2 Gaming Rigs, 1 Tower - Virtualized Gaming Build Log
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,188 words · ~15 min read
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whoa whoa hold on a second Linus you can't do that
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actually yes we can and today we're
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going to be showing you guys a step by step how to build a single tower that
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can run two independent gaming rigs complete with their own keyboards mice
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and even video cards out of the same box
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off the same motherboard and the same CPU even so hit that like button if you
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guys are super amped on this topic and stay tuned this is going to be a wild
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ride
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so let's start with the inspiration for this build cooler master came to us and
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they were like hey we want to sponsor like a a build
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that you guys do in the master case five it's all modular and there's upgradable
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parts and you can like put a lot of hard drives in or you could not put a lot of
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hard drives in you could put a motherboard in or lots of graphics cards
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or just view graphics cards you could build like anything you want in there
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use your imagination i was kind of like okay well my imagination is that i've
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always kind of wanted to do like something with virtualization and like
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two gaming rigs running off of one computer because when you think about it
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looking at the rest of the hardware we're using here and we do this all the
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time we build like these super overpowered machines with like eight
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processing cores 32 gigs of RAM we've
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got like enough usb ports to choke a stallion you got two graphics cards you
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throw a couple ssds and a couple hard drives and you go well holy crap you've
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got like two computers worth of hardware in the thing why can't you just
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legitimately run two computers off of it
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so that is exactly what we'll be doing
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so our hardware list is a cooler master master case pro 5. we've got a v850
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power supply with a neptune 240m water cooler we're using a susex 99 deluxe
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motherboard with an 8 core core i7 5960x
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extreme edition 32 gigs of Corsair vengeance lpx memory we've got a gtx
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titan x a gtx 780 ti and a gt so what is
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this a 9500 gs okay i'll explain why we need that later as well as two Intel 730
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series 480 gig ssds and two seagate
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three terabyte hard drives and what are the hard drives for for a gaming rig
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great question we are going to be putting not one not two but three
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operating systems on this machine
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two copies of Windows 10 and one copy of
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lime tech unraid server pro so this
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machine will be a nas and it will be two gaming rigs at the same time so let's
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start by building the machine so the biggest way that we leveraged the
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modularity of the master case five was to
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reconfigure the drive cages our plan was
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to use two ssds and two hard drives
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which gave us a lot of space in the front of the case for a large water
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cooling system however in the event that we wanted more emphasis on the nas
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portion of our build and we wanted to have a lot more hard drives for storage
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we could easily use a different cooler whether mounted in the rear or the top
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or just an air cooler on the CPU and fill up the front of the case with
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drives
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okay so that wasn't the most detailed physical build guide we've ever done but
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it wasn't intended to be the hard part today is component selection and
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software configuration so if you want to know more about how this case works and
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all of its modularity then check out the review video that we did here no we're
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going to talk about why we picked the other parts that we did first number one
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you will need a CPU with virtualization technology so this will be called vt-d
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which is being able to pass through a pci device to a virtual machine very
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important for passing through our video cards and the second is
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vt-x and this is all applying to Intel cpus and that is the ability to support
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virtualization at all step number two
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configure your graphics cards appropriately for each gaming machine
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that you want to run off of your computer you will need one dedicated
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gaming capable graphics card then in addition to that you will need another
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GPU for unraid to initialize when it's
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booting up so this could be your onboard graphics or in our case we installed a
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9500 gs and this is important in the top
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pci express slot for it to grab
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number three is other devices that you want each
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machine to have access to in our case both of our monitors are going to have
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support for an audio pass-through jack on the bottom of the monitor so we can
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use the HDMI or displayport audio off of our graphics card if we wanted to run
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usb sound cards that would be an option as well and would give both players the
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ability to use a microphone usb headsets
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could work as well but with any usb
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devices you may have noticed our peripherals are all completely different
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you will have to use different models of usb devices more on this later
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and finally for storage we've gone with two ssds this gives us redundancy
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effectively raid one of high enough capacity that you can split the capacity
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between the two machines so our two 480 gig drives are actually turning into 240
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gigs per box of redundant safe storage
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and then our hard drives again we've gone with two hard drives because if you
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go with more than two then you're going to hurt your right performance and
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failover if onedrive dies all the data is there through butter fs is enough for
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us for these purposes and we'd like to have the additional write speed we can
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do about 100 plus megabytes per second to our array so two hard drives for
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redundancy again high enough capacity that we can effectively split them
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getting one and a half terabytes of redundant storage per virtual machine
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step number one format your usb drive in fat32 calling it unraid in all caps
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download the latest version of unraid off of the lime
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technology.com website copy all of the files from your download
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onto your formatted usb disk then right-click make bootable
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and run as administrator and press enter
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you can now eject your usb and put it into your computer step two make sure
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you're running the latest BIOS for your motherboard change all SATA devices to
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ahci mode and enable virtualization
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technology in our case it was under advanced CPU configuration and advanced
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system agent configuration
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within the BIOS now what you can do is use your boot
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override to boot to the usb drive that you just created
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once the system's booted up navigate to http colon slash tower
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in the internet browser of another computer on the same network
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at this stage you can decide whether you want to purchase a key or get a trial
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key which is limited to three storage devices and stops working after 60 days
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it's a good way to try it out though step four hit info in the top right
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and double check to make sure that hvm and i o mmu are enabled if they're not
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you may need to reconfigure something in your motherboard BIOS to get your
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virtualization running with that out of the way go to main
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change your hard drive slots to something lower
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add your two hard drives using the drop downs
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to parity and disk one then
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change your cash slots we're using these for our ssds
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to to and add both of the ssds
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to cache drives
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next go to tools then system devices
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make sure your devices are showing up correctly we're looking for our graphics
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cards anything that starts with zero zero is built into the motherboard while
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things that start with other numbers or letters are generally
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going to be discrete devices so here we can see all three of our graphics cards
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are showing up correctly note this pci device number at the
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beginning here this will be important for the next step
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now scroll down to iomu groups
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find those devices so in our case here we are here are our video cards and
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ensure that they are showing up in separate groups
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if they're not you may need to enable a workaround but fortunately thanks to the
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way that ASUS has implemented things on this motherboard they are all showing up
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in separate groups and it will be easy to assign these devices to separate vms
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next go to settings and identification here we can change
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the name of our server which is how it'll show up on the network so i'm
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going to call it unlinus and with this change made we're going to
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have to re-navigate to our administration console
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i would also recommend at this stage navigating to users
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and adding a password to the root user so that not just anyone can dink around
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in the administration console next go to settings then network settings
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and change obtain ip address automatically to no it's recommended
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just for the sake of ease of use later on down the road that you set a static
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ip so that it's easy to navigate to this administration console from another
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computer on the network now go back to main and start the array
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once you see the green array started in the bottom left hand corner click the
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yes i want to do this button next to format and click format
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it'll take a while for your drives to format and the more drives you have the
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longer it'll take now that our format is complete go to shares and we are
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actually going to create using the add share button
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for different shares note carefully the settings that we're
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using for them and replicate these exactly our iso share is for installing
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our vms and the associated drivers
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our vdiskshare is for the boot drives of our vms they
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are running purely on SSD
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our docker folder is for if we want to add applications like plex server to our
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unraid server install as opposed to our Windows vms
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and our final share array v vdisks is
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for mass storage drives that are on the hard drives for our virtual machines now
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go to settings vm manager change enable
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vms to yes change the iso library to your iso's directory that you just
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created change the default network bridge to br0 then press apply you'll
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know this worked because you'll see a vms tab at the top
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next go to the vms tab and click add vm
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name your vm and give it a description and if you want it to automatically boot
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up when you fire up unraid then change auto start to yes select the appropriate
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operating system for Windows 10 you can select Windows 8.1 and that'll work just
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fine and change from basic view to advanced
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view select the number of cores you want for your vm in our case we're going to pick
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eight of our virtual cores so that's four real cores and four hyper threaded
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ones and then select how much memory you want
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for your vm i'm going to give each of my vms around 12 gigs of RAM
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don't change max memory just initial memory to obtain an operating system
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install iso for Windows 10 you can simply download it from microsoft and
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copy it to the isos folder then for your
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vert i o drivers iso click this link and
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use the fourth download so
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latest vert iso win iso
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and copy that directly to the isos folder on your network in our case we
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can type backslash backslash unlinus
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and navigate to isos
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with those downloaded we can select them in the drop down
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and set a primary vdisk location in this case user
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vdisks choose a primary vdisk size
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i'm going to go with 200 gigs press the plus button
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then select for the location user array v
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disks and for size well let's make it one
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terabyte and change your graphics card to the one that you desire for this
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particular vm we're going to make this our titan x machine
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for sound choose the corresponding NVIDIA device in the drop-down or if you
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add additional sound cards then you can definitely do that as well
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make sure your network bridge is the one that you created before
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and finally select the peripherals you're going to be using for this
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particular vm once you're ready click create and the vm will start as soon as
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it's finished being created and this my friends is where the magic happens
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within a couple seconds you should see the screen illuminate and your Windows
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install should begin just as it would if you were installing on a normal computer
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okay not quite normal you will need to load a driver
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so simply browse and go to your vert i o
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vio store the corresponding copy of Windows so 8.1 for 10
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and then the appropriate architecture so we're running 64-bit and install
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your storage device driver once that's done you should see both of your storage
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devices show up and you can install to your SSD storage device
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once you're dumped on the desktop there are a few more drivers you'll need to
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install so go to device manager and there should be three
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exclamation mark items update driver software browse
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and go to your vert i o disk press ok include
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subfolders and click next repeat this process for each of them
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once that's done install your NVIDIA graphics card drivers from NVIDIA.com
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and you are pretty much ready to go you can create your second virtual machine
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in exactly the same way with the one exception being that you'll need to
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change your CPU cores to cores that you didn't already use for this virtual
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machine in cases where you want to install some additional applications on
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unraid itself you may want to reserve one or two cores for unraid and leave
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the rest of them allocated to your virtual machines there are a couple of more pro tips put
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your pc in high performance mode disable fast boot sleep and hibernation and
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there's a guide over on the guru 3d forums that you'll need to follow
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especially if you've got an NVIDIA graphics card and you're using the
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onboard audio to ensure that your audio doesn't get garbled it is a registry
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hack but it's not too complicated to follow along
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so this is it my friends moment of truth time
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both of our vms are set to start up automatically once the system is powered
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on so in theory within about a minute or so
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we're gonna have Windows 10 running twice
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on one computer so on raid takes a little while to boot
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up give her a minute you know oh there it goes okay my two virtual
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machines are starting
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other side oh oh this one's already at the desktop
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yes my friends there you have it
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mouse keyboard star wars battlefront beta
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this is kind of it this is the star wars battlefront beta
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running at ultra details 1080p
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on two virtual machines on the same box
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at 106 FPS on this one
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and 104 FPS on this one yes we are
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getting full discreet performance
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on two instances of the game simultaneously
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so now that we've gotten this far i mean what's the fun of having a dual-headed
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gaming box if you don't have somebody to enjoy it with
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let's go get luke admiral akbar
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you like bounce around when i hit you it'll show you like a cone of where they
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are which is red but then it'll also show you
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like red shapes oh there's one left is there behind something like the rocks or
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whatever they take a sec to blow up
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do you have regenerating health in this game yes
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yeah i got an anti-vehicle turret cool and a proximity bomb yeah there's
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they're unlocking more waves oh this guy has a shield and a jet
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pack so that was fun and to my eye i can't
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tell that i'm running on a virtual machine but without objective
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measurements i can't quantify the difference for you guys so i've actually
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got luke running our standardized battlefront benchmark which was used in
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our performance roundup which you guys will actually be able to check out in i
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think one or two days depending on how the release schedule goes to validate
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how our 980 ti mind you it's running on three CPU
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physical cores versus it was running on a six core in there stacks up against
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running it on a dedicated machine and i
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think the numbers should be with us any moment here
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there we go so this is running on a 5960x versus on
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a 5930k which is actually a higher clock speed chip not to mention that it has
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all six of its cores versus only three of them and the 980 ti scored 120 FPS
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average we got 102.5 FPS average i am
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feeling pretty fracking good about those
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results and this is at 1080p ultra so guys thank you for checking out
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this video if you didn't like it then come on
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and if you did like it hit that like button get subscribed and maybe even
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consider supporting us here at Linus tech tips you can buy a cool t-shirt like this one you can change your amazon
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bookmarked one with our affiliate code with the instructions up there by the
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way we'll have links for where you can check out all of this hardware as well
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as unraid in the video description at the link to the Linus tech tips forum
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where you can also contribute to us and i think that pretty much wraps it up
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thanks again for watching and uh i will see you guys next time we do a crazy
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project like this man this was this was this was a thing