Are there any people running Unraid gaming computers daily?

[imbrock]

As seen in 7 Gamers, 1 CPU

 

I want to make one next year but I'm hoping for some real world reviews first. Is anybody here dabbling in this sort of server business?

Just to note I do already have an unraid server running, its just a media and homelab server without a gpu though.

 

PS: Not necessarily with 7 gamers.

[Pixel5]

it doesn't really make sense to do this unless you have very specific restrictions in terms of how many computers you can run, for every other case its better to keep a server and gaming setup separate.

[imbrock]

My thinking is that I have lots of TV's and lots of devices like the shield tv or other android tv things. Instead of having a PC hooked up to each of the four tv's in my house I could build one PC with two or three gpu's in it and then I could play wherever I felt like playing. Plus if I can rig up a good handheld steam streaming unit I can have that going on as a bonus. Without having to juggle the hassles of having three or four different computers to choose from each time I wanted to do that.

I currently run lots of roms and retro images off my server and run them all remotely on different devices, and really like how that works. Taking it further seems like it could be a good flexible household gaming solution if setup right.

[SkyHound0202]

I have an Unraid server built on an Asrock Z370 Killer SLI with a passively cooled QQC0 (i9-9900T Engineering Sample, 8C/16T, 35 W, 1.7-3.8 GHz), a KalmX fanless 1050 ti and an LSI 9300-8i HBA with a bunch of cheap decommissioned (has several hundred terabyte writes on it) Intel DC SSDs (eight 3.8 TB S3500 to be precise) connected, all powered by a Seasonic Platinum 520 Fanless PSU. Extremely power efficient and makes no noise.

 

Primarily uses as a NAS, but also has a Windows 7 VM on it only to play some legacy games like Red Alert 2 (please don't judge) and remote in to see if anything went wrong.

 

Honestly, the idea of streaming with a VM on a local server is an idea with great potential for a single house hold. But there's much problem to this.

 

In my use case (NAS), I wasn't expecting triple-A titles to play on this thing anyway, so that gaming VM is merely an "add-on" for the system. All I need it to be is super efficient and quiet (hence the all low-power, fanless component), running any higher end hardware defeat its purpose of being a proper NAS. There's also not enough expansion slot or power headroom to accommodate a second GPU (lower PCIe x8 slot taken by LSI card to utilize full bandwidth), so upgrade is a no-go for me.

 

If I were to upgrade, it means at least I need to move to a HEDT or server platform, which is expensive. Sure I can get some older parts like X79 platform with E5 v2 for cheap, but then its power consumption is again too high to be a NAS.

 

Finally, consider this: you will not be in two place at the same time (unless there's multiple people gaming at the same time), so setting up dedicated gaming VMs for each room is no better than streaming from your main PC.
 

So in a word, no. Stick with a low-power NAS and a performance main (streaming) PC is the right way to go.

[imbrock]

Why thats just what I was looking for SkyHound0202. My use case might still make a game server a decent solution for my household, my spouse is also a gamer though she's a bit wary of the PC space. I've been kinda thinking this could be a decent consoly way to get her into some of that stuff, while also helping with some of the mutliplayer hassles associated with PC gaming.

 

That being said for my own high end gaming needs I will probably need a dedicated PC at least some of the time. Can't let these high framerate monitors go to waste piping 60fps over a network.

[Jarsky]

You don't need unRAID to this - and that just convolutes it if you're going to be running a KVM to 4 different TV's?

Just use SteamLink to your gaming PC. If you have a Samsung Smart TV you can just install the app, otherwise an Android TV device or even an RPi3 on each display will run SteamLink. I have an HTPC on my main lounge setup, which has Steam Big Picture running, and SteamLink works flawlessly. 

[SkyHound0202]

18 hours ago, imbrock said:

My use case might still make a game server a decent solution for my household, my spouse is also a gamer though she's a bit wary of the PC space. I've been kinda thinking this could be a decent consoly way to get her into some of that stuff, while also helping with some of the mutliplayer hassles associated with PC gaming.

Correct me if I am wrong, are you trying to build something like this, but with multiple GPUs to power at least 2 VMs?

[imbrock]

11 hours ago, SkyHound0202 said:

Correct me if I am wrong, are you trying to build something like this, but with multiple GPUs to power at least 2 VMs?

Like that though not necessarily rack mounted, or like 7 Gamers, 1 CPU  but for 2.5 people. I was more just looking to see if anyone was using one.
I'm figuring on just a large tower with a cpu with lots of cores for me to assign to vm's, then three gpu's probably each at different performance points also assigned to respective vm's.
The vm with the weakest one would handle emulators and run entirely headless and stream over to my tv on the shield. The other two would be used for running windows mostly to stream games out to the shield or a laptop or whatever using steam gamestream. Though after watching that video you posted I quite like the thunderbolt idea and might try that for a desktop setup somewhere in the house.