Couple's PC build?

Tetsuiga · October 1, 2020

Budget (including currency): unlim

Country: us

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: rdr2, hots, wow, mhw, basically any recent game

Other details (shes running a 4790k 16gb ram gtx 980, im currently running a 1800x ryzen 7, 16gb ram, 1080ti):

Hi all,

new to the forum, saw linus' recent couples pc video and im wondering the actual practicality of it i guess, and how it might be achieved, i think the ability to run two people on one machine sounds awesome, and id like to try and pull it off if i could ! would be really neat to show to people.

she is currently only running a 1080p monitor and im running a 1440p both at 144hz, so building a system that could run those framerates would be ideal, she is less of a power user than i am, but she does enjoy the few games she plays to look really nice,

Im thinking of holding out for the upcoming zen 3 chips to release, i have a few questions of how this might work

1. i know i need two video cards, how would sound work?

2. i dont know a lot about virtually running windows, how does one divide the ram, hard drive etc?

3. is it easy to turn on/off? we work opposite shifts some were not always ont he pc together, so id like to reclaim those rescources if possible when shes not home

4. networking, our itnernet isnt the greatest to begin with, i assume each running copy of windows would have its own ip settings, would there be anything special to do here?

thanks so much for taking the time to read this and replying !

RadiatingLight · October 1, 2020

15 minutes ago, Tetsuiga said:

1. i know i need two video cards, how would sound work?

2. i dont know a lot about virtually running windows, how does one divide the ram, hard drive etc?

3. is it easy to turn on/off? we work opposite shifts some were not always ont he pc together, so id like to reclaim those rescources if possible when shes not home

4. networking, our itnernet isnt the greatest to begin with, i assume each running copy of windows would have its own ip settings, would there be anything special to do here?

Keep in mind I've never done this, so these are just guesses:

1. Probably sound through HDMI. You might be able to dedicate the motherboard sound to one system and have a sound card for the other system, or if one system has USB speakers, they can just use USB passthrough.

2. You do it with a program like Unraid, which runs "below" everything else, and manages the resources. (this is called a hypervisor). Unraid needs some resources to run on as well, so if you have 8 cores and 32GB ram in the computer, unraid might need 2 cores and 4GB RAM, so you'd end up with 3 cores and 14GB RAM per user.

3. It's easy to turn on/off each system individually, but the resources don't get freed up. To reclaim unused resources you'd need to completely re-configure the VM, which takes a very long time.

4. not sure about this one, but it seems likely that there wouldn't be anything to do.

overall, I don't recommend it, especially if you're going to be doing actual work on this machine, rather than gaming. It's less reliable, takes longer to set up, and the cost saving are pretty small (you save a little on the power supply, case, and motherboard, but GPU price is the same, and you need a better CPU.