small virtual disks and shadow didn't fit
and i could have expanded them but then it would have taken longer to copy them back and forth over the network and
stuff so this is what we're doing
and the craziest thing about this kind of virtualized setup is that even though
we're using the same machine we don't have to both play the same game this is something not some game console you know
i want to do some you know 3d rendering or some crap on my
CPU colin shouldn't feel it at all in his
game while i crank the eight cores that are assigned to me
pretty sick hey so for world's most comfortable gaming
it's about to get uncomfortable because we actually totally forgot i forgot uh
this doesn't have DisplayPort so our wall jack is kind of useless we pulled
that out and then this was the only
long HDMI cable we had on and it's a 300
footer and we couldn't get it unspooled to get you know what just whatever don't
worry about it fiber optics are so cool
like that is a 300 foot HDMI cable and
we are at 4k 60 frames per second right now is that not freaking awesome
and of course guys just you know proof's in the pudding right
we are not running off of this pc
now something i haven't tried yet is whether we can actually run 120 hertz
4k or oh wow that was quick and worked just fine oh that's smooth
that is freaking awesome 50 feet of 120 hertz 4k oh and our
control panel's showing up now okay let's play a game
man i really hope this works so this is the 2080 ti equipped machine so
theoretically performance should be flipping awesome so far everything just
works you just plug stuff in and
usb 2 usb 3 this is 4k 120 hertz over long distance
we're running at like 80 FPS yeah it's a bit of an older game but
this thing is freaking cranked guys and
that's my gaming pc right there
look ma not actually hooked up
this is cool too so because we're using this usb extender
box it has lots of power going into it and that re-boosts the signal
we can even plug in peripherals with long cables like an
xbox controller or something like that boom plug and play the thing about vr
is between the cameras and the extremely latency sensitive nature of it
any problems with either your display connection or your usb connection are
going to result in a very very bad
experience so i think i found a problem generic
super speed usb hub here is showing up as a yellow exclamation mark
and it only happens when i plug in the index
it's okay i've got an idea right now i'm using this ASUS card with an as media
chipset to plug into my optical box and i'd like to swap it out for another one
but i don't have anything else handy which got me thinking
what do all rtx touring cards have
a usb type c port for that vr link or
whatever it's called thing so what if i plugged in a type c hub and
i plugged into that and passed that through
let's see what happens well the good news is it works at all i
wasn't 100 sure because i know that it's a slightly non-standard implementation
of usb type-c but uh the vr headset's still not
working let's go ahead and give it the old the old replug right now we've got
one of two possibilities either our miracle usb box is not a miracle or
there's something about virtualizing our usb controller that causes it to have
virtual hubs in the chain or something that's causing performance issues so to
diagnose this we're gonna take my vr gaming setup
we're gonna pop it in the room upstairs and see if that works with the usb box
well it picked up we're in game i will say last night i did manage to
get this far connected via the virtual machine
but it wouldn't go longer than about 10 or 15 seconds without the tracking going
all wonky which was making me pretty sick
so just because it's going now doesn't mean that we're out of the woods yet so
far i've had no performance and no tracking issues which is really
impressive when you consider that between the pc and the vr headset
there's not only my optical links but also the long tether so what all this
means then is that the concept of having our computers separated physically and
all in a centralized location and then accessing them over optical fiber in our
homes is sound it's just a matter of
the cost becoming controllable and maybe some software or driver issues being
sorted out pretty freaking cool
thanks lastpass for sponsoring this portion of today's video lastpass makes
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it out at the link in the video description and massive thanks to lastpass for sponsoring this portion of
our video hopefully you guys enjoyed this man this
was about as chaotic techy LTT as it gets but i am super
thrilled with the potential of the solution if nothing else it could be
used to take all the noise and heat generating components away from places
like your media room where you don't want it and consolidate it somewhere out
of sight and out of mind with no performance penalty that we can detect
flipping sick if you guys want to see more great projects like this make sure
you're subscribed and if you like this kind of virtualization stuff maybe check
out our previous video six workstations one CPU where we took a single tower and
edited 8k video six times off of it with
six independent editors