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. It
just it kind of 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 VIOC tables and people sitting gaming
shouldertoshoulder. 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. >> No, 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 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
going to 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.
>> Do I do I get any help? >> Sure. You get this budget
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As fun as it would be to go balls to the wall with daddy's credit card, he did
actually give me some off- camerara 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 Lionus got to go visit. But I'm going to
circle back to them later cuz 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 Lionus 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-userfriendly 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 taking 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
antiche. 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 Lionus 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 Minism BD790 EIX3D-US.
That's kind of a mouthful, but it's also a hardware full. This MiniITX board
includes a Ryzen 9 7945HX3D,
another mouthful. a total power draw of just 100 watts thanks to its mobile CPU,
enough I/IO for our gaming peripherals, and maybe more importantly, a 2.5 GB
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 GB connection. While it's a great board, it
does have some drawbacks, like we're stuck with soda memory. But we did find
a decently priced G-skll Rip Jaws kit, which runs at 5600 mega transfers per
second. And we're going to be loading these up with 32 GB, 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 1 TB 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
cuz 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 9070 XT 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 GB 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. Uh, $600
MSRP times 16 of these bad boys. Maybe
Powerol is willing to send us another 15, and then Lionus 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 CIC Focus SPX 750 watt. We're kind
of riding the line here a bit on what AMD's recommended PSU is for this GPU,
but it's CIC. 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 we 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 uh hardware info here.
My CPU is at a crisp uh 100°. 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 Lanhouse 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 TLDDR is
this. Before every land 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 disc
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 whale land one, whale 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 Whailand 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 144 hertz on the monitor. That's as high as I'd want to
go for our esportsish 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 hitchy. 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 land 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 this is going to be 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 36 U's 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 two U cases. Also, I'd be spending like $5,000 on just cases.
What am I going to do now? Do I 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 Lionus' 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 Whaland. Well, in part two, I'm going to be buying 16 computers,
assembling them in a server rack, deploying them at Whaleand, and then we're going to test drive it at the very
first Whaleand. I just hope my check doesn't bounce. Well, that'd be really
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