Gadgetory

so normally I stand amidst the hardware to introduce the topic of the video but as you can tell today there's legitimately no room for me because this is by far the highest end machine that I have ever built and the hardware barely even fits on the table but what does this build for - you've been teasing this thing on social media for weeks well inspired by our to gamers one CPU build back in whenever the heck we did that this is taking it to the next level Michael Bay's sequel style we are doing seven gamers running off of one tower but before we begin I should tell you something and that is that I legitimately don't know if this is going to work at this time now I mean we've done some pre-testing we've got four VMs working with you know the performance you'd expect from an AMD radeon r9 nano and a quad core gaming processor but we have no way of testing seven until we install all the custom water-cooling and get the whole thing assembled so without further ado a huge thanks to Kingston for sponsoring this video providing 256 gigs of their kick-ass ddr4 ECC memory providing eight one terabyte SSD so all those gaming VMs have nice high speed storage and for demoing this machine at their booth at CES 2016 so if you're there at the show definitely go check it out you can see it in person let's get started you so it's 24 hours later and if I look like I haven't slept much it's probably because I didn't but it's totally worth it it's working so I'm gonna take you guys through the journey now that I know that it's successful of how we created seven gamers one CPU it starts I guess actually with the CPU or I should say CPUs because there isn't a CPU on the market that could deliver a full-on high-end gaming experience to seven gamers all at the same time so our system is equipped with two Intel Xeon e5 26.97 v3 processors so these are 14 core processors that are clocked at up to 3.6 gigahertz when they're turbo as high as they can actually have hyper threading as well for a total of 56 threads meaning that each of our VMs has four cores and four hyper threads just like you would if you were running on something like a core i5 or a core i7 normal desktop processor for our motherboard obviously we needed something that could hold both of these CPUs and seven graphics cards so the Asus z10 PE d 8 WS is one of the only standard form factor boards that would fit in like a gaming case that is capable of carrying seven GPUs two sockets for the CPUs and that can hold all of the RAM that we need and there's got some other key features as well so it has a VGA output for our unread console it's got enough SATA ports for us to throw in as many SSDs and hard drives as we pretty much want it can handle a total of 12 out of the box and it's got an N dot 2 slot on it which could be useful in the future as like a cache for the array onto RAM actually kingston hooked us the crap up for this machine and sent us because we could only have eight sticks of memory in this board they hooked us up with 32 gig sticks of ddr4 ECC Ram what that means is each of our gamers can have 32 gigs of ram for a zero compromises gaming experience for the case we went with a case labs s8 and we did this for a number of reasons so first and foremost actually is that pretty much nothing else on the market was going to work for us so we needed something that supported our extended ATX motherboard and this one has an optional tray available and in addition to that because there's lots of server cases out there that would support this motherboard we needed support for water cooling so it's got lots of room for radiators pumps reservoirs all of that good stuff not to mention it's got room for all the hard drives we need and it's got a full aluminum construction so it's actually fairly lightweight considering all the hardware we have in there and personally I think it looks pretty badass with the selection of windowed and mesh panels that we chose for our particular rig not only that the case labs also hooked us up on a sweet black and orange powder coat paint job that I think looks fan-freaking-tastic for our power supply again we didn't have a ton of choices because doing quick napkin math I figured this rig was going to pull anywhere from 1500 watts or more from the wall when it was under max load so EVGA hooked us up with their t2 1600 watt power supply yes my friends it is 80-plus titanium and capable of a continuous load of 1600 watts and then to make it look even more badass capel mod hooked us up with a black and orange cable set to just kind of trick this baby out and even some custom cables so we could run single eight pin connectors to each of our video cards making the whole thing come together just mmm then that's beautiful and I'll tell you how close I was to that 1500 watt number a little bit later on in the video now I've water-cooled a lot of systems before in the past I have never done one with this many blocks before fortunately as far as the CPU went it was really straightforward I really liked e KS mounting mechanism here we're using their supremacy Evo's with nickel tops to match some of the other nickel accents in our system and the GPU blocks actually fairly straightforward as well too straightforward it's kind of therapeutic for me water cooling systems these days because it's like you know that's my old hobby like it's relaxing for me but after seven GPU blocks in a row I was definitely ready for a new challenge and fortunately that's exactly what was waiting for me Ek custom designed and manufactured this seven block connector / splitter thing that went on top of our GPUs effectively transforming them into a block on seven graphics cards that were could be installed in one fell swoop into all seven of the PCIe slots on the motherboard this was the only way that we were going to be able to fit not just a bunch of graphics cards into a system but a bunch of high-end gaming cards into a system which leads us I guess to the radiators because you got a cool a bunch of high-end gaming cards in one system so we went with two of their high-end super thick XE series triple 120 millimeter radiators and then we're using on my LT t edition not to a fans to cool them and then the original plan was to use one d5 pump connected to one of their reservoirs and mount that in the front that didn't end up working I actually had a number of challenges and things were overheating and I was trying to turn the system on and I ended up actually having to add another pump to the system in order to get this baby working because we're talking nine blocks right to CPU blocks seven GPU blocks to make this thing happen so let's talk about those GPUs that was another careful decision for this system I originally planned to use something else entirely realized it wasn't going to work because even though I could get single slot blocks on them I couldn't adjust the back plates and they had display interfaces in two of the slots so I was gonna go with the theory X and then I realized oh no it's going to draw too much power there's the power supply on earth that's going to be able to handle seven of these so the the AMD r9 nano saved my bacon the efficient gaming card that thermal throttles unfortunately with its stock cooler in a normal sized case yeah we took care of that all GPUs all the time no throttling high-end gaming card super efficient and something I didn't even foresee because the card is short I'm actually able to get it the PCIe locks so that I can remove the cards from the system in the event that I need to do that any other card and I probably wouldn't be able to pull the cards out so at the end of the build I actually realized Kingston's are our sponsor for this and I didn't have mounting adaptors for my SSDs so I went for the double-sided tape bippity boppity boop I made a stack of SSDs on the bottom that I actually think ended up looking pretty badass booted it up it kind of cycled a few times I experienced a moment of unparalleled despair when I thought that okay we went from because we originally tested it with four GPUs we went from four GPUs kind of working to Oh No seven doesn't post and then it turned on we needed a few BIOS tweaks to make this happen over 4G decoding setting the default video output to the onboard video making sure our boot device was the USB Drive for unread and then it was off to the races in terms of software truthfully we didn't have to do a whole lot differently from to gamers one CPU on the software side of things you're still using on raid to manage our pooled storage so in this case it's eight of Kingston's shiny new one terabyte KC 400 series drives running in a RAID 10 for Hyper reliability and enough mean to run set of freaking computers off of them at the same time and then we had to do like this funny you know guess and check thing for assigning keyboards and mice to VMs because a lot of USB device manufacturers don't correctly label them so we just had to kind of unplug and plug things in and run around and move them around so we got this whole thing working and then well okay there were a bunch of other problems but I'm not going to bore all of you guys with that but I will tell you about one cool trick that we used to save some space on our SSDs and make room for more games and applications for each of our gamers and that's a a snapshotting like feature of butter FS that allowed us to create one of our virtual hard disks and then clone it kind of like a shortcut in Windows for all of the other six so none of those files get replicated and what cool about that is even if you delete you know this file or that one the file system is smart enough to know not to actually eliminate the data so that everyone can access it very very cool so if one person on installs a program it does not install it for everybody which leads us finally to testing it works thank goodness it works not everything is possible for me to capture unfortunately some of our GPUs are not reading their temperatures correctly there are there are some quirks but I can tell you guys this our idle power consumption is 250 watts yes our idle power consumption is as much as a mid-range gaming machine under load and our load power consumption from the wall is 1500 watts when running seven instances of Unigine heaven which you guys can see going on behind me and have another cool fact for you as well we actually got 3dmark fire strike scores that were 800 points higher per VM than we did running the cards air-cooled yes my friends that is the power of custom liquid Elayne so I think that pretty much wraps it up other than to do a quick I'm actually surprising my camera operator with this but I'm gonna do a quick proof proof that it is all real my friends all right so we sat through the incredibly boring intro cinematic for Crysis 3 and this is it this is the real deal gaming experience of the 7 gamers one CPU machine and you might ask yourselves well Linus why did you go to all the effort to put all these 34 inch Predator X 34 monitors on here because what I wanted to demo was that you can't just have a gaming experience seven times on this machine you can have the gaming experience seven times on this machine my friends we're talking 30 for 40 by 1440 ultra wide IPS and yes that framerate counter in the top right is accurate this game is running at anywhere from about 60 to upwards of a hundred frames per second and all my instances if you want to just look up all my instances of Unigine heaven are still running in the background gonna be smooth baby not a hitch except for that I just ended up in the same room that I started it it doesn't make you any better at games unfortunately so thank you for watching seven gamers one CPU a demonstration of what the technology is capable of however impractical something like this might be and I don't expect any of you to run out and build a system that costs literally as much as a decent brand-new car for something like this but if nothing else it is proof that we have the technology thanks again for watching if you just like this video hit the dislike button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed share this video with all your freaking friends come on how cool is this and maybe even consider supporting us by using our amazon bookmark to shop at amazon instructions for which are up there or maybe a we're going to put it even supporting us directly through the former biting cool shirt now I'm wearing some origin shirt today well whatever not going to worry too much about that thanks again for watching don't forget to subscribe don't forget to check out all our other cool videos if you haven't seen to gamers one CPU make sure you check that out because that is where the inspiration for this all came from