One rig for my marriage.

[kubadro]

First things first - hello! I've been only a watcher of LTT channel for some time but the time has come for me to search for some advices from the community.

 

Ok, backstory first.

Together, with my wife, we're very much gamers. She is even more than I am. We have one room, quite small in which we have dedicated part for our rigs. This consists of 2 not the biggest desks, 2 medium towers, 2 27" displays. And alot of heat, I mean, it's next to unbearable sometimes.

Since my rig is alraedy 5 years old (and my wife is talking about changes too), I was thinking of a complete change. I would change 2 desks into one long tabletop. And, most importantly, I was thinking of getting rid of our 2 rigs in favour of one. I saw a video on LTT (from 2015) on building 2 virtual gaming systems on one physical machine, strong multi-core HT CPU, 2 GPUs, with help of unraid.
Since I am planning any changes for next year, I still have some time to put all things together, so first I am doing my intel.

First of all - I am looking for any insight - is it worth it? Is there a performance drop/rise compared for 2 separate builds for similar price? Is there any significant additional input lag (we both play FPS games too)? 
Second, I'm interested if a feature I would be looking for is possible... I know I can assign one GPU to one VM and another to second VM... but is it possible to do it in real-time? I mean, If only one VM is active, can it utilize power of both GPUs and switch to single one when the second VM is powered up?
Similar thing with CPU cores - can one machine use all of them and share half only when another machine is powered up? Basically, is there option for dynamic resources allocation?

I will be digging through unraid knowledge base and manuals soon, so probably some of my questions I will answer myself, but help for anybody with experience int he matter is always welcome

Anyway, for hardware, We will most likely go for double 2080rtx super or ti (well, next year's top of the line model). But what about CPU? Is there a sweet spot for number of cores and threads? Haven't really done proper research for years and don't know at which point bottle neck in CPU starts to show up. Disks are totally TBD and MB will be determined by CPU.
Important thing is case and cooling.
I like to dream that I am not lazy and would go for custom-built desk case with liquid cooling... but I am lazy, so I will not
Instead, I am thinking nice looking tower.
But what about cooling? Would air be sufficient?
What about liquid? I know that ultimately the heat will be removed right into our room anyway, so I guess it's not worth the hassle? I'm not really super crazy about looks and noise, we both play in headphones anyway.
My budget is not unlimited, but it probably will go max to 4000-5000$ US, so I guess it should be enough. (I live in Poland though, so prices may vary here from US). 

So that's it. Not a lot of details yet, as I said - beginning of the road, that will end probably summer 2020. Thanks for any advice in that regard.

[GoldenLag]

i would suggest having 2 rigs. 

 

perhaps in an offsite place next to your room. that way the heat is dumped elsewhere than into the gamingroom. 

 

something akin to what Linus has been doing the last 5 years. 

 

 

long range thunderbolt 3 cables should be in stores by mid next year (probably). and avoiding unraid is something you should do as its a lot of hazzle, and its expencive while not being better than a dual tower solution. 

 

also, try to get some ventilation into the gaming room, it will eventually get hot regardless of how little heat you  try to dump into the room. 

[Uptivuptiz]

Damn this is a long post!  

First of all: Welcome to the forum!  

Ok, so here's the benifit that comes with running 2 VMs on one system: Price. Since you don't have to buy 2 seperate system it's cheaper. That being said it comes with the extra hassle of seting up the VMs.

 

As for the CPU choices:

If you were to build the system today a 3900X would be a nobrainer.

Otherwise wait for the 3950X.

 

This seems like an interesting project. If/when you begin the builing process definetly make a thread in the Build Logs sub-forum about it.  

[kubadro]

21 minutes ago, GoldenLag said:

i would suggest having 2 rigs. 

 

perhaps in an offsite place next to your room. that way the heat is dumped elsewhere than into the gamingroom. 

 

something akin to what Linus has been doing the last 5 years. 

 

 

long range thunderbolt 3 cables should be in stores by mid next year (probably). and avoiding unraid is something you should do as its a lot of hazzle, and its expencive while not being better than a dual tower solution. 

 

also, try to get some ventilation into the gaming room, it will eventually get hot regardless of how little heat you  try to dump into the room. 

Sadly, in our apartment we don't really have any good place to dump one or 2 rigs to separate ourselves from heat. I would really love that, but still, it's something we can't do.

I saw Linus's (Linus'es? Linuses? how do You even spell this correctly?) video about rig in another room and thought it was awesome idea... If I had a place like that

But, I might explore this option a little bit, maybe we might rearrange some things and make place 

 

I will not lie, part of this idea is that I wanted to try it, since I thought it was interesting idea. Unless it comes with too big of disadvantage in terms of performance per $

Worst case scenario, after gathering all my information, I might drop the subject and go with plain, boring 2 rigs.

[Bacon soup]

45 minutes ago, kubadro said:

is it worth it?

no. Cost/performance is not going to save you money.

Ventilate/aircondition your room should be a priority over any fancy cooling solution

[kubadro]

Ok, guys, I read You, it's most likely not worth it in terms of performance per $.

Buuuuuut... I'm still a geek and still curious 

 

So, for now, I decided to clean one of my older drives and start a test unraid system on that. Then I will attach all my resources to VM and compare scores with regular, non-virtualized system. I wonder what experienced drop of performance will be.

 

For future - I will still fiddle with the idea, but probably will go with 2 rigs after all. Time to pick up what gear will I use is still there. I'm curious how well AMD will perform against Intel next year. I will do a sanity check here, before I buy anything though.