Gadgetory

seven gamers one CPU which you can check out over here was one of the most successful videos in every way that I have ever made so I determined almost immediately that I had to follow it up somehow but one of the biggest criticisms of seven gamers was that it was kind of over-the-top and impractical so in working on a sequel I called up a friend of mine for some advice hey yeah Mikey you've got experience with dealing with negative feedback about your over-the-top style how would you respond and that my friends is how eight gamers one CPU was born Tunnel Bear is the easy-to-use VPN service that lets you use the web as though you're in one of 20 different countries learn more and try tunnel bear for free at the link in the video description ok but for real the objectives of eight gamers were several one I did want to outdo the original project two I wanted the machine to have some kind of practical application if not today then at some point in the future and three I wanted the hardware to actually behave predictably in this kind of a use case between the WS board and the r9 nanos that last machine was a nightmare I'm fairly certain I was the first person and only including a soos R&D to ever try seven cards in that board at a time so the recipe started as it always seems to with Intel Inside four months leading up to the release I had been harassing my contacts all of them about availability of 22 core Broadwell EP $26.99 v4 processors so that I could pack forty four cores that is 80 eight threads of CPU power into this monster and they came through and for that matter so did Kingston with eight 32 gig sticks of quad-channel ECC ddr4 server memory along with a bunch of one terabyte SSDs that I divvied up into 16 gigs of RAM and one terabyte worth of space for each of my VMs we've actually about a hundred gigs of RAM left over for unread because yes my friends on raid is returning for more virtualized gaming action now some folks have asked why I continue to use unread for these projects instead of something like KVM from Red Hat or VMware well there are a few reasons one on raid uses KTM it's open source 2 it handles GPU pass-through which is important for the impressive near bare metal performance in gaming applications that we measured in this video really really well and three it's pooled safe storage is an easy way to manage data across multiple VMs and I've got another clever trick to show you guys this time - all right so that's all fine and good and very similar to last time so what's the difference then Linus well first up is the super micro sys 4028 gr - t RT a dual LGA 2011 3 Xeon 24 memory slot 24 SSD slot bare-bones server designed for high computational density applications like scientific research and simulation functionality is enabled by its 11 PCI Express 16x slots 8 of which are advertised as being ready for a graphics card or compute card like a xeon phi or nvidia tesla though perhaps more than 8 is possible with some extra power cables running from its for redundant 1000 watt power supplies more on that later the other main difference is in the graphics cards thanks to AMD's half-ass relinquishing of hardware resources when you soft reset a system the entire host last time needed to be shut down every time I had to reset a single VM for a driver installation or a crash or whatever else so I cried about my sad story - ZOTAC and they not only Poe need up eight of their top-of-the-line gtx 980ti amp video cards to ensure that each of my gamers would have a perfect gaming experience but they also contributed the thin clients that I needed for this very different implementation for each of their ZBOX B Series and C series with low-power Intel processors we actually covered so Tech's wide variety of quiet sometimes shockingly powerful mini pcs in the past and combining these with some HyperX odium memory modules and 240 gig SSDs from kingston we had some awesome client boxes to hook up the gorgeous 27 inch IPS 4k 27u d88 free sync gaming monitors that LG provided because eight gamers one CPU is all about my vision for a high-tech household in the future something I've talked about before on the LAN show a high powered machine in the closet that can allocate preferably dynamically computing power gaming or even otherwise to wherever it's needed a TV or projector as many desktops or laptops spread throughout the building as needed or even a handheld device like an Nvidia shield portable I wanted effectively to build my own Nvidia grid but with consumer GPUs and using Valve's steam in-home streaming to serve to all my clients not something they had in mind for it I'm sure so let's talk then about the set up process was it actually simpler well the hardware was less flaky this time which means that this hyperspeed set-up guide for unread that you guys are looking at went much smoother copy files to USB Drive make Drive bootable assigned SSDs to cache for high-speed OS and game drives assign larger drives to the array for mass storage create VMs share storage between the VMs which whoa slow down there John Kingston sent us like ten of their SSDs for this and you just shared data between virtual disks at the time of creation so on a single pair byte of storage you could have ten VMs each with 200 gigs of Windows games other base applications and a hundred gigs each of dedicated storage very efficient hopefully that feature makes it into the web GUI at some point so all of that was fine then but be this advantage to a networked solution like this is that while in theory you can manage the entire setup from a single terminal somewhere else in the building in practice Remote Desktop connections session management required this little trick I found on the steam forums to disconnect in such a way as to not Bork steam in-home streaming then I needed to reach out to fit PC who whipped me up 10 prototypes of their new 4k headless HDMI dongle that can handle up to 4k 60 Hertz and allows the video cards HDMI audio device to be active on a remote client this is needed unless you wouldn't want to install a bunch of sound cards or something like that so then finally after all of that it was time to get all my gamers to sign in to steam on the server side using TeamViewer and on the client side on their machines that ranged from comfortable gaming seats to less comfortable gaming seats and after fighting with some of the weirdness get things fired up all right now cuz I know for this game let's I the controls do feel a little bit laggy but I think part of that is just the god-awful vehicle controls with keyboard and mouse on GTA my gaming experience has so far been relatively normal it was indoors for the most part but now that it's outdoors it seems like the graphics quality actually takes a dip sometimes so far I started the game up I got through the intros and then somebody pointed out that my game is going to slow-mo which it does look like it in effect is going in slow-mo no I don't feel like I'm gaming on anything that's McWhorter I started playing and I'm like playing and I'm like assuming that the tower was just under the desk and then it like glitched out and then I was like wait and then I like thought about it and I was like oh latency pretty smooth like it is pretty seamless it doesn't seem like I said it doesn't seem like I'm running remotely it feels like I'm um hooked up like a full fat gaming power less than perfect but almost a little bit laggy but like a little bit compression that I notice from the streaming but other than that it's like it's pretty good would you consider putting your gaming machine in a closet and beaming it tiffin clients on you TV or I was playing csgo then no but for any other game I think it would be perfectly fine I don't know about switchy but maybe consider adding it um because I don't think I want to hide my rig like a closet somewhere but at the same time UVU the root I don't want to be sitting idly be tethered to light you know a battle station or something I want to be Belle swear so so that could be really good so I think the conclusion here is pretty straightforward while we pushed the hardware and the software and our networking infrastructure I mean we are streaming a lot of data right now to the limits most people's experiences are actually surprisingly good and while I don't think we're ready for land centers for example to just have a server room with a bunch of machines you can see there I just ran into an issue I'll loop I was just a hiccup for well I don't think we're ready for land centers to just have you know a server rack in a closet somewhere and a bunch of thin clients spread out throughout the land center I don't think we're that far away and seeing it perform as well as it did especially considering the fact that we're running gtx 980ti s and titan X's all sandwiched next to each other with many of them thermal throttling is pretty darn impressive and I hope you guys can agree and look forward like me to a future where you can just have one box that powers the gaming experiences of an entire household of people as computers continue to get more and more powerful and I hope you can also agree that this is a somewhat more practical application of this technology than just having a bunch of people plugged into and gathered around a single tower which is why I wanted to do it as a follow-up I guess this is sort of networking related because today's video sponsor is tunnel they're the easy to use VPN app for mobile and desktop tunnel bear lets you tunnel through up to 20 different countries allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in a different country they've got apps for iOS Android PC and Mac they also have a Chrome extension and it's easy to use no DNS reconfiguration port forwarding any of that nonsense you just pick your country you flip the switch and boom your connection gets encrypted and it appears to the websites and so services you're using as though you are sitting in a different country than the one you were in and the best part of tunnel bears you can try it for free no strings attached with 500 megabytes of free monthly data just by checking out the link in the video description and if you decide hey I like tunnel bear I'd love to pay a reasonable amount monthly for an unlimited plan well you can save 10% by going to tunnel bear comm /l tt also linked in the video description sort of the same link so just so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that dislike button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe even consider supporting us by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon instructions are up there you can you know buy one of these LG monitors one of these ZOTAC fin clients one of those fantastic 22 core Broadwell EP CPUs or maybe just a new video card from our friends over at ZOTAC or just anything you want actually even toilet paper helps us out a lot you can buy a cool shirt like this one at the link in the video description you can join our community forum you can ask and answer questions that's also linked in the video description and if you're done all that stuff your wondering what to watch next hey if you haven't already check out the original 7 gamers 1 CPU it is pretty different actually surprisingly so so don't miss it