VIrtualised Gaming

[Mike Charlie]

Hi all, first time posting here, looking for a bit of help. I have a severely limited budget of £1200 GBP which is not good however this only needs to work for proofing the concept to my wife. Down the line I will easily be able to spend more money to add things to it and increase the specs even more later on.

 

The aim of this project started wanting to build myself a better gaming rig as my laptop is getting too old. I then thought I would start to plan a build for my son as well. I was going to build a small server in my little man cave for messing with anyway and then decided to build my rig into the server. However since then a bunch of things have been added to it so total things I want it to do is following:

• Media Server
• NAS Server
• Gaming Server 1
• Gaming Server 2
• Gaming Server 3
• My Gaming Computer
• Sons Gaming Computer
• Wifes Gaming Computer
• Office Computer

So as you can see a lot is going to be expected from a little machine. I have already worked out I will need at least 128 GB RAM and 9 TB of usable storage total which will be in RAID 6 not fully decided how many drives and sizes but 5 disks of 3 TB each will be the bare minimum.  But could go with 11 1TB drives to get the read speed boost. I have also decided for the gaming computers I will use refurbished RX 570. Not got a clue what graphics card I will use for the office computer but it doesn't have to be anything special so what ever is cheap. I also plan on water cooling the server with multiple radiators to try and keep noise down.

 

The first two gaming servers will only have myself and my son on them. I might consolidate them into one and just up the allocations.

 

The problem I am having is deciding on a CPU, it needs to be low budget but powerful, maybe one that can be overclocked to grab every last bit out of it.

 

I know this is a lot to want but like I said if I can make it work for now then I can upgrade parts later on until my setup is where I want it to be in a year or two.

 

The final problem is getting monitors and usb the required lengths, one will be right next to the server so no problem, second will need 8 meters of wire total, third will be 15 meters away last one will be either 15 or 25 meters depending on how I manage to run the cabling.

 

Thanks for any advice.

[NubCak]

I don't think 1500 gbp will be enough...

right now at the very least for a gaming machine you will want 4 cores, 8 threads. 

As there could potentially be 3 people using it, that would mean atleast 12 cores, 32 threads. However you need some overhead to from hyper visor etc. 

So i'd say you need atleast 16 cores, 32 threads, which basically means: 3950x or like a 9980xe.

 

Just processor is already over 50% of your budget or more than your budget.

 

[Mike Charlie]

This is why I was looking at older xeons on ebay, I did notice a DL2000 that has 4 nodes of dual socket x5650s in each node. Never dealt with a DL2000 before so not really sure how it all looks fully but after a bit of reading a have seen that the x5650's can achieve a good enough result. With that in mind it might be able to do it? I would have 8 of them across the 4 nodes. If I went this way I could go with each computer being on a separate node and then split the rest of the services across the nodes. Something like:

• Node 1
  • My Gaming Computer
  • NAS Server
• Node 2
  • Sons Gaming Computer
  • Media Server
• Node 3
  • Office Computer
  • Gaming Server 1 & 2 consolidated
• Node 4
  • Wifes Gaming Computer
  • Gaming Server 3

Although I don't think the DL2000 is a good fit exactly as don't think the graphic cards will go in correctly. But this is the sort of thing I am looking at.

[Mike Charlie]

Ok some thinking overnight and what if instead I went with building a PC for my wifes gaming computer, sons gaming computer and the office computer. Just build a server for gaming servers, media servers and NAS server along my gaming rig. This would very much lessen the load on the server and make it a lot easier seeing as distances wouldnt be a problem straight up. So by that logic I would only need to run

• Media Server
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 2 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• NAS Server
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 1 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• Gaming Server 1/2
  • 12 GB RAM
  • 0.25 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 4C/8T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• Gaming Server 3
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 0.25 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• My Gaming Rig
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 3 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 8C/16T ~ 3 GHz
  • Not decided on Graphics for this but might go with AMD RX 570 to start with, I want to see what they release later this year, then might upgrade to either that or the RX 5700 XT

 

So with all that in mind we would need the server to have the following system:

• 68 GB RAM Might up this to 80GB RAM
• 5.5 TB Might up this to 7 TB but thats probably unneeded.
• 18C/36T CPU at 3 GHz possibly across two processors to split the load using 2 10C/20T CPU at 3.0 GHz
• 1 Graphics card, I might upgrade this to 2 later to allow for my media server to do hardware accelerated transcoding

This would allow for a budget of ~£850 maybe more depending on how cheap I can build the separate rigs. But buying second hand xeons should help budget a lot more.

[NubCak]

8 hours ago, Mike Charlie said:

Ok some thinking overnight and what if instead I went with building a PC for my wifes gaming computer, sons gaming computer and the office computer. Just build a server for gaming servers, media servers and NAS server along my gaming rig. This would very much lessen the load on the server and make it a lot easier seeing as distances wouldnt be a problem straight up. So by that logic I would only need to run

• Media Server
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 2 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• NAS Server
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 1 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• Gaming Server 1/2
  • 12 GB RAM
  • 0.25 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 4C/8T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• Gaming Server 3
  • 8 GB RAM
  • 0.25 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 2C/4T ~ 3 GHz
  • No Graphics needed
• My Gaming Rig
  • 32 GB RAM
  • 3 TB Storage
  • Undecided CPU but 8C/16T ~ 3 GHz
  • Not decided on Graphics for this but might go with AMD RX 570 to start with, I want to see what they release later this year, then might upgrade to either that or the RX 5700 XT

 

So with all that in mind we would need the server to have the following system:

• 68 GB RAM Might up this to 80GB RAM
• 5.5 TB Might up this to 7 TB but thats probably unneeded.
• 18C/36T CPU at 3 GHz possibly across two processors to split the load using 2 10C/20T CPU at 3.0 GHz
• 1 Graphics card, I might upgrade this to 2 later to allow for my media server to do hardware accelerated transcoding

This would allow for a budget of ~£850 maybe more depending on how cheap I can build the separate rigs. But buying second hand xeons should help budget a lot more.

My previous rig was actually an I7-970 based rig, which is 6 core / 12 thread processor based on the same architecture as the X5650. 

It's clearly showing its signs of age, which is why i decided to build a new rig late last year. 

I'm not aware of any 10c/20t CPUs that will overclock well on a budget. With that being said, IPC has significantly improved since the days of sandybridge, for games you'd probably want something like the following:

~4ish ghz with atleast 6 cores, with IPC comparable to something within the last 3 years. 

Although Tomshardware is not usually the best choice for unbiased data, this below link is a good choice to look at processors in general.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-hierarchy,4312.html

 

Here's a video from Linus, which i feel is quite close to what you're looking to achieve:

I'm not saying you would use opterons but rather something like a dual socket xeon setup, xeons have had lock multipliers for a while now and run far lower frequencies.

I digress, the main thing is what you want to play and you need to be realistic here: If you do indeed find a 10c/20t processor @3ghz its probably gonna bottle neck pretty much any video card available today. 

If you are 100% set on getting something last generation for a video card, i would recommend getting the RX480 instead of the RX470. On the used market, it wouldn't cost you much more, but offers much  better performance. 

Lastly i'd also like to point out running separate rigs will also cost more interms of secondary components, like the case, power supplies, motherboards. 

Quite frankly speaking I don't see how you would be able to come up with 2.5 competent gaming rigs with that budget, let alone adding in functions like home server and Nas servers.

[Mike Charlie]

Ok I have sat down and thought it all through some more and instead of trying to tackle everything I am doing, from what you showed me I saw that my plan would not work in the long run at all. The plan is now a server virtualising just the following:

• Gaming Servers
• NAS Server
• Media Server

I reckon  I can do the above for pretty much nothing by buying a second hand Proliant or Poweredge server so this shouldn't be a problem. Then like above I will build individual PC's for each room but might space the time out to allow for more budget.

 

Now for my gaming rig I have decided to try to upgrade my laptop, the company that sold it me told me it can't be but I doubt it, it currently has a GTX 970M and I would like to upgrade it to a standard graphics card, if I can do this then that will significantly help me. The final problem would be cooling. As I type this my laptop is running at 57 C and fans are ridiculously loud. I guess maybe I could look at liquid cooling seeing as I will be keeping my laptop in the one room even a simple AIO would probably do better for this. Will need to take my laptop apart and have a look around before deciding on this fully but it is an idea on how to get the most out of it, it has an i7-4790k in it so should be good enough for now. If I can make it last a couple years then I can upgrade later on.