 For a long time now, we've talked about how we're approaching the point where you could buy a single computer and have two users enjoy it simultaneously. But some recent advancements, notably the high core count third generation Ryzen processors from AMD, have gotten us to the point where we think we're finally ready to do it. Today we build the one PC for you and your SO. And it's sponsored by SK Hynex. Their gold P31 series SSDs are going to act as the high speed storage we need to have two users simultaneously loading up heavy games at the same time. Which is the same as simultaneous. You know what, it doesn't matter, let's just roll this thing. Simultaneous is the theme today anyway. Now normally we'd start by going through the hardware that we're using for the build. But today, the star of the show is actually the case. This is the Phanteks P600S and we've chosen it both for its ease of use in terms of building, but also for its ease of disassembly. Because, ha ha ha, I've got something really fun today. Instead of just, you know, lame-o painting with spray bombs, we've actually leaned on our one and only Ed Zaljago, our production manager, who brought in his own like hobbyist grade spray, whatever this is. What is this? It's a HPLP turbine sprayer. The advantage of having a sprayer versus a spray bomb is that you just have more control. You can adjust the nozzle, the pressure. So we're going to be using some acrylic polyurethane enamel because it's pretty hard-wearing. It's in a satin finish so that it doesn't show off all the imperfections of my spray job. I have only sprayed a case twice. Yeah, hopefully this will be good. That's a good rationale for a satin finish. Which side's going to be blue and which side's going to be pink? So the left side's going to be pink. It's going to be split two-tone. So it's actually going to be diagonally pink this way. Cool. And then this right side is going to be blue. The whole panel here is going to be blue. And on the inside, this part's going to be pink. Not the rest of that. Yeah, we're not doing the motherboard tray blue, are we? No, no. That's riveted in. Yeah, so it's not going to be too bad. We're just going to have to mask this off and just have paper or plastic to cover that up. That's going to look pretty sharp. So because this is a hinge side panel, normally you would have to worry about scratching the paint here and here if you're painting the inside because when you slide on a panel, you're doing a sliding mechanical motion and it's just always going to scrape everything. Scuffing helps our primer coat adhere to what is otherwise a very, very glossy, shiny surface that's difficult for paint to adhere to. This is actually pretty good though. Okay. You want it to not be glossy anymore. While I build up the bench to make sure the system's going to actually work after we assemble it, Ed is masking off our case. So how good of a job of masking do you care about here? Suitably adequate is what I aim for. We'll put that on your performance review. I've got the latest beta of Unraid fired up on my system, 6.9. Nice. Which means that I'm ready to shut it down and get my two NVMe SSDs installed. The benefit for us of going with NVMe storage is that we get low latency operation even when both of our users are hitting our drives at the same time. Now there's a number of ways that we can configure our two SK Hynix Gold SSDs here. Either we can have both of them running independently and pass them through to our virtual machines, which is similar to how we're going to pass through CPU cores and our graphics cards, which are going to be installed in the PCI Express slots here. Another way that we can do it is we can run them in RAID 1, and then we can just have both of the VMs running on this redundant RAID 1 configuration so that in the event that one of them were to fail or even that a slot failed on the motherboard, we experience no data loss whatsoever. The drawback of that approach is that our two 1TB drives would give us only 1TB of total usable capacity. The last way, the way I'm leaning towards, is we can run these two in RAID 0 for maximum speed. What do you think, David? HEP YEAH! In the event that one fails, all the data is gone. It's gaming. It's gaming, and honestly, I'm not expecting that to happen. So we're going RAID 0, boys. Frog tape is one of those things that I think is actually worth the extra money. The lines you get are just so crisp compared to the random masking tape that you can get for cheaper. Yes, it is. Okay, free 2TB. So we are running in RAID 0. Now I've got my RTX 2080 Super installed. This is the one I want to pass through so that I can actually game off of it. But that presents some challenges, because this is kind of the primary GPU slot in the system, where we've got most of the PCI Express bandwidth. I want my high-performance card there, but that means this guy is not outputting my OS. So I've got a remote into it, which is fine. It just means that when I go to boot my VM, Womp womp. We've got to stub this. Fortunately, this is cool. The beta has a new tool for stubbing system devices. So instead of typing a bunch of crap, all you do is find it, click it, bind selected to VFIO at boot, and theoretically, you reboot and you're done. My confidence level is not actually super high. I can't have any stress with water this cold. LTTstore.com. I finally have progress. Unfortunately, I do have to have my pinner card in the top slot due to some BIOS Linux funkery. But, oh boy. I mean, at least we're booted up with the 2080 Super passthrough. A quick XML edit to our VM later. We changed from CPU host model to CPU host passthrough. We're in. We can expand that 30 gigs later. Is that actually 10% water? Again, not helping. You know, that's kind of like eating more because you over salted your food. Did you have something helpful to say or no? Wow, that's actually really good. I think two coats and that's nailed. I may have added too much water to the paint, or I didn't mix it well enough after I added the water because it's a bit thin and uneven. Could also just be my painting. After all the teasing Ed about us running out of time, it's actually me who's in more trouble than him at this point. The painting's looking great, but I've tried C BIOS, I've tried changing around the XML, I cannot get the right color. I cannot get the second VM to fire up here with the second graphics card. And talking to the unraid guys, they're basically like, yeah, you know, we love AMD and there's members of our community that are having great luck with AMD graphics, you know, using GPU passthrough, but it is just not as polished compared to the experience on Intel. So at this point I'm going, you know what? I'm going to stop trying to put a square peg in a round hole because switching to Intel, who actually has, think about it, the highest core count CPU with onboard graphics built into it means I don't have to have this anymore. I'm only giving up two CPU cores, I've still got 10 cores so I can have a quad core machine for each of my gamers. And it means that hopefully the virtualization experience is just going to be simple. And the benefits of the Switch kind of keep rolling here. I found a board in our inventory that has a much more ideal layout, so we're going to be left with this PCI Express slot and this one with our two graphics cards installed with more space in between them. And because Intel is still using a monolithic design for their CPU cores, it means that we don't have to worry about, you know, which VM has cores on which CCX and, you know, where the PCI Express ports are connected and all that kind of stuff. So we're just, we're taking the easy path, okay? I guess this gives us an opportunity to install our M.2 drives again. The SK Hynix Gold P31 SSD features class-leading PCI Express Gen 3 read speeds of up to 3500 MB per second. It's the world's first NVMe SSD for consumers with 128-layer NAND flash, and all the core components are designed and built by SK Hynix using their in-house technology, so you know it's good. SK Hynix has been supplying global PCOEMs with high quality competitive SSDs for years, and they're backing this up with a five-year warranty. You can learn more at the link in the video description. All right, I think that's it for the blue. Nice! Now I'm just going to clean out my gun and switch paints. It's not bad. It ranges from absolutely perfect to reasonable. Hey, that's a pretty good range. Meanwhile, after switching platforms, everything is hunky-dory. So it's normal within a virtual machine for our clock speed to just be reported as the base clock, so 3.7 GHz here, but I would actually expect it to be boosting, and we'd be able to see that on our hypervisor in the background. We've got eight virtual cores, so that's four true cores and four hyper-threaded cores, which should be plenty for basically any modern game, and our graphics card not only showed up, but it's actually installing the drivers as well, and the icing on the cake is that this is actually VM number two. One extra little bonus is that because this motherboard happens to have 2.5G Ethernet, each of us should get 1 Gbps plus, so when we're downloading games, we can actually both download them at high speeds. I'm downloading a game in Uplay, and I'm downloading a game in Steam. It's sitting in the neighborhood of 0.1 to 0.4 milliseconds. Jake's sitting in the 1.2 to 1.5 millisecond range. Also pretty good. So in terms of the responsiveness of this experience, you know, you fire up a web browser or whatever the case may be, you go to lttstore.com, you want to do that kind of stuff. Neither of these users is going to know that they're not on a dedicated machine, which is the beauty of virtualization with high performance hardware like what we've got right now. Pretty sleek. Hey, what the? What is this? Now that all our games are installed, we just need to set our array to start automatically, and also set our VMs to start automatically, which means that when we press the power button on the computer, all of this stuff happens completely transparently, and just our two computers light up on their own. In theory. All right. That's it. How does it look? Press the button. Let's do it. You saw something? Oh, hey, there you go. Are they both going? With the way we've got it set up then, booting it up is just like booting up any normal computer. Dang it. I just got killed by a bot. No. Dang it. I got to run faster with my knife here. Swinging my knife, swinging my knife around. How does it feel? It feels like a regular system. Delayed, not bad. So mission accomplished then? I mean, I don't like being beside you here. Look, it's a couple of PC. OK, fine. We'll trade you out. We'll trade you out. Get out of here. So is this actually cheaper than building two PCs? Well, it's a little complicated. I mean, you could build two PCs with cheaper lower tier components that would be combined less than just this one. But if you wanted, you know, two PCs that were at a similar performance tier, it would actually be similar or maybe even more expensive to build the two. And what's cool is, particularly using Unraid, we've actually got those couple CPU cores and a little bit of RAM left over. We could throw some hard drives in this thing and we could actually use it also for a third purpose as network attached storage for the rest of our house. If we were into that sort of thing. A disadvantage you have to deal with is obviously both of the players are tethered to the same machine. So you have to not mind being in close proximity to each other. Fortunately, we're good with that. So I've got them both fired up with Anno. Just go ahead and accept my invite. Both of us just running the game here. We've actually settled into more like 40 to 60 percent CPU usage. You'll see little spikes like that sometimes up around 70, 75 percent. But that's freaking awesome. One test that we can do on our storage subsystem is both of us try to load up the game at the same time. So go ahead and press play. Anno8200. Let's see how we do. Did you notice anything abnormal about the loading times? I wasn't really paying attention. Sorry. OK, perfect. With everything cranked in my game and the view distance increased. So that's a gameplay option over here. I'm getting anywhere from 50 mid to 70 mid FPS, even when I'm pulled back so I can actually see more of my islands, which personally I really prefer. And then Yvonne running at 4K is, wow, that's not bad. 90 FPS. You're out in the middle of the ocean though. You want to go look at one of the islands? How's it feel? Not bad. It was stuttering a little bit before, but now it's not. We're supposed to try this game called Fall Guys. Now, this one's not particularly demanding, but the use case that we're trying to show here is that this game doesn't support local multiplayer yet. So, virtualization. Yeah, we're going to die like right away. Can you jump? Yeah, space, I guess. I have no space for it. OK, well that was not very successful. How am I moving in the opposite direction? Oh, come on. I'm doing so bad. OK. Don't give up. There's like giant doughnuts and stuff. No, I can't do this. I'm so adorable and useless. Is that you? No. Somehow I doubt this is hitting the CPU quite as hard as Anno was. Yeah, we're at like 30%. Oh, no, no, no, no. Oh, I fell. Oh, come on. But can you recover? Can you recover? You can recover. Just keep going. Yes, I qualified. Where are you? I don't know. Speaking of freaking awesome, just want to shout out SK Hynex for sponsoring this really fun build. This was a blast for us to put together. It actually ended up performing and just generally functioning better than I could have possibly hoped for. Because you never know when you're doing like cutting edge virtualization stuff like this. Their storage held up extremely well. So these are PCI Express Gen 3 NVMe drives. They're a great upgrade, whether you're running a desktop, a laptop or whatever the case may be. If you want great responsiveness and a lot of storage, actually. I mean, if you told me like five years ago, we were going to have SSDs that were the size of a stick of gum that were a terabyte of capacity that you just slip into your motherboard like that. No cables, no mess. I told you, I think you're crazy. But great idea. You know, go out there and make it happen. If you want to get 10% off the SK Hynex Gold P31 1 terabyte SSD, just head to Amazon and use code 10LTTSKH1TB. We're going to have that in the video description so you don't have to like remember it. Thanks, SK Hynex for making it happen. Thanks for making this video happen. And thanks to you guys for watching.