 I promised my wife that we were not going to do it this way, but... I don't see her. So here's the thing. Every single project we've ever done with like multiple gamers and one CPU, or multiple video editors and one CPU has had one thing in common. It was kind of janky. Good enough to make a video about it for sure, but not good enough to deploy day to day. Well today, that all changes. Both the hardware and software side of virtualization have come a long way in the last couple of years, to the point where we have individual CPUs with 32 or even 64 cores, and Nvidia dropped the artificial lock on their consumer GeForce GPUs that prevented them from running inside a VM without some hackery nonsense, not to mention stability issues. So here's what we're going to do. We are going to build a single OP machine that is going to power all five of the gaming stations in the LAN room over there, so that my entire family can sit down and game together without anybody even realizing that they're all running on the same box. We hope. We hope. Yeah, Jake's here. What's up, Jake? He's holding the script. Should be fine. Kind of ad-libbed it a bit. Oh, just like I ad-libbed this segue to our sponsor. SmartDeploy, now powered by PDQ.com. With SmartDeploy, IT professionals can leverage Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive to re-image Windows PCs from the cloud. Grab your free SmartDeploy licenses worth over $500 at smartdeploy.com slash Linus. To fill you guys in, here's what the LAN center is going to look like. Each of our five stations is wired up for power. Oh, that's not power. Sorry, here's the power. This one is a Cat6a cable connected to an RJ45 connector, so that can be used for up to 10 gigabit networking. And then down here, we've got OM4 multimode fiber with an LC connector. And we can use this a number of different ways. The way we're going to use it is for USB, but we could actually do up to 100 gigabit networking on this thing. And that's today, assuming that we don't see any kind of future evolutions of the standard. The coolest thing, though, is this box up here, which is actually more of an access box slash pull station. So you can see this runs through conduit in the walls and would allow us to run different cables in the future. Also contains this bad boy. This is a fiber optic display port 1.4 cable. That means that over this single cable that runs 50 feet away to the mechanical room, we could do 4K 120 hertz to a display. And this will all go back to that motherboard I was holding at the beginning. I know all of that is unnecessary. We could have just as easily put the gaming computers in the room right next to the monitors. But the idea was that by using these long distance cables, we could remove all the heat and all the noise and just dump it all here in the mechanical room. Except it's kind of weird to just have five like full size. I mean, that's kind of small, but let's say five full size ATX towers just chilling in here. So we're like, let's throw it in the rack. Yeah, but then we realized, well, now hold on a second. Just to get a GPU in here without running like sideways GPUs. Yeah, freaking like a blowing matron fans and making a ton of noise. You're going to end up with every one of these chassis being at least this thick. And all of a sudden, what? Well, hold on a second. Five of these, we're going to take up the whole freaking rack. So I'm sorry, wife. There was simply no other way than to consolidate it all. Definitely couldn't have just gotten another hot pink rack. No, couldn't have done. I mean, we probably could have done that. You don't want to make this one jealous. Jake, is that a crypto mining rack? Why, yes. Yes, it is. Now we don't know what the final system is going to look like. Hopefully not like that. Yeah, this would not be ideal. This would not fit in the rack. Instead, we're just using it to see if the actual concept of having our five GPUs works well and works stable enough that you can actually deploy it. Because even though, yeah, like I said, it's gotten a lot better than it has been over the years. We also haven't tried it. We haven't tried it on this particular motherboard, with these particular GPUs, and you can run into some weirdness. Okay, what's the model of this epic in here? It's a 75F3, F for frequency. And what's special about this bad boy is it's 280 watt TDP, 32 cores and boost frequency of up to 4 gigahertz. And as for RAM, okay, well, you don't get the same kind of crazy specs that you might on the desktop side. Or RGB. Just because you're running server RAM doesn't mean you need to go slow. This Micron 3200 megatransfer per second DDR4 is flipping fast. And more importantly, we've got a total of 256 gigabytes of it. So that means we should be able to put... What is that, 36 gigs of machine or something? Yeah, six cores to each machine and 32 gigs of RAM to each machine. Easily, yeah. Easy. We could give the kids 16 and use the rest for something else. That's true. So one of the greatest things about Epic is how many PCIe lanes are running off of that CPU. It's 128. That means that each of these 16 X slots is actually running at full PCIe Gen 4 by 16. With an asterisk. So I think there's a couple of them. No, there's one. One that like switches with some M.2s or something like that. These are Oculink. These are PCIe. These M.2s, well, they share, but they're PCIe. And then these are SATA, right? Yeah. They break out. Yeah. But you still got... That's another eight lanes right over there. That's freaking insane. Okay. When I saw these, I just about crapped my pants. But Sonnet has a new USB-C card. Okay. Isn't that amazing? Each of these two ports is powered by a dedicated controller here on this board that appears to be using an M.2 connector to split. So they must have some kind of PCIe switch or bridge chip on here or something like that. So you can take the 16X lane and get, I guess, anywhere from... That's weird, actually. It's a 16X interface here. And then they've got only a 4X up here to the daughterboard. Well, if you look at the board too, like it doesn't really look like the rest of the pins are connected. Okay. This is an 8X board. And then they've just got it taking up a full 16X slot just for lulls, apparently. Anyway, the reason we need these are that you can pass through an individual USB device or USB port to a VM, but the better way to do it without compromising on performance is to pass through an entire controller. So this way, each one of our VMs is going to get its own controller. That way we can have full hot plug capabilities and full performance. If for whatever reason they're doing, I don't know, homework or a media project on there or something, they want to ingest some footage. Yeah, it's kind of like, you know, a regular computer with just a USB port. You can just use it just like that. Exactly. And once you've got display port and USB, you can kind of connect to anything. Do you have a particular layout planned for this? Sort of. I played with it a bit and there is a way that makes it work better. Otherwise known as there's only one way to do it. And if you don't do it this way, it won't all fit. Okay. And do you remember? Thanks, Jake. For the kids, we've got RTX 3060s. These are actually the ones that are left over or returned from the verified actual gamer drop. Have we tested to make sure they work? Nope. Because they are returns. Should be fine. Okay, sure. Anyway, the point is we only got a handful of them back. And so it wasn't enough for us to have any meaningful amount of stock to do a drop again. But we didn't want to just turn around and sell them individually and like profit off the scalper prices or whatever. So they've kind of just been sitting there. Anyway, now we're going to use them. So there you go. Three 3060s and then for me and Yvonne, we're stepping up to 3080 Ti's. Cause like, you know, we're the parents. We get the good stuff. We'll probably swap these out when we do the final build anyway. I think the intention long-term would be to water cool them. So we might end up with reference cards just to make that a little bit easier. Right. Yeah. Do you remember when an AX1600i was like excessive? Like stupid. You could run four GPUs on it. Now you're like, you could run two maybe. Like, can you even run two 3090s on an AX1600i? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's still like, you're getting there. It's fine. It's fine. So for five, we needed more than one power supply. I wanted to use the 2000 watt power supply we have because you do have two 8-volt in the rack. Oh, that's right. But we don't have an extension cord to get that power from there to here. Right. And we're doing the test out here rather than running everything through the walls today. Yeah. We want to know if it actually works. Instead, rather than one AX1600i, we have two. Nerd. I got a little, little power supply jumper. These things are sick. You just plug it into your motherboard and it's got a little like a pigtail with two connections just to jump the power supply. So when you hit the button, they both turn on at the same time. You don't have to do this. You could put a paper clip in the second power supply and it would just be on all the time. But it just, it doesn't really feel right. Yeah. That doesn't feel right at all. Oh, one thing we didn't mention. We're running Unraid. So our operating system runs off of a USB stick like it's the Stone Age. Lime Tech, if you guys are watching, definitely do want to be able to run Unraid off of a real drive at some point. Thank you. Can I turn this on now? Oh, hold on a second there, buddy. I just got to plug I.O. That's VGA. That stuff works live. It's fine. Well, no, I just, it's not the point. I just need... I'm just gonna... Do you know which one is 10 gig? Yeah. Hey, look, it's booting. It's booting? Yeah. Oh, good. Look at that. Boy, do these server boards ever take a long time to boot. Well, they have to wait for the IPMI to boot up. I was having a panic attack this morning. It was booting up. You see this monitor down here? The main monitor was only showing PCIe bus enumeration, which means like it's checking for the graphics cards. But it also means that it's gone to the graphics card to display the output. But I had set in the BIOS before to just use the VGA port on the motherboard. Right, so it just ignored you because it's a server board doing server board things. And I was like, oh, God, this computer's not working. Oh, my God, the shoot's gonna be a sham. Oh, my God, they're already on their way. Oh, my God, oh, my God. And then the internet stopped working. It was a stressful morning, but it works. Can we talk about the fact that we just hooked up like five GPUs on PCIe risers with two USB cards? So that's seven cards into the system. It just turned right on. The only thing I changed in the BIOS was that setting that it ignored, so. That's insane. So that'll learn you. Previous projects like this, we're talking multiple days just to get the computer to turn on with everything plugged in. I see for storage, we've gone with- One SSD. A single one terabyte SSD. We could do way better than that in the future. We could set up some kind of array or actually- We could have a ZFS pool. Yeah, do they have ZFS pool supported yet? I don't think so. Ad pool, what is this ad pool? That's just to add. You can have multiple cache pools now, which is kind of cool, but- Okay, that's neat. They are apparently working on ZFS, so that would be amazing. You can also do it with like a third party plugin. Hey, look at that. Nice. I wonder which GPU that is. Quick, start mining Dogecoin. So this is a 3060. 3060, okay. Let's see, does it work? Oh, yeah, she works good. Yeah, that looks great. I'm gonna get two screens. Okay, let's try GPU 2 then. Can I get you a chair, Jake? No, I like them more. I'm gonna get a chair, and he's gonna just refuse to sit on it because he's stubborn, because now he said that he doesn't need a chair. So I'm just gonna put this right here. Hey. You watch. Let's sit here, Hagrid. World's more comfortable. He's not gonna sit in it. You and your chair can just go f*** yourself. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. We got it. Hey! Nice. That's two for two. That's a 3080 Ti. Isn't it insane how easy this is? You used to have to fight like error 43 because they were trying to detect that you were in a VM. Like just, yeah. For lack of a better word, go f*** yourself, Nvidia. Right here, Nvidia. Yeah. I mean, they're doing it better now. There's still things they could do way better though. Yeah. Let's see, I'm gonna boot up. I'm booting up another VM. Don't touchy. Look at that! I'm not touching. Hey, hey, hey! I believe you. Look, look, look! Okay. Hey, hey, look! Linus! Linus, look! It's like when a small child like goes to the bathroom by themselves. No, no, but I want you to watch me do it. Hey Linus, I had a really nice poop this morning. I'm glad to hear it, Jake. I really am pleased for you. It was one long. Hey, look! Hey Linus! Oh my God, yes! Linus, look! Look, it's working! Wow, Jake! Good job! Yay! Okay, but for real though. It's cool that it's working. There's four of them. Okay. What about number five? How sure are you that it's this boy? It's this boy because the fans are still spinning. No, I meant how do you know it's this boy that's working? But yeah, okay, sure. So it's running its silent mode. So the fans are actually completely off on all the ones that are working correctly. Well, this is in. Brother. What? The power supplies are still on. They are? Yes. I don't know, all the other fans are off. The power supplies. Oh yeah, but the power supplies, they like power. They need power. It's right in the name. If this stops working because of that, not my fault. Oh wait, what slot is that? Is that second from the bottom? Yes. Oh! We might have to move the jumper. It might be in sharing. Yeah. Okay, well that's fine. That's doable. Is it a jumper or is it a bio setting? It's a jumper. Really? Yeah. What year is it? Hashtag crack. There's two jumpers for it. They should both be on the left. What are the odds that this just works? I just want to, I'm going to say right now, full disclosure, I did not test this with five GPUs before. I just assumed it would work. Frickin guy. I tested it with two and it worked so well. And I did check that all the PCIe slots work except those ones. Yeah, okay. Oh boy. What's up? I'm setting the last VM. Okay. I'm going to start the rest of them. Okay. Are you going to go full YOLO and start them all at once? Yeah, that's what I'm doing right now. Nice. It's literally happening as we speak. Oh, oh, there's three. There's four. There's five! I'm actually really surprised. Yeah, so easy. And the cool thing is I can access them all on the VNC still. Man, this is hardly even a video because everything's going so smoothly. I need to create some drama. Oh no, Jake's chair failed. I mean your chair failed. Oh yeah, right. No, okay, it's a good chair. It's a quality chair, aluminum chair. Once you're going fast enough, downloading games on Steam is actually pretty demanding. We are sucking back, what does this work out to? 26% of this 32 core processor. And I think only two of them are actually downloading right now. Last Steam 2FA code. Sorry, we needed five freaking accounts with CSGO. We still don't know if you've won that CSGO. No, no, she has CSGO. I told you she's got CSGO. Okay, cool. She doesn't have CSGO. She doesn't have CSGO. What a different game then. I don't even care anymore. Yeah, it just doesn't have to be the same game. Yeah, whatever. COD Modern Warfare 2. Halo Infinite. Yeah, heck yeah. Let's do it. Okay, but hey, oh my goodness. Look at these CPUs going. There's your Halo Infinite download boys. Does that happen to be VM number two? I mean, I guess it probably is. There's no way it's not. What speed is it managing to do? 129 megabytes a second. Okay, that's not bad. I think Steam uses Z standard compression now. Wow, we're going to need more cores, dude. We are. I can actually see that it's not running amazing, all things considered. Mind you, all of these are running bots, which is pretty CPU intensive, but still pretty damn good. It's running. Honestly, if we switched the storage to something faster, it would actually probably make the performance better. I suspect storage is a big, big problem right now. Oh, interesting. This one is seeing up to 200 FPS now. That one in the bottom right is just like, 30, 40, 50. This one's all over the place. It's going up to like 250, and then dropping down to, I saw it as low as 50. And that happened to correspond with a peak in download speed over here. We are almost definitely just storage limited in it. And I bet when we throw better storage in here, it's just going to resolve it. I mean, the CPU usage is pretty high right now. It's like doing a lot of stuff. That's true, but that's not that bad. I think, I don't think that's it. You want to make a friendly wager? Lunch? No. All right, it was worth a shot. I like free lunch. Hello? Hello, Infinite? Are you going to launch? Buddy? Hello, Buddy? Hey, there we go. Wait, and it's gone. God damn it. We should have just bought CSGO. Okay, we got our fifth game launched. We just need to- I mean, that pretty much confirms it. We got five mostly working gaming computer stations. Yeah, we've just got some storage issues to figure out. Get all of the fiber optics actually connected to monitors, and put desks in there and everything. There's probably some optimization to be done. But that's it. Single machine, five gaming stations. I think this is probably good enough for prime time. This is the easiest virtualization setup I've ever done. And this is the easiest segue I've ever done to our sponsor, Pulseway. Do you ever find yourself needing to remotely manage your network devices from a less than convenient location? Like when you're dropping your kids off at school or in line for lunch? Pulseway can help. 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