Building a home gaming server

Jellybean188 · April 20

Okay guys i need some help/tips with an idea i have...

My wife and myself both love to game both pc and xbox gaming and watch movies on plex at this point all separated on 3 systems . Now i wanna build a home server and kinda wanna put all game systems in here and also put a plex server on it for the movies.

Now the budget is kinda good ( i think) 2500€ but dont wanna spend all on it as i have some stuff laying around that is still ussable.

This are the specs i had in mind.

Motherboard: Gigabyte B550 EAGLE WIFI6 moederbord

Memory: HyperX FURY Beast 128 GB 4 x 32 GB DDR4 3200 MHz

Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 5950X processor ( this one i already have from my personal rig)

Videocard: ASUS Geforce RTX 4060 DUAL-RTX 4060-O8G-EVO ( this one i already have from my personal rig)

Videocard: MSI GeForce RTX 4060 VENTUS 2X BLACK 8G OC ( this one is in my wife her rig now)

Videocard: Nvidia RTX A1000 8 GB GDDR6 ( for plex already have this one)

SSD: Samsung 9100 PRO 2TB M.2 SSD i have 2 of those at the moment both are in the personal rigs. Plex runs on a old ssd

Networkcard: StarTech.com 2 poorts 10G ( Already have those in the personal rigs as the home network is 10gb and fiber from the street is 8gb.

Powersuply: be quiet! Dark Power Pro 13 1300W

I was thinking about using micrsoft server 2025 in combination with Moonlight so we can run desktop games on the xbox. But dont know if this OS is the right piece of software for this....

Also i think the specs are okay if not please let me know what to change or not to change.

jaslion · April 20

Remote gaming from a pc is never as good as local and you will have input latency that is often noticable. As well as degraded image quality. This is always a given when network image streaming for games.

If you are ok with that you can do a build like this. I would not replace your desktops with a single system really.

Do you want to do 1 pc multiple gamers? If so DO NOT DO THIS. It is unstabel, prone to fucking up because of windows updates, driver issues, severe usb port issues, many games will NEVER work due to anti cheat/drm/licensing, horrible to keep running,... Basically a full time hobby keeping this terrible solution alive.

If you are ok with that you can do it.

You can build the system and it may work but really just keep things separate.

If you really need a plex box + game server hosting build a simple machine to do just that.

Jellybean188 · April 21

21 hours ago, jaslion said:

Remote gaming from a pc is never as good as local and you will have input latency that is often noticable. As well as degraded image quality. This is always a given when network image streaming for games.

If you are ok with that you can do a build like this. I would not replace your desktops with a single system really.

Do you want to do 1 pc multiple gamers? If so DO NOT DO THIS. It is unstabel, prone to fucking up because of windows updates, driver issues, severe usb port issues, many games will NEVER work due to anti cheat/drm/licensing, horrible to keep running,... Basically a full time hobby keeping this terrible solution alive.

If you are ok with that you can do it.

You can build the system and it may work but really just keep things separate.

If you really need a plex box + game server hosting build a simple machine to do just that.

Thank you for your reaction.

Yeah the idea was to do 1 pc multiple gamers but than over the network.

So to my understanding you say like its a bad idea to do this. but what if i than like put the builds in a network rack like all seperate systems the network rack is downstairs and the game room is upstairs like 2 floors up i have pipes running already to that space cause of the fiber thats already going from the rack to upstairs.

How can i like make this work? what will i need? can i use like a dockingstation with a usb-c cable or you have better ideas?

(i kinda wanna move the systems cause of the heat upstairs in summer time)

jaslion · April 21

29 minutes ago, Jellybean188 said:

Thank you for your reaction.

Yeah the idea was to do 1 pc multiple gamers but than over the network.

So to my understanding you say like its a bad idea to do this. but what if i than like put the builds in a network rack like all seperate systems the network rack is downstairs and the game room is upstairs like 2 floors up i have pipes running already to that space cause of the fiber thats already going from the rack to upstairs.

How can i like make this work? what will i need? can i use like a dockingstation with a usb-c cable or you have better ideas?

(i kinda wanna move the systems cause of the heat upstairs in summer time)

How long is the run?

Theres 3 options:

Fiber thunderbolt runs which are $$$$$$$$$$$$$

Optical displayport + usb 2.0 over ethernet which is $$

Cool the room with an ac $$$

Since you have amd systems thunderboltnis kinda iffy. You also would need to inject the thunderbolt link with a fisplay signal as desktop and laptop thunderbolt is VERY different with default features

Retrodex Gaming · April 23

On 4/20/2025 at 1:24 PM, jaslion said:

Remote gaming from a pc is never as good as local and you will have input latency that is often noticable. As well as degraded image quality. This is always a given when network image streaming for games.

If you are ok with that you can do a build like this. I would not replace your desktops with a single system really.

Do you want to do 1 pc multiple gamers? If so DO NOT DO THIS. It is unstabel, prone to fucking up because of windows updates, driver issues, severe usb port issues, many games will NEVER work due to anti cheat/drm/licensing, horrible to keep running,... Basically a full time hobby keeping this terrible solution alive.

If you are ok with that you can do it.

You can build the system and it may work but really just keep things separate.

If you really need a plex box + game server hosting build a simple machine to do just that.

Going to argue this one as I do EXACTLY (und exactly) this setup and it's been amazing. DO NOT run MS Server 25 for it it. MS Server is absolute pain and Hyper V will not give you what you want easily. (It grabs the primary display adapter, wont let you use it elsewhere, complete cluster).

Do however check out Unraid, stub the GPU & NVME drives to VFIO at boot and pin them to 2x VM for streaming games from. Also run some spinning rust and a cache drive for the Plex server (Docker it!) and trust me, its incredible. I can now stream to almost anything in the house, with No PC anywhere other than up in my rack hidden away.

Do use ethernet, do keep access easy to the machines. Do expect to be doing 1080p (120hz on moonlight is delightful), and do run individual NIC in the VM if you can.