Steam Machine idea

[BRiteBak]

So with the release of steam os I have been thinking about what I am going to use...

So living in Australia we have a website called graysonline where they often auction off ex lease lenovo desktops, many of which have a slot for a dual slot full size GPU

So my plan was to buy a core 2 duo machine for $50-60 and drop in a gtx460 off eBay for about $50.

In my opinion this is really good bang for the buck and it will run most of the games I play.

What do you guys think?

What are you going use as a steam machine?

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[helping]

The PSU might not be up to having a 460 in there. 

[Lord Pantaloons]

I know of the ones you're talking about, at best they have a 260w rated PSU which probably delivers half of that at the best of times. I had one with an E7500, 1GB of RAM, and a single HDD&ODD. I added another stick of RAM and a GT 630 and it shut off constantly. Took the GT 630 out and it worked fine, it won't handle a 460.

[BRiteBak]

Hmmm, maybe I'll ghetto in a new power supply if it doesn't run properly

Apart from that what do you think

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[JAKEBAB]

do u have like a main beast rig? if so why not just use steam os streaming to that computer then u dont have to put a graphics card in thats what im going to do with my laptop also thanks for telling me about that site ive never heard of it until now.

[BRiteBak]

I didn't know about the streaming! That's awesome!

My family is building a new house at the moment and we are probably going to be setting up 3-4 of these so I'm not sure how that will work out

There is gigabit everywhere so streaming will be fine but I'll have to look into that further.

Still probably going to use some cheapy PCs though

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[CarDesinr]

I agree with power supply upgrade but I also think you should drop in maybe a GTX650 Ti for around $120 or so. Maybe you could find something better but just a suggestion.

[qwertywarrior]

I didn't know about the streaming! That's awesome!

My family is building a new house at the moment and we are probably going to be setting up 3-4 of these so I'm not sure how that will work out

There is gigabit everywhere so streaming will be fine but I'll have to look into that further.

Still probably going to use some cheapy PCs though

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

tell ur parents to have ethernet port in every room

[AndyCapets]

Hmmm, maybe I'll ghetto in a new power supply if it doesn't run properly

Apart from that what do you think

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

If you mean "ghetto" by getting the cheapest PSU you can find... Just don't spend a bit more money, maybe $50 on a decent PSU since it's the most important part of your PC.

[SirReallySam]

I didn't know about the streaming! That's awesome!

 

Yeah I'm gunna set up streaming as well gunna be SWEET

[piplupgao]

tell ur parents to have ethernet port in every room

I'm not sure if I'm going crazy but that looks like a phone cable port to me.              

[BRiteBak]

tell ur parents to have ethernet port in every room

Me and my dad decided to run about 24 for the main network and an additional 10-15 for a PABX

I think we'll be set

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[silencerbob]

I didn't know about the streaming! That's awesome!

My family is building a new house at the moment and we are probably going to be setting up 3-4 of these so I'm not sure how that will work out

There is gigabit everywhere so streaming will be fine but I'll have to look into that further.

Still probably going to use some cheapy PCs though

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

There's 1 big problem with streaming from a big PC to other smaller htpc PCs in the house. You can only run 1 game at a time and it ties up the main big PC.. So it can't do anything at all while streaming that 1 game to your smaller PC. Big drawback right there.

[BRiteBak]

There's 1 big problem with streaming from a big PC to other smaller htpc PCs in the house. You can only run 1 game at a time and it ties up the main big PC.. So it can't do anything at all while streaming that 1 game to your smaller PC. Big drawback right there.

My two brothers both run gaming PCs but they are much less powerful but we can still have multiple streams going

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[silencerbob]

My two brothers both run gaming PCs but they are much less powerful but we can still have multiple streams going

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

SteamOS is not out yet.. what are you talking about exactly?  you run multiple streams ?

[BRiteBak]

SteamOS is not out yet.. what are you talking about exactly? you run multiple streams ?

No sorry, I was saying that if I have multiple machines (my brothers PCs) then I can have simultaneous steam boxes running

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk

[Calibos]

SteamOS couldn't have come at a better time for me. Well, when all the bugs are ironed out after a year anyway.

 

.........By which time I'll have my planned Uber server ready.

 

I've got the case already and am currently modelling my plan for it in sketchup.

 

It is a Corsair Air 540 which for the first few months will just have an i5, 8gigs of ram and a few HDD's.

 

Next year however it will be upgraded to an....

 

Haswell-E i7 5930K (Assuming Intel keep the naming convention, its an 8 Core and its about $5-600)

X99 board with at least 8 Sata Ports (Seen some X79 boards with up to 12 so hopefully the follow up models have the same)

32gb DDR4 Ram

24-28x 3.5" HDD's (Have 10 of various sizes now. Once its fully populated I'll start swapping out the small 500-1000gb drives)

Dual or Tri SLI/Crossfire GPU's (GTX880's ?? )

2x  LSI 8 port Sas/Sata controller cards

HDD's air cooled

CPU/Mobo/GPU's water cooled

9x 120x120x60mm Rad Capacity ie. a 1080 Rad

 

The rad and its fans will fit inside a furniture grade base unit that the server will sit on. Everything else will fit in the case believe it or not.

Its amazing what you can do when you think 'Outside' the Box or in this case, on the 'Otherside' of the box. That, and make use of pci-E extenders. cheap and regular for the Sata controllers and expensive and shielded for the GPU's. Opens up so many more component layout configurations.

 

Anyway. 

 

Bare Metal Hypervisor running several VM's

VM 1 - WHS2011 running Flexraid for Drive Pooling and some Data security for our Media Content and Backups, mySQL XBMC central Database and Network Video Recorder (NVR)       software for recording CCTV footage from 8x 1080P and 2x 3-5MP IP cams.       Allocate 2 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 8 gigs of Ram Bulk of HDD's to Flexraid and a separate 2x Drive Raid 0 array for NVR to this VM       This VM will always run in the background serving Media content/CCTV footage to the XBMC devices around the house.VM 2 - Windows 8.1, 2x Steam Accounts, Instance of XBMC       Allocate 4-6 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 16 gigs of Ram, Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) on 512gb SSD, all GPU's in SLI/Crossfire       This VM will be used for general Windows usage in that room or Movie Watching/Gaming on a 3D 1080p 120" Home Theater setup and probably Oculus Rift in the future       Hence the need to use the GPU's in SLI mode.VM 3 - SteamOS, 2x Steam accounts with friends/family sharing turned on.       Allocate available Cores 3-6, 8 gigs of Ram, VHD and 1 GPU       This VM will stream games to any one of the low powered XBMC devices around the house that will have SteamOS dual booting enabled (Not needed if Valve are clever       and encourage the XBMC developers to port XBMC to SteamOS)VM 4 - Same as above

This way with VM 3 & 4, the 5x XBMC devices around the house which are €99 (Amazon Sale in Feb) Arctic MC001-N's (D525 Atoms with 5 series AMD mobile GPU's) and the several non gaming laptops can take advantage of the gaming power of the server. ie. Every low power XBMC device we already have in the house becomes a potential gaming machine!! Those likely to use the server for gaming on the big screen or Oculus are the same people that would game stream or are at work at different times so there shouldn't be a resource conflict really. 2x Steam accounts friends/family shared with little games overlap means the only time games streaming conflict arises is if 2 people want to play the same game at the same time but they should always be able to play 'A' game.

 

It frustrates me when I read comments from people saying that games streaming on SteamOS is a waste of time because they can just grab their mITX gaming beast and hook it up to their big TV if they want. Thats OK if you are single or are the only gamer in the house.

 

Game Streaming on SteamOS isn't targeted at you FFS !!

 

Its targeted at families like mine. ie. 21st Century Walton Families!! (Pop Culture Ref. probably wasted on those born from 1990-> )

 

.........and they thought I was mad spending the money to wire the entire house for a Gigabit Network when we renovated the house!!

 

the Hardware and Software is all coming together at the right time. Woohoo!!

[silencerbob]

SteamOS couldn't have come at a better time for me. Well, when all the bugs are ironed out after a year anyway.

.........By which time I'll have my planned Uber server ready.

I've got the case already and am currently modelling my plan for it in sketchup.

It is a Corsair Air 540 which for the first few months will just have an i5, 8gigs of ram and a few HDD's.

Next year however it will be upgraded to an....

Haswell-E i7 5930K (Assuming Intel keep the naming convention, its an 8 Core and its about $5-600)

X99 board with at least 8 Sata Ports (Seen some X79 boards with up to 12 so hopefully the follow up models have the same)

32gb DDR4 Ram

24-28x 3.5" HDD's (Have 10 of various sizes now. Once its fully populated I'll start swapping out the small 500-1000gb drives)

Dual or Tri SLI/Crossfire GPU's (GTX880's ?? )

2x LSI 8 port Sas/Sata controller cards

HDD's air cooled

CPU/Mobo/GPU's water cooled

9x 120x120x60mm Rad Capacity ie. a 1080 Rad

The rad and its fans will fit inside a furniture grade base unit that the server will sit on. Everything else will fit in the case believe it or not.

Its amazing what you can do when you think 'Outside' the Box or in this case, on the 'Otherside' of the box. That, and make use of pci-E extenders. cheap and regular for the Sata controllers and expensive and shielded for the GPU's. Opens up so many more component layout configurations.

Anyway.

Bare Metal Hypervisor running several VM's

VM 1 - WHS2011 running Flexraid for Drive Pooling and some Data security for our Media Content and Backups, mySQL XBMC central Database and Network Video Recorder (NVR)       software for recording CCTV footage from 8x 1080P and 2x 3-5MP IP cams.       Allocate 2 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 8 gigs of Ram Bulk of HDD's to Flexraid and a separate 2x Drive Raid 0 array for NVR to this VM       This VM will always run in the background serving Media content/CCTV footage to the XBMC devices around the house.VM 2 - Windows 8.1, 2x Steam Accounts, Instance of XBMC       Allocate 4-6 Cores of the OC'd 5930K, 16 gigs of Ram, Virtual Hard Drive (VHD) on 512gb SSD, all GPU's in SLI/Crossfire       This VM will be used for general Windows usage in that room or Movie Watching/Gaming on a 3D 1080p 120" Home Theater setup and probably Oculus Rift in the future       Hence the need to use the GPU's in SLI mode.VM 3 - SteamOS, 2x Steam accounts with friends/family sharing turned on.       Allocate available Cores 3-6, 8 gigs of Ram, VHD and 1 GPU       This VM will stream games to any one of the low powered XBMC devices around the house that will have SteamOS dual booting enabled (Not needed if Valve are clever       and encourage the XBMC developers to port XBMC to SteamOS)VM 4 - Same as above

This way with VM 3 & 4, the 5x XBMC devices around the house which are €99 (Amazon Sale in Feb) Arctic MC001-N's (D525 Atoms with 5 series AMD mobile GPU's) and the several non gaming laptops can take advantage of the gaming power of the server. ie. Every low power XBMC device we already have in the house becomes a potential gaming machine!! Those likely to use the server for gaming on the big screen or Oculus are the same people that would game stream or are at work at different times so there shouldn't be a resource conflict really. 2x Steam accounts friends/family shared with little games overlap means the only time games streaming conflict arises is if 2 people want to play the same game at the same time but they should always be able to play 'A' game.

It frustrates me when I read comments from people saying that games streaming on SteamOS is a waste of time because they can just grab their mITX gaming beast and hook it up to their big TV if they want. Thats OK if you are single or are the only gamer in the house.

Game Streaming on SteamOS isn't targeted at you FFS !!

Its targeted at families like mine. ie. 21st Century Walton Families!! (Pop Culture Ref. probably wasted on those born from 1990-> )

.........and they thought I was mad spending the money to wire the entire house for a Gigabit Network when we renovated the house!!

the Hardware and Software is all coming together at the right time. Woohoo!!

Umm.. I don't think you can do more than 1 game stream at a time. Just like shield streaming. It also means the big beast of a PC is completely occupied while streaming and it can't be used for anything else. The Vzm is an interesting idea tho.

[Calibos]

Umm.. I don't think you can do more than 1 game stream at a time. Just like shield streaming. It also means the big beast of a PC is completely occupied while streaming and it can't be used for anything else. The Vzm is an interesting idea tho.

Thats why I'd split purchased games between 2 shared steam accounts. 

 

If 2 people wanted to play games on their SteamOS/XBMC Devices/Laptops they couldn't play the same game at the same time but they could play 'A' game

 

There would be 2 SteamOS Virtual machines (VM's) on the server with allocated cores,ram and GPU for them to log into from their client devices. There would only be a resource conflict if someone was gaming off the main 3D Projector/Occulus Rift VM which would be set up to grab more cores and all the GPU's in Sli/Crossfire. In that scenario there would be no free cores or GPU's for VM 3&4

 

I mean, its not all definitely possible by any means. Game-streaming to client PC's with VGA passthrough via Microsofts RemoteFX or the equivelent Citrix/Xenserver/VMware technologies is apparently only smooth enough for slow paced games and not FPS's and the like if even that but I am hoping Steam OS taking over that role might make it all possible and more importantly playable. Lots more research needed though alright.

[silencerbob]

Thats why I'd split purchased games between 2 shared steam accounts.

If 2 people wanted to play games on their SteamOS/XBMC Devices/Laptops they couldn't play the same game at the same time but they could play 'A' game

There would be 2 SteamOS Virtual machines (VM's) on the server with allocated cores,ram and GPU for them to log into from their client devices. There would only be a resource conflict if someone was gaming off the main 3D Projector/Occulus Rift VM which would be set up to grab more cores and all the GPU's in Sli/Crossfire. In that scenario there would be no free cores or GPU's for VM 3&4

I mean, its not all definitely possible by any means. Game-streaming to client PC's with VGA passthrough via Microsofts RemoteFX or the equivelent Citrix/Xenserver/VMware technologies is apparently only smooth enough for slow paced games and not FPS's and the like if even that but I am hoping Steam OS taking over that role might make it all possible and more importantly playable. Lots more research needed though alright.

Well it sounds like a ghetto GRID ur trying to build there. If the "streaming" part of the equation is performed by the CPU.. Then great! If not, then its powered by nvidia kepler "gamestream". Then your out of luck coz they would only let 1 stream out at a time...

[Calibos]

Yeah, your posted prompted me to re-read some stuff and do more research. I thought Steam OS on a VM would be taking over the streaming role to clients from Hyper-V's RemoteFX or its equivelents. Looks like RemoteFX is probably actually a pre-requisite instead. While RemoteFX can deliver enough FPS for slow paced games just about and is perfect for server side rendering and remote Desktop display on a client machine, its not up to the task of proper games streaming. 

 

Looks like I'll have to drop the virtualisation idea then and use dedicated parts for the server and game machine. Thus like you said, just have the ability to stream to one device at a time which will still be great tbh. ie. A shared gaming PC that can be utilised by people in their own rooms albeit only one at a time.

 

Tis a shame really. An 8 Core Haswell-E, a good chunk of ram and 2 or 3 GPU's would have been well up to the task for everything I wanted and a very efficient use of resources.

 

I've set myself another challenge now though. Work out how to fit a mATX and an ATX mobo in the same case and run off the same 1200-1500 watt PSU and cooled with a dual loop :D

[silencerbob]

Yeah, your posted prompted me to re-read some stuff and do more research. I thought Steam OS on a VM would be taking over the streaming role to clients from Hyper-V's RemoteFX or its equivelents. Looks like RemoteFX is probably actually a pre-requisite instead. While RemoteFX can deliver enough FPS for slow paced games just about and is perfect for server side rendering and remote Desktop display on a client machine, its not up to the task of proper games streaming.

Looks like I'll have to drop the virtualisation idea then and use dedicated parts for the server and game machine. Thus like you said, just have the ability to stream to one device at a time which will still be great tbh. ie. A shared gaming PC that can be utilised by people in their own rooms albeit only one at a time.

Tis a shame really. An 8 Core Haswell-E, a good chunk of ram and 2 or 3 GPU's would have been well up to the task for everything I wanted and a very efficient use of resources.

I've set myself another challenge now though. Work out how to fit a mATX and an ATX mobo in the same case and run off the same 1200-1500 watt PSU and cooled with a dual loop :D

If its the nvidia game stream system at work (still don't know 100%) then the main big PC is completely unusable for anything else while the stream is going.. Effectively your 2 PCs become 1... Which is a big drawback IMO.