 Seven Gamers 1 CPU, which you can check out over here, was one of the most successful videos in every way that I have ever made. So I determined almost immediately that I had to follow it up somehow. But one of the biggest criticisms of Seven Gamers was that it was kind of over the top and impractical. So in working on a sequel, I called up a friend of mine for some advice. Hey, yeah, Mikey. You've got experience with dealing with negative feedback about your over-the-top style. How would you respond? And that, my friends, is how eight gamers, one CPU, was born. TunnelBear is the easy-to-use VPN service that lets you use the web as though you're in one of 20 different countries. Learn more and try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. Okay, but for real, the objectives of eight gamers were several. One, I did want to outdo the original project. Two, I wanted to make the game more fun. Three, I wanted to make the game more fun. Four, I wanted to make the game more fun. Five, I wanted to make the game more fun. I did want to outdo the original project. Two, I wanted the machine to have some kind of practical application. If not today, then at some point in the future. And three, I wanted the hardware to actually behave predictably in this kind of a use case. Between the WS board and the R9 Nanos, that last machine was a nightmare. I'm fairly certain I was the first person, and only, including a SUS R&D, to ever try seven cards in that board at a time. So the recipe started, as it always seems to, with Intel inside. For months leading up to the release, I had been harassing my contacts, all of them, about availability of 22-core Broadwell EP 2699v4 processors, so that I could pack 44 cores, that is 88 threads, of CPU power into this monster. And they came through. And for that matter, so did Kingston, with 832-gig sticks of quad-channel ECC DDR4 server memory, along with a bunch of 1TB SSDs that I divvied up into 16 gigs of RAM, and 1TB worth of space for each of my VMs, with actually about 100 gigs of RAM left over for Unraid. Because, yes, my friends, Unraid is returning for more virtualized gaming action. Now, some folks have asked why I continue to use Unraid for these projects, instead of something like KVM from Red Hat or VMware. Well, there are a few reasons. One, Unraid uses KVM. It's open source. Two, it handles GPU pass-through, which is important for the impressive near bare-metal performance in gaming applications that we measured in this video, really, really well. And three, its pooled safe storage is an easy way to manage data across multiple VMs, and I've got another clever trick to show you guys this time, too. All right, so that's all fine and good, and very similar to last time. So what's the difference, then, Linus? Well, first up is the SuperMicro SYS4028GR-TRT, a dual LGA 2011.3 Xeon, 24 memory slot, 24 SSD slot, bare-bone server designed for high computational density applications like scientific research and simulation, functionalities enabled by its 11 PCI Express 16x slots, eight of which are advertised as being ready for a graphics card or compute card like a Xeon Phi or Nvidia Tesla, though perhaps more than eight is possible with some extra power cables running from its four redundant 1000-watt power supplies. More on that later. The other main difference is in the graphics cards. Thanks to AMD's half-assed relinquishing of hardware resources when you soft reset a system, the entire host last time needed to be shut down every time I had to reset a single VM for a driver installation or a crash or whatever else. So I cried about my sad story to Zotac, and they not only ponied up eight of their top-of-the-line GTX 980 Ti AMP video cards to ensure that each of my gamers would have a perfect gaming experience, but they also contributed the thin clients that I needed for this very different implementation. For each of their ZBOX B series and C series with low-power Intel processors, we've actually covered Zotac's wide variety of quiet, sometimes shockingly powerful mini PCs in the past. And combining these with some HyperX SODIMM memory modules and 240-gig SSDs from Kingston, we had some awesome client boxes to hook up the gorgeous 27-inch IPS 4K27UD88 FreeSync gaming monitors that LG provided. Because 8Gamers1 CPU is all about my vision for a high-tech household in the future. Something I've talked about before on the WAN Show. A high-powered machine in the closet that can allocate, preferably dynamically, computing power, gaming, or even otherwise, to wherever it's needed. A TV or a projector, as many desktops or laptops spread throughout the building as needed, or even a handheld device like an NVIDIA Shield Portable. I wanted, effectively, to build my own NVIDIA grid, but with consumer GPUs and using Valve's Steam in-home streaming, to serve to all my clients. Not something they had in mind for it, I'm sure. So let's talk then about the setup process. Was it actually simpler? Well, the hardware was less flaky this time, which means that this hyper-speed setup guide for Unraid that you guys are looking at went much smoother. Copy files to USB drive, make drive bootable, assign SSDs to cache for high-speed OS and game drives, assign larger drives to the array for mass storage, create VMs, share storage between the VMs, which, whoa, slow down there, John. Kingston sent us like 10 of their SSDs for this, and you just shared data between virtual disks at the time of creation, so on a single terabyte of storage, you could have 10 VMs each with 200 gigs of Windows, games, other base applications, and 100 gigs each of dedicated storage. Very efficient. Hopefully that feature makes it into the web gooey at some point. So all of that was fine then, but the disadvantage to a network solution like this is that while in theory you can manage the entire setup from a single terminal somewhere else in the building, in practice, remote desktop connection session management required this little trick I found on the Steam forums to disconnect in such a way as to not bork Steam in home streaming. Then I needed to reach out to FitPC, who whipped me up 10 prototypes of their new 4K headless HDMI dongle that can handle up to 4K 60Hz and allows the video card's HDMI audio device to be active on a remote client. This is needed unless you wouldn't want to install a bunch of sound cards or something like that. So then finally, after all of that, it was time to get all my gamers to sign into Steam on the server side using TeamViewer and on the client side on their machines that ranged from comfortable gaming seats to less comfortable gaming seats, and after fighting with some of the weirdness, get things fired up. Right now, because I need to play this game, it looks fine. The controls do feel a little bit laggy, but I think part of that is just the god-awful vehicle controls with keyboard and mouse on GTA. My gaming experience has so far been relatively normal. It was indoors for the most part, but now that it's outdoors, it seems like the graphics quality actually takes a dip sometimes. Well, so far I started the game up, I got through the intros, and then somebody pointed out that my game was going in slow-mo. Which it does look like it is going in slow-mo. No, I don't feel like I'm gaming on anything that's in the closet. I started playing and I'm like, assuming that the tower was just under the desk, and then it glitched out and I was like, wait. And then I thought about it and I was like, oh, latency. Pretty smooth, it's pretty seamless, it doesn't seem like I'm running remotely, it feels like I'm hooked up to a full-fat gaming tower. Not less than perfect, but almost. A little bit laggy, but a little bit compression that I noticed from the streaming, but other than that, it's pretty good. Would you consider putting your gaming machine in a closet and beaming it to thin clients on UTV? If I was playing CSGO, then no, but for any other game I think it would be perfectly fine. I don't know about switching, but maybe consider adding it, because I don't think I would want to hide my rig in a closet somewhere, but at the same time it would be useful if I'm out of the room and I don't want to be tethered to a battle station or something. I want to move elsewhere, so that could be really good. So I think the conclusion here is pretty straightforward. While we pushed the hardware and the software and our networking infrastructure, we are streaming a lot of data right now to the limits, most people's experiences are actually surprisingly good, and while I don't think we're ready for LAN centers, for example, to just have a server room with a bunch of machines, you can see there I just ran into an issue. I'll... there, whoop, that was just a hiccup. While I don't think we're ready for LAN centers to just have a server rack in a closet somewhere and a bunch of thin clients spread out throughout the LAN center, I don't think we're that far away, and seeing it perform as well as it did, especially considering the fact that we're running GTX 980 Ti's and Titan X's all sandwiched next to each other, with many of them thermal throttling, is pretty darn impressive, and I hope you guys can agree and look forward like me to a future where you can just have one box that powers the gaming experiences of an entire household of people as computers continue to get more and more powerful. And I hope you can also agree that this is a somewhat more practical application of this technology than just having a bunch of people plugged into and gathered around a single tower, which is why I wanted to do it as a follow-up. I guess this is sort of networking related because today's video sponsor is TunnelBear, the easy-to-use VPN app for mobile and desktop. TunnelBear lets you tunnel through up to 20 different countries, allowing you to browse the internet and use online services as though you are in a different country. They've got apps for iOS, Android, PC, and Mac. They also have a Chrome extension, and it's easy to use. No DNS reconfiguration port forwarding any of that nonsense. You just pick your country, you flip the switch, and boom! Your connection gets encrypted, and it appears to the websites and services you're using as though you are sitting in a different country than the one you were in. And the best part of TunnelBear is you can try it for free, no strings attached, with 500 megabytes of free monthly data just by checking out the link in the video description. And if you decide, hey, I like TunnelBear, I'd love to pay a reasonable amount monthly for an unlimited plan, well, you can save 10% by going to tunnelbear.com slash LTT, also linked in the video description. Sort of the same link. So just... So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that dislike button, but if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe even consider supporting us by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Instructions are up there. You can, you know, buy one of these LG monitors, one of these Zotac Thin clients, one of those fantastic 22-core Broadwell EP CPUs, or maybe just a new video card from our friends over at Zotac, or just anything you want, actually, even toilet paper helps us out a lot. You can buy a cool shirt like this one at the link in the video description. You can join our community forum. You can ask and answer questions. That's also linked in the video description. And if you're done all that stuff and you're wondering what to watch next, hey, if you haven't already, check out the original 7Gamers1 CPU. It is pretty different, actually, surprisingly so, so don't miss it.