My Wife Is Going to KILL Me... Home LAN Center 5 Gamers 1 CPU Build

[moriz1]

3 hours ago, Luscious said:

That setup is still JANKY AF. Especially since now you can get server grade, rack friendly solutions that will accommodate 10+ full length PCIe cards easily AND take up only 4U of rack space. Put it another way, if you don't have 4U of empty space available in that hideous thing of yours that you call a rack, well, you've got bigger problems 

 

Never mind that you could also enjoy a dual CPU system, max out your RAM well beyond 2TB. add gobs of fast NVMe storage, throw in four big spinners for handling big files, tack on an Optane drive for cache and even connect using dual 200Gbit QSFP56. You also avoid the dual PSU issues with a server and at the end of the day it simply looks a lot more professional and streamlined too.

 

Of course it would probably set you back another $100K and that's the crux of the problem here - you are just a cheap ass. Re-purposing previously used consumer hardware like that is indicative of a poor man's attempt of a solution. We can agree that it works but it is also an incredible disappointment at the same time.

 

Unless you are just pretending to be a cheap ass and the actual/better 4U hardware comes later.. you know... because you have an excuse again to make yet another video??? If all you want are ideas excuses for making videos I could feed you plenty 

they were pretty clear that this video is about the proof of concept, not a final build.

 

so yes, there will be another video (probably) where they put it together for deployment. realistically speaking, if they want the system to be even vaguely compact (4U or smaller), they have to go with water cooling. might even be a good opportunity to make that rackmount gaming case that Linus was talking about in a few WAN shows a few weeks ago.

[Mattm4]

What hypervisor are you guys using? I was thinking about doing a similar setup for me and the wife with KVM on ubuntu. But I'm curious on your setup!

[Techrocket9]

Now two famous Linuses have flipped Nvidia off on camera in retaliation for Nvidia's driver policies (though Torvalds is probably a lot happier now after Nvidia open-sourced their kernel driver).

[burrrrrr]

How is the fibre video/USB terminated? I'm possibly interested in similar but I'm not sure how resilient fiber cables are when it comes to everyday wear and tear, but I'd prefer to add a last-mile copper run if possible, but I'm not sure if it would work.

[GodAtum]

what about CPU bound games like MSFS 2020? the performance will be terrible!

[Middcore]

1 hour ago, GodAtum said:

what about CPU bound games like MSFS 2020? the performance will be terrible!

 

There's 6 cores per VM, aren't there? I can't really see Linus, Yvonne, and the kiddos all sitting down for a fun evening of MSFS together anyway. 

[dogwitch]

12 hours ago, Mattm4 said:

What hypervisor are you guys using? I was thinking about doing a similar setup for me and the wife with KVM on ubuntu. But I'm curious on your setup!

same here. was going to ask that.

[NomBread]

I hope it works for linus sake or his wife might actually wack him. 

[Middcore]

I guess I didn't really understand why Yvonne would care if they went about setting up the LAN room this way.

[IkeaGnome]

18 hours ago, HeX_Boi said:

So the comment at 16:38 about buying CSGO... The game's been free for a while now. You can pretty much just make a new account on the spot and play CSGO. Asking around for other accounts was unnecessary and probably took more time than just setting up a burner email.

 

17 hours ago, Vishera said:

Jake: "We should have bought CS:GO"

 

CS:GO: "But i have been Free 2 Play for years"

You two must not have been around for the "pirating" stuff that's gone on in the last 8 months or so. I don't want to reopen that can of worms, but I feel like it was a jab at that.

[tyswid]

With PCIe Gen 5 around the corner, would 4 gamers 1 computer work for LAN events? This assumes there isn't any hiccups with the CPU or peripheral inputs or outputs, but it could be possible to provide PCIe Gen 3 x16 bandwidth support 4 times over a single Gen 5 x 16 slot. I would be interesting if it was 1. possible and 2. practical off of a single graphics card.

[danomicar]

Everytime i see one of these type of builds I try my best to follow along but end up inevitable confused.

 

Also, great title, LOL

[Ultraforce]

3 hours ago, Middcore said:

I guess I didn't really understand why Yvonne would care if they went about setting up the LAN room this way.

I believe a combination of Yvonne having had reliability issues with the Thunderbolt over Fibre that they have done in their current house to have the computers in a seperate room and the jankiness of previous virtualization attempts. Yvonne seems to prefer the systems in the house to be end user-friendly in a way that some of these set-ups tend not to be.

 

[Quackers101]

21 minutes ago, Ultraforce said:

vonne seems to prefer the systems in the house to be end user-friendly in a way that some of these set-ups tend not to be.

what do you mean not user friendly? one just have to saw th house in half to get it going first, then it will become user friendly

*starts yvonne on a linux challenge*

...

*woops she killed linu... linux*

[viz1er]

There is definitely a lot of less stress vibes going on with this build. Making me more interested in doing something similar. 

[Mirano]

On 5/12/2022 at 8:24 PM, moriz1 said:

i run something similar to this, but on a much smaller scale. i have a number of GPU VMs that could run games, and my friends connect to them using parsec. i also use one VM to play games when i'm visiting my parents, just so i don't have to lug around a heavy gaming laptop. unlike Linus, i'm using Proxmox.

 

one thing Linus and co needs to watch out for, is that they have to figure out a way to hide the fact that the VMs are... VMs. Windows is capable of detecting whether it is running as a VM or not, and some anticheats can also do the same. there are a number of CPU flags that i have to use (some of them hidden from the GUI, so i had to edit the config files manually to enable) to accomplish this. prior to doing so, some games, like Genshin Impact, would refuse to run.

 

a quick way to check, is to open up task manager and click on the CPU tab in the Performance tab. If you see the line "Virtual machine: Yes", and the CPU name is "Common KVM processor" or something along those lines, then it means that Windows has detected that it is running in a VM. otherwise, if the CPU tab can detect the name of your CPU and otherwise look normal, then you've succeeded.

 

EDIT: also, KVMs like Unraid and Proxmox can underprovision CPU cores, meaning that you can assign more cores to your VMs than you actually have. this means that you can totally give each of these VMs 16 cores or more, and they'll all run just fine. since most applications and games won't be able to saturate all the cores on a system, you can get away with this quite easily with basically no performance impact. this only becomes an issue if everybody decide to do something stupid, like run prime95 on every VM or something. but even then, the only issue is reduced performance.

Hey,

 

Would you mind letting me know the flags that accomplish this? i'm quite curious myself now to try this virt again. Only the anticheats was holding me back

[GhostRoadieBL]

Since it's all virtualized how hard is it to set-up LAN gaming? should be as simple as different local IPs but that would also mean the virtual machines each have their own network interface?

This is one of the bigger confusions when non-online coop or gaming happens on VMs. I've seen some running independent network ports but never seen many on local linking between VMs for gaming specifically

[moriz1]

2 hours ago, Mirano said:

Hey,

 

Would you mind letting me know the flags that accomplish this? i'm quite curious myself now to try this virt again. Only the anticheats was holding me back

ssh into your proxmox server, and enter:

 

nano /etc/pve/qemu-server/<vmid>.conf

where <vmid> is the id of your VM

 

make sure you have these lines in the conf file:

 

args: -cpu 'host,+kvm_pv_unhalt,+kvm_pv_eoi,hv_vendor_id=NV43FIX,kvm=off,-hypervisor
cpu: host,hidden=1,flags=+pcid

there are probably a few flags in there that are unnecessary. but specifically, you need the -hypervisor flag in args, and host,hidden=1 in cpu. if in doubt, just use all of them.

 

also, note that doing this will likely result in a small loss of performance, since it also turns off a few optimizations for virtualized CPUs.

 

i know for a fact that this gets around the anticheat for Genshin Impact (and basically all Hoyoverse games). i am not sure if it gets around other anticheats like Battleye, EAC etc.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

On 5/12/2022 at 10:17 PM, unijab said:

Going zen 3 (TR pro 5k or Milan) for final build?

I hope so...

 

Whats the plan for storage ... nas or internal or combo of both?

 

Still only going with 10Gb for all 5 seats sharing the same system?

It'll be fibre to the terminals they said

[dogwitch]

4 hours ago, orbitalbuzzsaw said:

It'll be fibre to the terminals they said

wonder what type if used.

btw love the avatar your using.

 

[morairtym]

Cable Ideas to try

Display Port 1.4
https://www.heyoptics.net/products/armored-fiber-8k-displayport-1.4-over-pure-fiber-mpo-om3-fiber-optical-cable-up-to-1000ft
 

HDMI 2.1

https://fibercommand.com/products/8k-fiber-plugs

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

10 hours ago, dogwitch said:

wonder what type if used.

btw love the avatar your using.

 

tyyyy!

[moriz1]

On 5/14/2022 at 3:31 PM, GhostRoadieBL said:

Since it's all virtualized how hard is it to set-up LAN gaming? should be as simple as different local IPs but that would also mean the virtual machines each have their own network interface?

This is one of the bigger confusions when non-online coop or gaming happens on VMs. I've seen some running independent network ports but never seen many on local linking between VMs for gaming specifically

qemu has a built in virtual switch that all VMs are automatically connected to. so, networking isn't an issue.

[MightyMackinac]

I'd love to get more information from Jake or Linus on the USB card they used.

 

I have the four port version of the Sonnet Allegro, and am having a really tough time getting my vm to actually use the card.

I was inspired by them and built my own 'Two Gamers, 1 Machine' hypervisor out of a Lenovo Thinkstation.

I'm also using Hyper-V, so that might be a limitation on my end. I know they used Unraid in their setups, but I would love to see how they actually passed the card through to the VMs.

Based on my testing, the Asmedia 3124 controller does not like being forced into Discrete Device Assignment in Hyper-V. I believe the instructions for the memory mapping were not included on the card, which is creating my problem. Funny enough, I have a different card with a Texas Instruments controller that works flawlessly. I was able to mount it to the VM, Windows installed the driver automatically, and I'm able to plug any of my devices into it no problem.