Use your Gaming PC's Extra Power as a NAS Ultimate Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
3,493 words · ~17 min read
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so we did a really cool project a little while ago we called it two Gamers one
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CPU you can check it out here where we' got one gaming tower with a couple
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graphics cards in it extreme Edition processor all that stuff and it runs two
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separate instances of Star Wars Battlefront and we used a software for
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that called unraid that um while they
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kind of came back to us and we're like yeah that's really cool they were also
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kind of throwing in Hay but that isn't really the point for most people and so
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they decided to sponsor a video where we show off a more practical application
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for this virtualization technology that let us run two gaming rigs in one Tower
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and this time instead of using crazy Overkill Hardware we're using I'd say
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Enthusiast but not completely overthe toop stuff to have a single gaming rig
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pull double duty as a gaming rig and also as the file server for the rest of
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the household so stay tuned guys we're going to be doing a gaming rig and a Nas
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in one
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box the Logitech g303 features a lightweight design an advanced Optical
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sensor with Delta zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting check
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out the link in the video description to learn more so let's go through the rationale
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of all the hardware while we we assemble the computer itself for our CPU we chose
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a core i7 6700k skyl processor in any
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case where you're going to be using virtualization you will a need a CPU
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that supports virtualization and B want
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one with more cores and or more thread
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so hyperthreading on this CPU is a definite Boon we're going to be
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installing that in a z170 deluxe motherboard from Aus it's a fully
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featured board and has lots of PCI Express Lanes and dual land if you you
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know wanted to team your Nicks or something along those lines in the
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future and also has the virtualization
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support that we need in terms of RAM
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ddr4 is all you're going to be able to use in this case the speed doesn't
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really matter however the one thing to note is that the more virtualized
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operating systems that you're going to be using the more you will need in this
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case we're just demoing a gaming rig and a NZ so there's really no need for us to
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go completely Overkill so we've gone with 16 gigs of RAM the casee was a
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pretty tough choice cuz I wanted something that would allow for more hard
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drive expansion remember this is a Nas
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also in addition to being a gaming rig but that wasn't going to compromise the
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cooling Andor expansion capabilities of the gaming rig itself so I settled on
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the Silverstone tjo for bew and then Silverstone also sent over
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a 750 W power supply giving us lots of room for hard drive expansion in terms
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of the power budget as well as this is
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cool so this is a brand new thing their fs305 so this is a 5x3 and 1/2 in
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toolless hot swap hard drive cage thing
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that we're going to be mounting in the front of the case this is very nazzy
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whereas the inside of the case is very just normal gaming Towery and I felt
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like this combo was a really really good one which brings us to storage now we're
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using Kingston's 1 tbte KC for 400 ssds
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note that I say ssds because we have two of them the reason for this is that
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while you could pick any other capacity of SSD that you want it is important to
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have two of them because this gives us two advantages one is it protects Us in
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the event of a hardware failure and two
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actually that's really the main advantage unraid is going to really want
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you to have these protected so uh yes we'll be running them in a butter FS
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raid one next up we've got our hard
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drives so we're using seates Enterprise capacity V5 SATA hard drives for Nas
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functionality these are about as fast
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and reliable and just generally ba as it
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gets but once again in terms of what you're going to be using you have a lot
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of flexibility in terms of both the hardware as well as the capacity that
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you want to go with in this case at least two drives is recommended again to
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keep your NZ safe in the event of a hardware failure but you get much better
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scaling in terms of the capacity per investment if you go to three drives or
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more and use a parity setup versus a
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raid one setup so we're going to have five drives so we can fill up that front
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Bay device that we have the video card
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was an easy choice I basically grabbed whatever was on my test bench and threw
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it in our motherboard has Onboard video so that takes care of running the web UI
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for unraid and then that video card is going to be passed through through to
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our Windows 10 VM for its full we hope
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functionality in games we could use any card AMD NVIDIA it really doesn't matter
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One Challenge we ran into was that our
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hot swap cage didn't actually fit in the
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front of this case without removing some small little tab shelf things designed
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for normal 5 and a/4 in devices like Optical drives but that was nothing that
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we couldn't solve With a Little Help from our friend Miss Mr Dremel and our
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other friend Mr vacuum cleaner okay so now that the system is
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physically constructed there's just one little trick when you're plugging in all
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your cables plug your display cable into the dedicated graphics card for now then
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power on the system for the first time press delete to get into the BIOS and
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we're going to change a couple small settings here go to Advanced system agent Graphics configuration set your
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primary display to igfx and igpu multim
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monitor to disabled this will allow unraid to grab the onboard Graphics
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leaving the discret card free for your gaming VM make sure that if you're
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planning to use the unraid desktop goey you've got your monitor plugged into the
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onboard Graphics now after you make this
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change another small setting that you're going to have to enable is
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virtualization so go ahead and make that change as well go to another PC and
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create a bootable unraid USB drive according to the instructions on their
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site plug that into the back of the computer and get her booted up once you
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reach the web UI go into settings identification and rename your Tower to
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something more recognizable on the network enable network bridge under
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Network it's normal to lose connectivity here for a few seconds and then if it
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doesn't come back right away use that recognizable name that you set to
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navigate to it in a web browser next navigate to the main Tab and assign
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discs to the array and to the cache the
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array is your slower larger magnetic storage devices your hard drives and the
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cache is those high-speed solid state drives that we installed next start the
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array you can see that a parody sync is running we can start using the system
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immediately to continue setting it up but you should be aware that data on the
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array is not protected until the parody
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sync is completed this takes quite a while but it's worth it because it
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allows a failed drive to be replaced and the data to be rebuilt in the event of a
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drive failure format the unmountable
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discs please note that this will wipe all data off the discs then refresh and
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it should be done within a few seconds next let's go over to shares and
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start creating we're going to do the nas shares first and here's some general
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rules if you're going to copy data over the network to this share then you'll
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want to enable this share to use the cash everything else can be default
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although minimum free SP is kind of important to set you want to
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set this to a value that is larger than the largest file you could see yourself
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copying to the share this will prevent out of space errors so for example for a
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media share you might set this to 25 gigs next we're going to create another
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share for backups for this one we are going to enable the use of the SSD cache
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so we can take advantage of faster local network transfer speeds remember data
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from the cache moves to the array nightly we're going to create a Shadow
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play share for game footage you know this is supposed to be a gaming machine
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and all that but for this one there's no need to enable the cash because Shadow
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play won't write more than 5 megabytes per second at a time and will never
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exceed the speed of the array even if we turn off the faster writing speed option
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another cool share to create is a game Library share so if you predominantly
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use steam you can actually map a network drive in the OS later and we'll show you
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how to do this and throw all of your steam gains especially the ones that
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don't suffer from slow loading times or that are large or you don't play that
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often and throw them onto the magnetic storage rather than taking up space on
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your SSD the last thing that you'll see here is US setting up our domains and
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isos shares for VMS um we're doing this
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manually the same way we did in the two Gamers one CPU video but by the time 6.2
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goes public beta uh this will be done for you and you won't have to worry
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about it please note these ones are not exported which means that they won't be
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browsable by other network attached devices this is fine we intend them to
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use on the local machine next we're going to enable VMS in settings VM
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manager click the download button next to vert iio driver then we need to copy
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a Windows ISO this can be downloaded legally from Microsoft directly to the
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iso's folder using another networked computer in my case I've got it on a USB
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stick on this computer in front of me now this is an advanced and therefore
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optional step it's possible to not only
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manually assign plugged-in USB devices to your VM before you boot it mice
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keyboards XLR audio interfaces Etc but
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it's also possible to completely pass through an entire USB controller to your
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VM so we threw a random dual USB 3 Port
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PCI E card into our system and we're going to show you guys how we can pass
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it through to enable hot plugging in some cases you'll be able to assign some
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of the onboard ports on your motherboard to your VM while leaving others to
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unraid to deal with but this varies from motherboard to motherboard and platform
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to platform Skylake for example for the same reason we couldn't pass through our
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onboard audio can have trouble with this
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using putty a free tool log into your server using the unraid username rout by
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default then run this command to see all USB controllers in the system our NEC
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PCIe USB device is the one that we added ourselves the next command shows us the
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vendor product ID which we've highlighted then we go back to the
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unraid web guei and in the main tab we click the flash device then put pc-
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stub. IDs equals and paste the ID we got
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from before and hit apply the system will need to be rebooted at this stage
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so stop the array and reboot once rebooted we can start the array then go
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to VMS and add our first VM just click Windows 10 change the name to what you
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want assign CPU cores I generally recommend assigning the hyperthreaded
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cores and the physical cores to the same assignment we've gone with 12 gigs of
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RAM for games and chrome we're going to
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pick our Windows installation media for storage we're going to assign most of
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our SSD space to our VM using just a little bit for our cash then we pick out
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our video card we pass through only the NVIDIA HDMI audio due to immu issues
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with the onboard audio then we're passing through the USB devices that we
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recognize so you'll see three Logitech ones for our keyboard mouse and USB
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gaming headset then that optional step from before we can pass through our NEC
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USB controller which gives us those hot pluggable ports so we don't have to
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restart our VM to plug in a USB drive or something along those lines all right so
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we are finally finally at the end of our journey but first this is very important
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this HDMI cable comes out of the Onboard
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video and goes into our dedicated
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graphics card because otherwise when we boot up the VM there's going to be no
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video output because we assigned that dedicated graphics card to our VM so
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here we go oh
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yes 12 gigs of system memory tested okay
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is amazing so now we install Windows the way that we just kind of normally would
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mostly stay tuned okay so here's the
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trick you're going to get to the point where it asks where you want to install Windows and there's nothing there so you
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want to load drivers click browse and
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then you're going to navigate to your CD drive convert IO win
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0.1.1 then go to the Vio store folder
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then you're going to go to Windows 8.1 amd64 and press okay then
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next yes third times the charm now we
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can install Windows next so now that TR at the
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desktop you'll have to install drivers for any devices that are missing them so
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for any of the stuff you don't recognize you're probably just going to navigate
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to your ver iio and manually add drivers and then you're probably going to want
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to throw some graphics drivers on and
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then actually there's some other post Windows installed tuning things that you
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might want to check out from two Gamers one CPU but other than that that's
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pretty much it so I'll show you guys how to utilize your array shares to make
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mapped network drives so that you can have all your Shadow play stuff go to
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one place uh so that you can have all of your Steam games install in another
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place um but really the sky is the limit here you can create as many shares
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within unrate as you want and then you can map as many network drives as you
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want as well anytime you want to make changes you just go into a browser go to
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gaming Nas in our case or whatever it is that you want to call it and then you've
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got access to the entire unraid console to create more shares change any
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settings or do things like oh hey I'm going to for stop my VM I wouldn't
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recommend doing that that'll shut down the computer you're using immediately so
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all that's left now is the day-to-day usability so you can set your VMS to
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auto start by just going to the VMS Tab and going yeah anytime I turn this
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machine on I want my gaming rig to start up and my monitor to turn on and all
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that stuff and then yeah I guess there's a couple little things that you might
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want to invest in to make your life a bit easier like having an extra keyboard
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and mouse as well as an extra display cable so you can use the multiple inputs
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of your monitor to switch if you're desperate and you have to get it the
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gooey because you can't access it over the network or whatever else but the
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cost of those items compared to if you had to buy a standalone NZ for your
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household is much much lower but of
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course that would all be meaningless if the performance of the finished machine
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wasn't still you know pretty much on par
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with the gaming machine that you intended to buy for yourself so let's
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have a quick look here boom Crisis 3 my
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friends and check this out I'm going to initiate a file
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transfer to myself gaming Nas media and check this
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out no frame rate dip copying at 100
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megabytes per second and if we Tab out check this out we can even see real time
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stats of what's going on with our storage and our networking and the
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transfer is done already so that was fast so there you have it guys it
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actually worked there is more to UNR than this especially if you want to
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start tinkering with other virtual machines and all that kind of stuff but
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I thought that this use case scenario was super applicable to our audience
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where you've probably only got you know one BA gaming rig in the house you
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probably have a use for network attached storage and sharing uh off-site backup a
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lot of the other functionality that you can dig a little deeper and get at with
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Docker containers and stuff like that so being able to combine that functionality
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rather than buying a separate uh mother board separate CPU separate case
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separate power supply being able to do all of that off of one single high
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quality machine I personally think is pretty darn cool so let us know with a
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comment and a like below if you agree
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which I guess leads us pretty well into our sponsor for today's episode Logitech
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we've actually had a lot of Logitech stuff going on in here we got the g91
16:52
and Spark we've got the g502 Proteus core but the focus today is the g633
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emis spect headset it's been completely redesigned by Logitech from their
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previous headsets to be better in well pretty much every possible way it's USB
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with support for surround it's more comfortable it's more durable it sounds
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better and with the uh that's actually
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that's a lot better it was a monitoring is on so I can hear myself talking and
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with the fold out and extend perfectly positionable microphone you will sound
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better to your gaming friends as well we've got a link in the video
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description where you can learn more about this puppy you can be like oh yeah
17:27
I want to know more about the you know 40 mm prot tuned drivers and I want to
17:32
know more about the you know comfort and the shape of the ear cups that is
17:36
actually the shape of ears I mean does anyone on Earth actually have round ears
17:40
I don't know I've never actually seen one so check out that link in the video
17:45
description all right thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video
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don't know uh supporting us by shopping on Amazon we've got the instructions for
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how to do that up there you can also buy a cool shirt like this one or you can give us a monthly contribution through
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our Forum get yourself a Nifty little contributor badge now that you're done
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doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next and hey how
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about you go back and watch two Gamers one CPU if you hadn't already it's also
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using un raid but in that case we actually ignored the nas functionality
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entirely and did two gaming VMS off of a single machine both with pretty much
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bare to the metal performance it is pretty darn impressive