 Portions of this video are sponsored by LastPass. Like five years ago on the WAN show, Luke and I made the prediction that even if cloud gaming could never solve its problems with latency and game licensing, the hardware that was used to run it was gonna get so powerful that it would be feasible to use a single computer as like the computing brain of your house and run all of the gaming machines under a single roof off of a single box. And my friends, it has happened. AMD's epic lineup of server processors are available in configurations with up to 64 processing cores. Guys, that is enough CPU resources to run 16 virtual machines, each with a quad core processor off of a single chip in a single socket. And guys, these are not weak cores. So we don't actually need quite that many of them for my house. So we've gone with an Epic 7502P. That's a 32 core processor that runs at 2.5 gigahertz base and actually boosts up to 3.35 gigahertz. So we're gonna be using this as well as all of this to convert all my computers to run off of a single motherboard. My personal gaming rig, which I also use for streaming very occasionally. My wife's rig, which she uses for work and also very occasionally gaming. So I like to still keep it up to spec. This one's not actually running right now because we got a broken Thunderbolt optical cable. The gaming machine that runs the world's most comfortable gaming setup. My NAS that I use for bulk storage and as a Plex media server. And finally, the home theater PC slash VR gaming rig that's in my living room. So managing credentials between all of these different machines can be a bit of a hassle. Thanks LastPass for sponsoring this portion of today's video. That's why I use our sponsor LastPass and I've been using them for years now. LastPass's browser extension and app makes signing into your accounts across all of your devices fast and easy without writing down passwords. Learn more about it at the link below or by waiting until the end of the video. Thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this portion. Now onto the rest of the video. What does a machine that's powerful enough to take the place of four to five others look like? Let's walk through all this back. Starting of course with the processor. So our 7502P here, it's 32 cores, 64 threads, but more importantly than that, it's got 128 PCI express Gen4 lanes on it. That means that almost no matter what we plug into this thing, whether it's M.2 drives for high speed storage or regular SATA drives or a ton of PCI express expansion cards, including graphics cards, everything is gonna be getting the full bandwidth. That is absolutely incredible. And all while consuming only 200 Watts, which sounds like a lot, but remember, that's gonna be four to five CPUs. So now as for what we've got it installed on, this is a gigabyte and Z32AR0. This is one of the few standalone extended ATX motherboards that has full support for PCI express Gen4 almost across the board, pun definitely intended. It's got an incredible amount of connectivity, including a bunch of NVMe storage, regular storage, seven PCI express slots. Only two of them I think are even Gen3, which is unbelievable. And it's got a remote management port as well as one of these OCP mezzanine card ports, where we've got an ASUS dual 10 gigabit LAN card. So this thing is gonna have high speed connectivity both in and out. Now as for our graphics cards, unfortunately, unless you go full enterprise, Nvidia doesn't currently support splitting a GPU into multiple virtual machines, the same way that a CPU manufacturer does. So we've actually got four total graphics cards, one for each of the gaming rigs provided by Nvidia, and then of course, ASUS ROG. So an RTX Titan for my gaming rig, a 2080 Ti for the VR rig, and then a couple 2070s for the ones that just need to be like basically up to spec. Finally, this is amazing. We have 512 gigs of DDR4 2666 memory from Micron. They sent this over for this project today, and it's running in eight channel mode. That means we have a ton of bandwidth. Each of my individual VMs is gonna have effectively dual channel DDR4 worth of memory bandwidth. That is on freaking believable. Not to mention that each one could have over a hundred gigs of RAM. By the way, if you're into tons of RAM, make sure you're subscribed, because we've got a project upcoming soon where we're gonna have two terabytes of RAM on a single GPU. We're gonna add two terabytes of RAM on a single epic processor. Now in a perfect world, what we'd really like to do is install all of our graphics cards directly in the slots, put water blocks on them so they only take up a single slot and water cool the whole thing. So you get that density. But because we're at the really proof of concept phase right now, we're just gonna use these PCI express extenders. Here we go. Now, to run the cards out of the motherboard like this, and then we'll run our power cables a little something like this. It's not the prettiest way to do this, but it's functional. And, you know, all we need to do is plug into it. So, you know, the card can just kind of sit there. The last thing I'm installing here is a couple of USB 3 cards. We're gonna need to pass through USB 3 ports to our virtual machines in order to have USB 3 ports. And unfortunately, this motherboard only has three of them. One of which is gonna be taken up by this USB drive that we're installing our OS on. I'm gonna be using Unraid just cause I'm most comfortable with it. And also because I use Unraid for my personal NAS at home. So if this works amazingly, and we end up deploying this in the long term, that is how I would end up using it, just with a bunch of hard drives connected as well. Oh, actually, wait, I forgot about the internal USB 3 ports. Dirt, dirt, dirt, da, da. There we go, we can use that for our OS. So now that our machine's assembled, we've got all this power, but we don't really have a solution for how to pipe it around the house, so to speak. Now, we used to do this with Thunderbolt back when I set up my gaming rig in the next room over along with my wife's, but between the reliability issues with the Thunderbolt 2 optical cables, random weirdness like displays. See, look at this. This has been sitting here since we started filming this, failing to go to sleep, and the lack of especially server motherboards with like four or more Thunderbolt ports on them, we needed another solution. Now, display was easy. This is a 50 foot light link display port connector from Sewell Direct that they sent over actually for an unrelated sponsor spot a few months ago. Hey, these are finally coming handy. But USB 3 was shockingly difficult until we found this. This non-descript brown box is from iKron Technologies, who are shockingly headquartered about 30 minutes from my house. That's super cool. This is the Raven 3124 USB over fiber extension. And this is the only USB 3 extender on the market that uses multimode fiber with backwards compatibility for both USB 2 and even USB 1. Trust me guys, we looked everywhere. They have extremely low latency on the order of microseconds, which is very important for our VR gaming setup. And thanks to their extreme USB technology, funny branding aside, they can go up to 200 meters with complete transparency. That means no drivers and no funny business whatsoever. The problem is that this right here is a connector that you are unlikely to find in the average house. So Colin hasn't actually said much up until now in this video and you're probably wondering why he's here. Well, you're probably not wondering that because you haven't seen him. He's gonna be running these. What are these and what's special about them? So these are fiber optic cables. We have two different ends here strictly because we want to connect them into these wall plates. Oh, okay. These wall plates, the only option was an SC connector. So we're taking this SC connector. Nope, I broke that. Good thing we don't need it anymore. Not anymore. And everything with fiber optics has little plugs on it because we wanna keep these fibers really clean. And so we will plug in the SC connector on one side of our box. And then on the other side, we're gonna plug in the same SC cable. And that leaves us with two LC ends. And these LC ends are what interface with our boxes. And now it's as simple as that. Plug and play, it's not that hard. Just don't break these cables. They're very fragile. And expensive. And expensive. They're actually weren't that bad. Well, in the context of how much this costs, they're not that bad. These are really cool plates. Where did you get these? So these are Datapro. They're a company down in the States somewhere. Might be Canada. I can't remember, honestly. But they do custom wall plates. And you can get them laser etched and you can get whatever you want. They have a real cool configurator on the website. You can just plug in all the ports you want. And they even send in the keystone connectors. So we plug in like our fiber optic display port into here. And then we just have a port. And then a normal plug. So we just throw this Linus and Yvonne's machines. We throw that in the wall there. We just plug in normal cables. Bippity boppity off you go. So this is the one for the VR machine. And then this is the one for world's most comfortable. That is sick. We're gonna start with a VR system run. So what challenges are we expecting? So the hardest part of this whole ordeal is keeping these cables from breaking. We have to be very gentle. It's just a glass fiber. So we're going to gently attach them to this fish cable. And we're gonna fish it all the way to the server room. And then we're going to drop some down to the VR setup. And then bring some all the way around to here. By the way, if you smell pee around here, it's because our old cats used to pee here. So it's pee. So in order to get access to the wall here, careful, careful, it's cable managed real tight back there. So you want to just spot me while I pull it out? Okay. Move the speaker. We good, we good? Okay. So to get access to the wall back here, we're just gonna need to pull the media console out. Is that enough? Yeah, I think so. Okay. And what we're gonna do is we're actually gonna use the same wall box from the existing ethernet run, except this time we're gonna bring it down with fiber and display port. And then we're gonna use that USB extension, which conveniently also has ethernet. Yeah, pipes are right through. To go ahead and provide ethernet for the rest of the devices here. Now it's not 10 gigs. So at some point I'll probably run another one, you know, just do the thing. It's only five gig. For now we're, no, no, the ethernet is probably one gig. Which is like realistically fine. Yeah, okay. Let's go do that. Okay. Bye, bye Colin. Bye. Also there's definitely something actively in here. What? Yeah, there's like wet spots. I wonder if my roof is leaking. No, it kind of smells like pee. I wonder if the cat got in there. The cat or something. Like there's so many turds. Sorry. It's okay. I just have to wash my pants. Wash everything. Wash all the things, yeah. Wash the whole self. Really need this to boot up like now. What's going on here? Why is it not booting? I have drilled a hole in line with this pot light. And I'm really hoping that the fish tape that I shoved down that hole into the wall is going to line up with the plate here. I kind of doubt it. It's like a foot too far in, but worst case scenario, I'll go back, drill another hole, and just try to get in the next wall space. So this is the ethernet that was run outside. So I can't really use it to fish my fiber optics back up the hill, so to speak. All right, so I think what we're gonna do is unplug all the graphics cards, get this booted up, and then start plugging them back in one at a time. We've seen this before with six workstations, one CPU. And the good news is because we haven't water cooled it all together and created a custom chassis, there's plenty of time to sort out these kinds of issues. The big thing we're testing today is whether the fiber optic USB and display port solution is actually any good. Ew, dead squirrel. What? What? There's a dead squirrel in here. Oh my God, that's disgusting. Yep. Okay, how old is it? It's not moist anymore, if that's what you're wondering. Okay, sorry. I've shoved the fish tape all the way down, but there's no seeing it. So, and I'm in line with this box, I think. So I'm in the next wall space over. So I think I'm going to mark out poke a hole and pray. And we're gonna see if we can find the tape in there. I get to recline this house. Yes. I think I have like a 50% chance of finding it in the wall. You said 70. I did say 70 earlier. I just dropped it down to be realistic. So I found the edge of the next stud. Yeah. And so that's where I think I am in the wall, given the pot light. So I'm ready to poke a hole. I just need to kill the power. Okay. And then we can fish the cable down and hope we find it. Okay, well, there's nothing powered up over here that matters. So go ahead and start flipping breakers. They're sort of labeled? Oh, that helps. Why did I drill two holes? Cause I should have put the first hole on the edge of where I need to cut so I can get the saw in there. There it is. Okay. So I think I know what the issue is. This board is still running the release bios from four months ago. So there's a new one that apparently fixes blue screen issues with graphics cards, apparently fixes issues with Intel network cards, which is exactly the kind of Nick that we had plugged in. So CDFS0, current directory not specified. What does that mean? So we've put a hole in the wall. This guy fits quite nicely. If I do say so myself. And now I'm going to go up to above this and let's try and shove the fish tape down there and see if I can find it. Like a fox. Did you get it? Yep. Nice. Nice. This SC connector is too big to fit in the hole that I drilled in the joist upstairs. So we're going to run the LC connector, which is what actually plugs into the devices. This guy will screw onto the end here. I'm probably doing this wrong. So any electricians or people who pull data lines professionally, don't at me. We are going to take the actual USB fiber, not just the display port fiber, this nice small end that I can actually fit through the hole I drilled. I'm gonna try and pull mostly from the plug in the jacket. Boom. Got a nice little missile to drag up. Okay. So BIOS update seems to have worked. I am in unread. Everything is behaving as it should, but I have a couple of problems to solve. One is that my old VDISC, so with a Windows 10 install on it, doesn't seem to be booting for some reason. Not sure why. Oh, I think we're stuck in a boot loop. You've got to be kidding me. Oh, I think we're stuck in a boot loop. You've got to be kidding me. I see that. That's the same thing you put me last time. Ooh, there's a pattern in there. Where'd you get that? From my chair. From my chair? What the heck? Please. Just need these graphics cards to show up. Wow. Wow. I still need a few more things to go right. Okay. So devices that we need to plug in then. Oh, here's something I really didn't think of. Colin. Yes, sir. How many display ports did we run down here? Just one. That's all you said to run. Thinking. Yeah, there's no way to like get another one down here quickly and easily. We don't have another one. Thinking. Okay. I have an idea. We are going to plug the primary display in upstairs. We will plug the VR headset in down here. Oh, how did I not think of this? Let's try it just with the main TV first then. Okay. So things we need plugged in. This, that's our keyboard mouse dongle doodad. Is there a front one? No, I guess they're all in the back. Okay. That's fine. I pulled the plugs off. We're connected. And now we have the correct connector to go into the back of the extender. Pull the little plug. Send it Linus. Oh, it might have detected something. It said HDMI display port. No signal. Should we just test with something that we know works? Yeah, sure. Why don't you go ahead and plug it into the blue one over there? The blue one in the back. Okay. Yeah. I got to be that Cartagena again. Hold on a second. What? Did you unplug it? No, it was just sitting there. Did you not plug it in? Plug into the 2080 Ti then I guess. 2080. Yep. No signal. That's heartbreaking. Okay. We're locked in display port. So hopefully at some point it'll just go. Nothing yet, but the little light at the bottom is flashing orange. Wait. What? Am I plugging in the wrong thing? These are directional. I didn't realize they were directional. Oh, wait, wait, wait. Got it. Okay, great. Okay. New plan. Since we had to rerun it anyway, we're gonna run the two here so we can have the TV and the VR setup running at the same time. I mean, hey, look at that. It's up? Yep. Okay. Honestly, I think we got to call it here today and pick this up again tomorrow. With GPU passthrough working, now we can focus on setting up all of our VMs and getting our peripherals working. As you guys might be able to tell, I was up for quite a few hours last night getting this all configured. So not really feeling my best anymore, but the good news is we're ready to show you guys. All four machines are running super smoothly right now. I'm just extracting a copy of the Cinebench benchmark. The only real way to tell the difference between them is to fire up task manager and look at their different specs. So this one's got 128 gigs of RAM, six cores. I actually have SMT disabled on the CPU due to a BIOS irregularity on our motherboard. So those are six true cores, and these are eight true cores, as opposed to a virtual core and a true core. So eight true cores, and finally, what's this one got? Eight true cores. Now remember guys, individually these scores might not be crazy impressive or anything, but you gotta remember that this is four instances running off of a single chip. So let's go ahead and go run, run, run. And we are two core short because I've reserved two of them for our virtualization hypervisor. They are all lit up right now, ladies and gentlemen. This thing is working hard. Now let's just see how they do in terms of performance here. We come in at anywhere between around 2,700 and 2,000, but that's without having our SMT enabled, and that's with all of them running at the same time. So what I'm expecting is that even without altering the core counts, gonna run one of these again, we would actually get a higher score if not all machines are going full tilt at the same time, which would be a pretty unlikely scenario. And as expected, we got 2,900 points without changing any configuration, just thanks to our CPU being able to boost higher. So that's great. Everything is performing as we would expect. So it's time to throw some GPUs back into the VMs and try and light these monitors up. Okay. In theory, everything's linked up. So now it's just a matter of unplugging my Thunderbolt dock here and switching over to optical display port and optical USB. Oh, execution error. Oh crap. Okay. One moment please. All right. Peripherals lit up. So our USB 2 backwards compatibility is running. Okay. So now what we need to do is get Yvonne's turned on. This is great. So we had a connectivity issue there. Our USB 3 was flashing. All we needed to do was unplug and replug our fiber pass through and we're good to go. 150 gigs of rad, ladies and gentlemen. So this is it. Colin and I are gonna try and game on both of these machines at the same time over fiber optic connections. You might say we're gonna game at the speed of light. You were waiting to do it if I didn't. In case you're wondering why it's rise of the Tomb Raider not shadow of the Tomb Raider. I set up the VMs with really small virtual disks and shadow didn't fit. And I could have expanded them but then it would have taken longer to copy them back and forth over the network and stuff. So this is what we're doing. And the craziest thing about this kind of virtualized setup is that even though we're using the same machine we don't have to both play the same game. This is not some game console. I wanna do some 3D rendering or some crap on my CPU. Colin shouldn't feel it at all in his game while I crank the eight cores that are assigned to me. Pretty sick, hey? So for world's most comfortable gaming it's about to get uncomfortable because we actually totally forgot. I forgot this doesn't have display port. So our wall jack is kind of useless. We pulled that out. And then this was the only long HDMI cable we had on hand. It's a 300 footer and we couldn't get it unspooled. You know what? Just whatever, don't worry about it. Fiber optics are so cool. Like that is a 300 foot HDMI cable and we are at 4K 60 frames per second right now. Is that not freaking awesome? And of course guys, just, you know, proofs in the pudding, right? We are not running off of this PC. Now, something I haven't tried yet is whether we can actually run 120 Hertz 4K oh wow, that was quick and worked just fine. Oh, that's smooth. That is freaking awesome. 50 feet of 120 Hertz 4K. Oh, and our control panel is showing up now. Okay, let's play a game. Man, I really hope this works. So this is the 2080 Ti equipped machine. So theoretically performance should be flipping awesome. So far everything just works. You just plug stuff in and USB 2, USB 3. This is 4K 120 Hertz over long distance. We're running at like 80 FPS. Yeah, it's a bit of an older game, but this thing is freaking cranked guys. And that's my gaming PC right there. Look ma, not actually hooked up. This is cool too. So because we're using this USB extender box that has lots of power going into it and that reboosts the signal, we can even plug in peripherals with long cables like an Xbox controller or something like that. Boom, plug and play. The thing about VR is between the cameras and the extremely latency sensitive nature of it. Any problems with either your display connection or your USB connection are going to result in a very, very bad experience. So I think I found a problem. Generic super speed USB hub here is showing up as a yellow exclamation mark. And it only happens when I plug in the index. It's okay, I've got an idea. Right now I'm using this ASUS card with an as media chipset to plug into my optical box. And I'd like to swap it out for another one, but I don't have anything else handy, which got me thinking. What do all RTX touring cards have? A USB type C port for that VR link or whatever it's called thing. So what if I plugged in a type C hub and I plugged into that and pass that through? See what happens. Well, the good news is it works at all. I wasn't a hundred percent sure because I know that it's a slightly non-standard implementation of USB type C, but the VR headset's still not working. Let's go ahead and give it the old, the old replug. Right now we've got one of two possibilities. Either our miracle USB box is not a miracle or there's something about virtualizing our USB controller that causes it to have virtual hubs in the chain or something that's causing performance issues. So to diagnose this, we're gonna take my VR gaming setup. We're gonna pop it in the room upstairs and see if that works with the USB box. Well, it picked up. We're in game. I will say last night, I did manage to get this far connected via the virtual machine, but it wouldn't go longer than about 10 or 15 seconds without the tracking going all wonky, which was making me pretty sick. So just because it's going now doesn't mean that we're out of the woods yet. So far I've had no performance and no tracking issues, which is really impressive when you consider that between the PC and the VR headset, there's not only my optical links, but also the long tether. So what all this means then is that the concept of having our computers separated physically and all in a centralized location and then accessing them over optical fiber in our homes is sound. It's just a matter of the cost becoming controllable and maybe some software or driver issues being sorted out. Pretty freaking cool. Thanks LastPass for sponsoring this portion of today's video. LastPass makes it easy when you're setting up new computers or when you're traveling and you wanna get access to your passwords. With LastPass, not only can you store passwords and then recall them on desktop with their browser extensions or on mobile with their apps, you can also store things like WiFi access codes, personal health numbers, or anything else that you don't want anybody to be able to access. It is so easy to reuse the same password from one account to another, but if all the password leaks that we've seen over the last few years have taught us anything, it's that that is absolutely the worst way to go about things. So with LastPass, you only need to remember one password and all your other passwords can be completely different or even randomly generated using LastPass's own random password generator. Even if you're capable of remembering all your passwords, LastPass just makes things more convenient because it will even auto-fill your username and password on many mobile apps on both Android and iOS. So go check it out at the link in the video description and massive thanks to LastPass for sponsoring this portion of our video. Hopefully you guys enjoyed this. Man, this was about as chaotic techie LTT as it gets, but I am super thrilled with the potential of the solution. If nothing else, it could be used to take all the noise and heat generating components away from places like your media room where you don't want it and consolidate it somewhere out of sight and out of mind with no performance penalty that we can detect. Flippin' sick. If you guys wanna see more great projects like this, make sure you're subscribed. And if you like this kind of virtualization stuff, maybe check out our previous video, six workstations, one CPU, where we took a single tower and edited 8K video six times off of it with six independent editors.