Seven Gamers 1 CPU, which you can check out over here, was one of the most
successful videos in every way that I
have ever made. So, I determined almost immediately that I had to follow it up
somehow. But one of the biggest criticisms of Seven Gamers was that it
was kind of overthe-top and
impractical. So, in working on a sequel,
I called up a friend of mine for some advice. Hey. Yeah,
Mikey, you've got experience with
dealing with negative feedback about your over-the-top style. How would you
respond? And that, my friends, is how
eight gamers, one CPU was born.
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Bear for free at the link in the video description. Okay, but for real, the
objectives of eight gamers were several.
One, I did want to outdo the original
project. Two, I wanted the machine to have some kind of practical application.
If not today, then at some point in the
future, and three, I wanted the hardware
to actually behave predictably in this
kind of a use case. Between the WS board and the R9 Nanos, that last machine was
a nightmare. I'm fairly certain I was the first person and only including ASUS
R&D to ever try seven cards in that board at a time. So the recipe started
as it always seems to with Intel inside.
For months leading up to the release, I had been harassing my contacts, all of
them, about availability of 22 core
Broadwell EP 2699 V4 processors so that
I could pack 44 cores. That is 88
threads of CPU power into this monster.
And they came through. And for that matter, so did Kingston with eight 32
gig sticks of quad channel ECC DDR4
server memory along with a bunch of 1 TBTE SSDs that I divvied up into 16 gigs
of RAM and 1 TBTE worth of space for
each of my VMs with actually about 100 gigs of RAM left over for Unrade.
Because yes, my friends, Unrade is returning for more virtualized gaming
action. Now, some folks have asked why I continue to use Unrade for these
projects instead of something like KVM from Red Hat or VMware. Well, there are
a few reasons. One, Unra uses
KVM. It's open source. Two, it handles
GPU pass through, which is important for the impressive near bare metal
performance in gaming applications that we measured in this video really, really
well. And three, it's pulled safe
storage is an easy way to manage data across multiple VMs. And I've got
another clever trick to show you guys this time, too. All right, so that's all
fine and good and very similar to last time. So, what's the difference then,
Lionus? Well, first up is the Super Micro SYS 4028
GR-TRT, a dual LGA 20113 Zeon 24 memory
slot, 24 SSD slot, barebone server
designed for high computational density
applications like scientific research and simulation. functionality is enabled
by its 11 PCI Express 16X slots, eight
of which are advertised as being ready for a graphics card or compute card like
a Zeon Fi or NVIDIA Tesla. Though
perhaps more than eight is possible with some extra power cables running from its
four redundant 1,000 W power supplies.
More on that later. The other main difference is in the graphics cards.
Thanks to AMD's half-ass relinquishing of hardware resources, when you soft
reset a system, the entire host last
time needed to be shut down every time I
had to reset a single VM for a driver installation or a crash or whatever
else. So, I cried about my sad story to
Zotac, and they not only ponyied up eight of their top-of-the-line GTX 980
Ti AMP video cards to ensure that each of my gamers would have a perfect gaming
experience, but they also contributed the thin clients that I needed for this
very different implementation. for each of their Zbox B series and C
series with low power Intel processors. We've actually covered Zotac's wide
variety of quiet, sometimes shockingly powerful mini PCs in the past. And
combining these with some HyperX sodium memory modules and 240 gig SSDs from
Kingston, we had some awesome client boxes to hook up the gorgeous 27 in IPS
4K 27 UD 888 Freync gaming monitors that
LG provided. Because eight gamers, one
CPU is all about my vision for a
high-tech household in the future. Something I've talked about before on
the WAN Show, a high-powered machine in the closet that can allocate, preferably
dynamically, computing power, gaming, or
even otherwise to wherever it's needed. A TV or projector, as many desktops or
laptops spread throughout the building as needed, or even a handheld device
like an NVIDIA Shield portable. I wanted
effectively to build my own NVIDIA grid,
but with consumer GPUs and using Valve's
Steam inhome streaming to serve to all my clients. Not something they had in
mind for it, I'm sure. So, let's talk then about the setup process. Was it
actually simpler? Well, the hardware was less
flaky this time, which means that this hypers speed setup guide for Unrade that
you guys are looking at went much smoother. Copy files to USB drive. Make
drive bootable. Assign SSDs to cache for high-speed OS and game drives. Assign
larger drives to the array for mass storage. Create VMs. Share storage
between the VMs. Which Whoa, slow down there, John. Kingston sent us like 10 of
their SSDs for this. And you just shared
data between virtual discs at the time
of creation. So on a single terabyte of storage, you could have 10 VMs each with
200 gigs of Windows, games, other base
applications and 100 gigs each of
dedicated storage. Very efficient.
Hopefully that feature makes it into the web gooey at some point. So all of that
was fine then. But the disadvantage to
aworked solution like this is that while in theory you can manage the entire
setup from a single terminal somewhere else in the building. In practice,
remote desktop connection session management required this little trick I
found on the Steam forums to disconnect in such a way as to not bork Steam in
home streaming. Then I needed to reach out to FitP who whipped me up 10
prototypes of their new 4K headless HDMI
dongle that can handle up to 4K 60 Hz
and allows the video cards HDMI audio
device to be active on a remote client. This is needed unless you would want to
install a bunch of sound cards or something like that.
So then finally after all of that, it was time to get all my gamers to sign
into Steam on the server side using Team Viewer and on the client side on their
machines that ranged from comfortable gaming seats to less comfortable gaming
seats. And after fighting with some of the weirdness, get things fired up right
now cuz I need to play this game. Looks fine. The controls do feel a little bit
laggy. Um, but I think part of that is just the god-awful vehicle controls with
keyboard and mouse on GTA. My gaming experience has so far been relatively
normal. It was indoors for the most part, but now that it's outdoors, it
seems like the graphics quality actually takes a dip sometimes. Well, so far I
started the game up. I got through the intros and then somebody pointed out
that my game was going in slow-mo, which it does look like it in fact is going in
slow-mo. No, I don't feel like I'm gaming on anything that's in the closet.
I started playing and I'm like playing and I'm like assuming that the tower was
just under the desk and then it like glitched out and then I was like,
"Wait." And then I like thought about it and I was like,
"Oh, latency pretty smooth. Like it's
it's it's pretty seamless. It doesn't seem like I said it doesn't seem like
I'm running remotely. It feels like I'm I'm hooked up to like a full fat gaming
power. less than perfect, but almost a little bit laggy, but like a little bit
compression that I noticed from the streaming, but other than that, it's like it's pretty good. Would you
consider putting your gaming machine in a closet and beaming it to thin clients
on a new TV or if I was playing CS GO then? No. But for any other game, I
think it would be perfectly fine. I don't know about switching, but maybe
consider adding it. Um cuz I don't think I would want to hide my rig in like a
closet somewhere. But at the same time, it would be useful if I'm out of the
room and I don't want to be sitting. I I don't want to be tethered to like, you know, a battle station or something. I
want to move elsewhere. So, so that could be really good. So, I think the
conclusion here is pretty straightforward. While we pushed the
hardware and the software and our
networking infrastructure, I mean, we are streaming a lot of data right now to
the limits. Most people's experiences are actually surprisingly good. And
while I don't think we're ready for LAN
centers, for example, to just have a server room with a bunch of machines,
you can see there I just ran into an issue. I'll there that was just a hiccup
for while I don't think we're ready for LAN centers to just have, you know, a
server rack in a closet somewhere and a bunch of thin clients spread out
throughout the land center. I don't think we're that far away. And seeing it
perform as well as it did, especially
considering the fact that we're running GTX 980 Ti and Titan X's all sandwiched
next to each other with many of them thermal throttling is pretty darn
impressive. And I hope you guys can agree and uh look forward like me to a
future where you can just have one box that powers the gaming experiences of an
entire household of people as computers continue to get more and more
powerful. And I hope you can also agree that this is a somewhat more practical
application of this technology than just having a bunch of people plugged into
and gathered around a single tower. Which is why I wanted to do it as a
followup. I guess this is sort of networking
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guys. If you dislike this video, you can hit that dislike button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed,
maybe even consider supporting us by using our affiliate code to shop at
Amazon. Instructions are up there. You can, you know, buy one of these LG
monitors, one of these Zotac thin clients, uh, one of those fantastic 22
core Broadwell EP CPUs, or maybe just a
new video card from our friends over at Zotac, or just anything you want
actually, even toilet paper. Helps us out a lot. You can buy a cool shirt like this one at the link in the video
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description. And if you're done all that stuff, you're wondering what to watch
next. Hey, if you haven't already, check out the original 7 gamers 1 CPU. It is
pretty different, actually, surprisingly so. So, don't miss it.