8 (or is it 10?) Gamers, 1 CPU - Taking it to the Next Level!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
2,224 words · ~11 min read
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Seven Gamers 1 CPU, which you can check out over here, was one of the most
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successful videos in every way that I
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have ever made. So, I determined almost immediately that I had to follow it up
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somehow. But one of the biggest criticisms of Seven Gamers was that it
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was kind of overthe-top and
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impractical. So, in working on a sequel,
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I called up a friend of mine for some advice. Hey. Yeah,
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Mikey, you've got experience with
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dealing with negative feedback about your over-the-top style. How would you
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respond? And that, my friends, is how
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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
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objectives of eight gamers were several.
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One, I did want to outdo the original
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project. Two, I wanted the machine to have some kind of practical application.
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If not today, then at some point in the
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future, and three, I wanted the hardware
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to actually behave predictably in this
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kind of a use case. Between the WS board and the R9 Nanos, that last machine was
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a nightmare. I'm fairly certain I was the first person and only including ASUS
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R&D to ever try seven cards in that board at a time. So the recipe started
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as it always seems to with Intel inside.
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For months leading up to the release, I had been harassing my contacts, all of
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them, about availability of 22 core
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Broadwell EP 2699 V4 processors so that
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I could pack 44 cores. That is 88
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threads of CPU power into this monster.
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And they came through. And for that matter, so did Kingston with eight 32
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gig sticks of quad channel ECC DDR4
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server memory along with a bunch of 1 TBTE SSDs that I divvied up into 16 gigs
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of RAM and 1 TBTE worth of space for
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each of my VMs with actually about 100 gigs of RAM left over for Unrade.
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Because yes, my friends, Unrade is returning for more virtualized gaming
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action. Now, some folks have asked why I continue to use Unrade for these
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projects instead of something like KVM from Red Hat or VMware. Well, there are
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a few reasons. One, Unra uses
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KVM. It's open source. Two, it handles
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GPU pass through, which is important for the impressive near bare metal
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performance in gaming applications that we measured in this video really, really
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well. And three, it's pulled safe
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storage is an easy way to manage data across multiple VMs. And I've got
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another clever trick to show you guys this time, too. All right, so that's all
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fine and good and very similar to last time. So, what's the difference then,
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Lionus? Well, first up is the Super Micro SYS 4028
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GR-TRT, a dual LGA 20113 Zeon 24 memory
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slot, 24 SSD slot, barebone server
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designed for high computational density
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applications like scientific research and simulation. functionality is enabled
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by its 11 PCI Express 16X slots, eight
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of which are advertised as being ready for a graphics card or compute card like
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a Zeon Fi or NVIDIA Tesla. Though
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perhaps more than eight is possible with some extra power cables running from its
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four redundant 1,000 W power supplies.
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More on that later. The other main difference is in the graphics cards.
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Thanks to AMD's half-ass relinquishing of hardware resources, when you soft
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reset a system, the entire host last
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time needed to be shut down every time I
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had to reset a single VM for a driver installation or a crash or whatever
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else. So, I cried about my sad story to
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Zotac, and they not only ponyied up eight of their top-of-the-line GTX 980
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Ti AMP video cards to ensure that each of my gamers would have a perfect gaming
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experience, but they also contributed the thin clients that I needed for this
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very different implementation. for each of their Zbox B series and C
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series with low power Intel processors. We've actually covered Zotac's wide
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variety of quiet, sometimes shockingly powerful mini PCs in the past. And
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combining these with some HyperX sodium memory modules and 240 gig SSDs from
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Kingston, we had some awesome client boxes to hook up the gorgeous 27 in IPS
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4K 27 UD 888 Freync gaming monitors that
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LG provided. Because eight gamers, one
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CPU is all about my vision for a
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high-tech household in the future. Something I've talked about before on
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the WAN Show, a high-powered machine in the closet that can allocate, preferably
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dynamically, computing power, gaming, or
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even otherwise to wherever it's needed. A TV or projector, as many desktops or
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laptops spread throughout the building as needed, or even a handheld device
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like an NVIDIA Shield portable. I wanted
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effectively to build my own NVIDIA grid,
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but with consumer GPUs and using Valve's
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Steam inhome streaming to serve to all my clients. Not something they had in
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mind for it, I'm sure. So, let's talk then about the setup process. Was it
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actually simpler? Well, the hardware was less
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flaky this time, which means that this hypers speed setup guide for Unrade that
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you guys are looking at went much smoother. Copy files to USB drive. Make
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drive bootable. Assign SSDs to cache for high-speed OS and game drives. Assign
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larger drives to the array for mass storage. Create VMs. Share storage
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between the VMs. Which Whoa, slow down there, John. Kingston sent us like 10 of
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their SSDs for this. And you just shared
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data between virtual discs at the time
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of creation. So on a single terabyte of storage, you could have 10 VMs each with
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200 gigs of Windows, games, other base
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applications and 100 gigs each of
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dedicated storage. Very efficient.
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Hopefully that feature makes it into the web gooey at some point. So all of that
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was fine then. But the disadvantage to
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aworked solution like this is that while in theory you can manage the entire
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setup from a single terminal somewhere else in the building. In practice,
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remote desktop connection session management required this little trick I
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found on the Steam forums to disconnect in such a way as to not bork Steam in
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home streaming. Then I needed to reach out to FitP who whipped me up 10
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prototypes of their new 4K headless HDMI
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dongle that can handle up to 4K 60 Hz
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and allows the video cards HDMI audio
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device to be active on a remote client. This is needed unless you would want to
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install a bunch of sound cards or something like that.
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So then finally after all of that, it was time to get all my gamers to sign
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into Steam on the server side using Team Viewer and on the client side on their
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machines that ranged from comfortable gaming seats to less comfortable gaming
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seats. And after fighting with some of the weirdness, get things fired up right
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now cuz I need to play this game. Looks fine. The controls do feel a little bit
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laggy. Um, but I think part of that is just the god-awful vehicle controls with
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keyboard and mouse on GTA. My gaming experience has so far been relatively
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normal. It was indoors for the most part, but now that it's outdoors, it
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seems like the graphics quality actually takes a dip sometimes. Well, so far I
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started the game up. I got through the intros and then somebody pointed out
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that my game was going in slow-mo, which it does look like it in fact is going in
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slow-mo. No, I don't feel like I'm gaming on anything that's in the closet.
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I started playing and I'm like playing and I'm like assuming that the tower was
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just under the desk and then it like glitched out and then I was like,
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"Wait." And then I like thought about it and I was like,
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"Oh, latency pretty smooth. Like it's
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it's it's pretty seamless. It doesn't seem like I said it doesn't seem like
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I'm running remotely. It feels like I'm I'm hooked up to like a full fat gaming
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power. less than perfect, but almost a little bit laggy, but like a little bit
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compression that I noticed from the streaming, but other than that, it's like it's pretty good. Would you
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consider putting your gaming machine in a closet and beaming it to thin clients
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on a new TV or if I was playing CS GO then? No. But for any other game, I
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think it would be perfectly fine. I don't know about switching, but maybe
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consider adding it. Um cuz I don't think I would want to hide my rig in like a
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closet somewhere. But at the same time, it would be useful if I'm out of the
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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
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want to move elsewhere. So, so that could be really good. So, I think the
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conclusion here is pretty straightforward. While we pushed the
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hardware and the software and our
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networking infrastructure, I mean, we are streaming a lot of data right now to
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the limits. Most people's experiences are actually surprisingly good. And
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while I don't think we're ready for LAN
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centers, for example, to just have a server room with a bunch of machines,
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you can see there I just ran into an issue. I'll there that was just a hiccup
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for while I don't think we're ready for LAN centers to just have, you know, a
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server rack in a closet somewhere and a bunch of thin clients spread out
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throughout the land center. I don't think we're that far away. And seeing it
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perform as well as it did, especially
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considering the fact that we're running GTX 980 Ti and Titan X's all sandwiched
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next to each other with many of them thermal throttling is pretty darn
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impressive. And I hope you guys can agree and uh look forward like me to a
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future where you can just have one box that powers the gaming experiences of an
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entire household of people as computers continue to get more and more
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powerful. And I hope you can also agree that this is a somewhat more practical
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application of this technology than just having a bunch of people plugged into
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and gathered around a single tower. Which is why I wanted to do it as a
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followup. I guess this is sort of networking
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video description, sort of the same link. So, just So, thanks for watching,
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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,
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maybe even consider supporting us by using our affiliate code to shop at
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Amazon. Instructions are up there. You can, you know, buy one of these LG
12:35
monitors, one of these Zotac thin clients, uh, one of those fantastic 22
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core Broadwell EP CPUs, or maybe just a
12:44
new video card from our friends over at Zotac, or just anything you want
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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. You can join our community forum. You can ask and answer questions. That's also linked in the video
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description. And if you're done all that stuff, you're wondering what to watch
12:59
next. Hey, if you haven't already, check out the original 7 gamers 1 CPU. It is
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pretty different, actually, surprisingly so. So, don't miss it.