Need advice with UNRAID build

littlegreen · October 1, 2020

Budget (including currency): £ 1,200

Country: UK

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Games mainly.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc):

Got GPUs. Got 32GB DDR4 @ 3000MHz + 850W PSU. Got SSDs and I don't use HDDs at all. Got USB audio interfaces. Got monitors and peripherals.

Hey guys! Me and the Mrs. often play games online and I thought it'd be really nice if we were playing off the same machine. Also, I thought I could finally make my first custom loop for WC in a new case.

I've seen UNRAID work and am impressed, however, I also realise it comes with a few caveats - and so I am struggling to choose a suitable platform for it. I understand that with AMD platforms, it is quirky at best, and with Intel platforms I will probably be hitting a bottle neck in the following scenario:

I am looking to buy a 3080 outside the budget above, and I have a 1070, which my wife would be using on her monitor. Generally speaking, I would prefer to have PCI-E gen4, where I completely realise that the performance difference is so minor, I am willing to stay on Gen3 if it covers the rest of the requirements. Which are mainly for number of pci-e lanes - and this is where I am hitting a roadblock. Consumer grade CPU-s predominantly have 16 lanes - and that's simply put one GPU. I know that I should not be bothered if it is Gen4 in 2x8 lanes config, but on a Gen3 platform it will be a very real issue. In an ideal world, I would have 34 lanes, so both GPUs can have 16, and then I would like to have a pci-e based USB controller for direct passthrough to one of the machines, which I understand saves a ton of headaches with hot-plugging devices. Also, 1 lane for wifi and bluetooth for game controllers, etc.

So I suppose the question is what platform should I be aiming for and is the budget enough, or am I better off with two separate PCs as we have always been? Maybe upgrade one to take full advantage of the 3080 - and use whatever possible to beef up the other? Our machines currently have 6700k + 16GBs of memory (for her) and a 7700k with 32GBs of memory(for me) respectively - fully built and operational.

Many thanks in advance!

porina · October 1, 2020

40 minutes ago, littlegreen said:

or am I better off with two separate PCs as we have always been?

I think this is the safe and simple option. A 3080 deserves to be paired with more cores than a quad, as good as it was for the time. So get one high end system, and use best of the rest in the other until such time you decide to upgrade that too.

littlegreen · October 1, 2020

I had a feeling this was going to be if not the first, then one of the first responses lol

I'll probably sell the 6700k with the 16 gigs, transition the 7700k to her and look for either a 10900k for myself, however, 7700k has not bottlenecked me in what I play so far, so I'm not in any real rush.. I could wait and see what Zen3 is like when it launches, which I understand is right around the corner. ...