 So we did a really cool project a little while ago. We called it Two Gamers, One CPU. You can check it out here where we've got one gaming tower with a couple graphics cards in it, Extreme Edition processor, all that stuff, and it runs two separate instances of Star Wars Battlefront. And we used a software for that called Unraid that, while they kind of came back to us and were like, Yeah, that's really cool, they were also kind of throwing in hay, but that isn't really the point for most people. And so they decided to sponsor a video where we show off a more practical application for this virtualization technology that let us run two gaming rigs in one tower. And this time, instead of using crazy overkill hardware, we're using, I'd say, enthusiast, but not completely over-the-top stuff to have a single gaming rig pull double duty as a gaming rig and also as the file server for the rest of the household. So stay tuned, guys, we're going to be doing a gaming rig and a NAS in one box. The Logitech G303 features a lightweight design and advanced optical sensor with Delta Zero technology for precise tracking and RGB lighting. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So let's go through the rationale of all the hardware while we assemble the computer itself. For our CPU, we chose a Core i7 6700K Skylake processor. In any case where you're going to be using virtualization, you will, A, need a CPU that supports virtualization and, B, want one with more cores and or more threads. So hyper-threading on the CPU is a definite boon. We're going to be installing that in a Z170 Deluxe motherboard from ASUS. It's a fully featured board and has lots of PCI Express lanes and dual LAN if you want to team your NICs or something along those lines in the future and also has the virtualization support that we need. In terms of RAM, DDR4 is all you're going to be able to use in this case. The speed doesn't really matter. However, the one thing to note is that the more virtualized operating systems that you're going to be using, the more you will need. In this case, we're just demoing a gaming rig and a NAS. So there's really no need for us to go completely overkill. So we've gone with 16 gigs of RAM. The case was a pretty tough choice because I wanted something that would allow for more hard drive expansion. Remember, this is a NAS also in addition to being a gaming rig, but that wasn't going to compromise the cooling and or expansion capabilities of the gaming rig itself. So I settled on the Silverstone TJ04BEW and then Silverstone also sent over a 750 watt power supply, giving us lots of room for hard drive expansion in terms of the power budget as well as this is cool. So this is a brand new thing. They're FS305. So this is a 5 by 3.5 inch tool-less hot swap hard drive cage thing that we're going to be mounting in the front of the case. This is very NAS-y, whereas the inside of the case is very just normal gaming tower-y. And I felt like this combo was a really, really good one, which brings us to storage. Now we're using Kingston's 1 terabyte KC400 SSDs. Note that I say SSDs because we have two of them. The reason for this is that while you could pick any other capacity of SSD that you want, it is important to have two of them because this gives us two advantages. One is it protects us in the event of a hardware failure and two, actually that's really the main advantage. UnRAID is going to really want you to have these protected, so yes, we'll be running them in a butter of FES RAID 1. Next up, we've got our hard drives. So we're using Seagate's Enterprise Capacity V5 SATA hard drives for NAS functionality. These are about as fast and reliable and just generally BA as it gets, but once again, in terms of what you're going to be using, you have a lot of flexibility in terms of both the hardware as well as the capacity that you want to go with. In this case, at least two drives is recommended, again, to keep your NAS safe in the event of a hardware failure, but you get much better scaling in terms of the capacity per investment if you go to three drives or more and use a parity setup versus a RAID 1 setup. So we're going to have five drives so we can fill up that front bay device that we have. The video card was an easy choice. I basically grabbed whatever was on my test bench and threw it in. Our motherboard has onboard video, so that takes care of running the web UI for UnRAID, and then that video card is going to be passed through to our Windows 10 VM for its full, we hope, functionality in games. We could use any card, AMD, Nvidia, it really doesn't matter. One challenge we ran into was that our hot swap cage didn't actually fit in the front of this case without removing some small little tabbed shelf things designed for normal 5.25 inch devices like optical drives, but that was nothing that we couldn't solve with a little help from our friend Mr. Dremel and our other friend Mr. Vacuum Cleaner. Okay, so now that the system is physically constructed, there's just one little trick when you're plugging in all your cables. Plug your display cable into the dedicated graphics card for now, then power on the system for the first time. Press delete to get into the BIOS, and we're going to change a couple small settings here. Go to Advanced, System Agent, Graphics Configuration, set your primary display to IGFX, and IGPU Multi-Monitor to Disabled. This will allow UnRAID to grab the onboard graphics, leaving the discrete card free for your gaming VM. Make sure that if you're planning to use the UnRAID desktop GUI, you've got your monitor plugged into the onboard graphics now after you make this change. Another small setting that you're going to have to enable is Virtualization. So go ahead and make that change as well. Go to another PC and create a bootable UnRAID USB drive according to the instructions on their site. Plug that into the back of the computer, and get her booted up. Once you reach the web UI, go into Settings, Identification, and rename your tower to something more recognizable on the network. Enable Network Bridge under Network. It's normal to lose connectivity here for a few seconds. And then if it doesn't come back right away, use that recognizable name that you set to navigate to it in a web browser. Next, navigate to the main tab and assign disks to the array and to the cache. The array is your slower, larger magnetic storage devices, your hard drives, and the cache is those high-speed solid-state drives that we installed. Next, start the array. You can see that a parity sync is running. We can start using the system immediately to continue setting it up, but you should be aware that data on the array is not protected until the parity sync is completed. This takes quite a while, but it's worth it because it allows a failed drive to be replaced and the data to be rebuilt in the event of a drive failure. Format the unmountable disks. Please note that this will wipe all data off the disks, then refresh, and it should be done within a few seconds. Next, let's go over to shares and start creating. We're going to do the NAS shares first, and here's some general rules. If you're going to copy data over the network to this share, then you'll want to enable this share to use the cache. Everything else can be default. Although minimum free space is kind of important to set, you want to set this to a value that is larger than the largest file you could see yourself copying to the share. This will prevent out-of-space errors. So, for example, for a media share, you might set this to 25 gigs. Next, we're going to create another share for backups. For this one, we are going to enable the use of the SSD cache so we can take advantage of faster local network transfer speeds. Remember, data from the cache moves to the array nightly. We're going to create a ShadowPlay share for game footage. You know, this is supposed to be a gaming machine and all that, but for this one, there's no need to enable the cache because ShadowPlay won't write more than 5 megabytes per second at a time and will never exceed the speed of the array, even if we turn off the faster writing speed option. Another cool share to create is a game library share. So if you predominantly use Steam, you can actually map a network drive in the OS later, and we'll show you how to do this, and throw all of your Steam games, especially the ones that don't suffer from slow loading times or that are large or you don't play that often, and throw them onto the magnetic storage rather than taking up space on your SSD. The last thing that you'll see here is us setting up our domains and ISOs shares for VMs. We're doing this manually, the same way we did in the 2 Gamers 1 CPU video, and by the time 6.2 goes public beta, this will be done for you and you won't have to worry about it. Please note, these ones are not exported, which means that they won't be browsable by other network-attached devices. This is fine, we intend to use them on the local machine. Next, we're going to enable VMs in Settings, VM Manager. Click the Download button next to Vert.io Driver. Then we need to copy a Windows ISO. This can be downloaded legally from Microsoft directly to the ISOs folder using another networked computer. In my case, I've got it on a USB stick on this computer in front of me. Now, this is an advanced and therefore optional step. It's possible to not only manually assign plugged-in USB devices to your VM before you boot it, mice, keyboards, XLR, audio interfaces, etc., but it's also possible to completely pass through an entire USB controller to your VM. So we threw a random dual USB 3-port PCIe card into our system, and I'm going to show you guys how we can pass it through to enable hot plugging. In some cases, you'll be able to assign some of the onboard ports on your motherboard to your VM while leaving others to Unraid to deal with, but this varies from motherboard to motherboard and platform to platform. Skylake, for example, for the same reason we couldn't pass through our onboard audio, can have trouble with this. Using PuTTY, a free tool, log into your server using the Unraid username root by default. Then run this command to see all USB controllers in the system. Our NEC PCIe USB device is the one that we added ourselves. The next command shows us the vendor product ID, which we've highlighted. Then we go back to the Unraid web GUI, and in the main tab we click the flash device, then put pci-stub.ids=" and paste the ID we got from before and hit apply. The system will need to be rebooted at this stage, so stop the array and reboot. Once rebooted, we can start the array, then go to VMs and add our first VM. Just click Windows 10, change the name to what you want, assign CPU cores. I generally recommend assigning the hyper-threaded cores and the physical cores to the same assignment. We've gone with 12 gigs of RAM for our games and Chrome. We're going to pick our Windows installation media. For storage, we're going to assign most of our SSD space to our VM using just a little bit for our cache. Then we pick out our video card, we pass through only the NVIDIA HDMI audio due to IOMMU issues with the onboard audio. Then we're passing through the USB devices that we recognize, so you'll see three Logitech ones for our keyboard, mouse, and USB gaming headset. Then, that optional step from before, we can pass through our NEC USB controller, which gives us those hot, pluggable ports so we don't have to restart our VM to plug in a USB drive or something along those lines. Alright, so we are finally, finally at the end of our journey, but first, this is very important. This HDMI cable comes out of the onboard video and goes into our dedicated graphics card, because otherwise, when we boot up the VM, there's going to be no video output because we assigned that dedicated graphics card to our VM. So here we go. Yes! 12 gigs of system memory tested, OK! It's amazing. So now we install Windows the way that we just kind of normally would mostly. Stay tuned. OK, so here's the trick. You're going to get to the point where it asks where you want to install Windows, and there's nothing there. So you want to load drivers, click Browse, and then you're going to navigate to your CD drive, VirtIO Win 0.1.1, then go to the VIO Store folder, then you're going to go to Windows 8.1, AMD64, and press OK. Then next. Yes! Third time's the charm. Now we can install Windows. Next. So now that you're at the desktop, you'll have to install drivers for any devices that are missing them. So for any of the stuff you don't recognize, you're probably just going to navigate to your VirtIO and manually add drivers. And then you're probably going to want to throw some graphics drivers on. And then actually there's some other post-Windows installed tuning things that you might want to check out from 2Gamers1CPU. But other than that, that's pretty much it. So I'll show you guys how to utilize your array shares to make mapped network drives so that you can have all your ShadowPlay stuff go to one place, so that you can have all of your Steam games install in another place. But really, the sky is the limit here. You can create as many shares within Unraid as you want, and then you can map as many network drives as you want as well. Anytime you want to make changes, you just go into a browser, go to gaming NAS in our case, or whatever it is that you want to call it. And then you've got access to the entire Unraid console to create more shares, change any settings, or do things like, oh, hey, I'm going to four-stop my VM. I wouldn't recommend doing that. That'll shut down the computer you're using immediately. So all that's left now is the day-to-day usability. So you can set your VMs to auto start by just going to the VMs tab and going, yeah, any time I turn this machine on, I want my gaming rig to start up and my monitor to turn on and all that stuff. And then, yeah, I guess there's a couple little things that you might want to invest in to make your life a bit easier, like having an extra keyboard and mouse as well as an extra display cable, so you can use the multiple inputs of your monitor to switch if you're desperate and you have to get it the GUI because you can't access it over the network or whatever else. But the cost of those items compared to if you had to buy a standalone NAS for your household is much, much lower. But of course, that would all be meaningless if the performance of the finished machine wasn't still, you know, pretty much on par with the gaming machine that you intended to buy for yourself. So let's have a quick look here. Boom! Crisis three, my friends. And check this out. I'm going to initiate a file transfer to myself. Gaming NAS media. And check this out. No frame rate dip, copying at 100 megabytes per second. And if we tab out, check this out. We can even see real time stats of what's going on with our storage and our networking. And the transfer is done already, so that was fast. So there you have it, guys. It actually worked. There is more to Unraid than this, especially if you want to start tinkering with other virtual machines and all that kind of stuff. But I thought that this use case scenario was super applicable to our audience, where you've probably only got, you know, one BA gaming rig in the house. You probably have a use for network attached storage and sharing offsite backup, a lot of the other functionality that you can dig a little deeper and get at with Docker containers and stuff like that. So being able to combine that functionality rather than buying a separate motherboard, separate CPU, separate case, separate power supply, being able to do all of that off of one single high quality machine, I personally think is pretty darn cool. So let us know with a comment and a like below if you agree, which I guess leads us pretty well into our sponsor for today's episode, Logitech. We've actually had a lot of Logitech stuff going on in here. We've got the G910 Orion Spark, we've got the G502 Proteus Core, but the focus today is the G633 Artemis Spectrum Headset. It's been completely redesigned by Logitech from their previous headsets to be better in, well, pretty much every possible way. It's USB with support for surround. It's more comfortable. It's more durable. It sounds better. And with the, actually that's a lot better. Monitoring is on so I can hear myself talking. And with the fold out and extend perfectly positionable microphone, you will sound better to your gaming friends as well. We've got a link in the video description where you can learn more about this puppy. You can be like, oh yeah, I want to know more about the, you know, 40 millimeter protuned drivers, and I want to know more about the, you know, comfort and the shape of the ear cups that is actually the shape of ears. I mean, does anyone on earth actually have round ears? I don't know. I've never actually seen one. So check out that link in the video description. Alright, thanks for watching guys. If you disliked this video, you know where that button is. But if you liked it, hit the like button, get subscribed, and maybe even consider, I don't know, supporting us by shopping on Amazon. We've got the instructions for how to do that up there. You can also buy a cool shirt like this one, or you can give us a monthly contribution through our forum. Get yourself a nifty little contributor badge. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next. And hey, how about you go back and watch two gamers, one CPU, if you hadn't already. It's also using Unraid, but in that case, we actually ignored the NAS functionality entirely, and did two gaming VMs off of a single machine, both with pretty much bare to the metal performance. So it is pretty darn impressive.