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Turned my Watercooled Gamnig PC into a Beast Media Server [PICS]


iamspartacus

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iamspartacus

I've been going the opposite direction that a lot of "homelabbers" have been over the past few years.  Less than 3 years ago I was running a 4-node vSAN cluster on my network for full redundancy of my media server (Plex at the time) and my 80TB of storage.  I then migrated down to a single all-in-one Unraid because I just didn't want to be maintaining as much hardware anymore.
 
In the meantime last year I also built a beast custom watercooled gaming PC because...why not.  Well it hasn't gotten much use other than the occasional VR session.  So I decided to get rid of even more hardware and combine my gaming PC into both my home server and a daily driver Windows 10 gaming VM with passed through hardware.  
 
My thought process is that my Threadripper 1950x would be an upgrade over the Xeon E5-2680v3 in my server. RAM is the same in both (64GB DDR4), and I could use one of the 1080Ti's for HW transcoding in Plex & Emby with the other being used for my everyday workstation/gaming VM. So I set out to test the whole Windows Gaming VM aspect because without that working just like a bare metal box I know I'd one day miss having a separate PC. You can read all about my testing process here. But the gist is the Windows VM works great with passed through Samsung 960 Pro 512GB NVMe SSD, EVGA 1080Ti, and a USB controller for all my USB devices including the front panel USB ports. The second part of the test (HW transcoding with the 1080Ti) went even better.
 
So I set out to build a JBOD box to migrate my spinner disks over to my SMA8 build. My backup server (housed off site at my parents home) is built in a U-NAS NSC-810a and I thought that was the perfect candidate to fit in the little 13" x 13" cubby I have under my PC. So I through a dual SFF-8088 HBA in my PC in order to get this new JBOD chassis connected and voila...we have a 80TB Unraid Storage / Media / VM server running on a watercooled TR1950x with dual 1080Ti's and all spinner disks running nice and cool in a separate JBOD chassis.

 

I have one of my 1080Ti's "passed through" to both my Plex and Emby dockers and both are able to utilize it simultaneously with no issue.

 

dy58Kiq.jpg

 

opzp6B6.jpg

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KMBanana

Your xeon CPU should have been able to transcode ~10+ 1080p streams, are you actually using that many or are you doing 4k transcodes?  

Are you sure both docker containers can actually use your passed through GPU simultaneously and one isn't just falling back to software transcoding?  

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iamspartacus

Your xeon CPU should have been able to transcode ~10+ 1080p streams, are you actually using that many or are you doing 4k transcodes?  

Are you sure both docker containers can actually use your passed through GPU simultaneously and one isn't just falling back to software transcoding?  

 

I wanted to free up my CPU cores for VMs an other processes like encoding video files to h265.  I'm moving to h265 for all my new media and maybe some of my older media.  But furthermore, my PC just wasn't being used at all and I don't want to sell it (a lot of work went into building it and I view it as functional artwork) so I just wanted to get better use out of the idle hardware.

 

Yes, the GPU can be used for both containers at once I have it running fine.  It's not passed through in the traditional sense like for a VM's use.  The dockers just each have access to it so a transcoding session in either application just opens a new stream on the GPU.  This can all be seen via the watch nvidia-smi command as you can see here.  The 1st process is from Emby, the second is from Plex.

 

5cb5f5b268faa_GPU.png

Edited by iamspartacus
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GiGo

Looks cool, more pics of your artwork please  :)

 

So your media server is in the Unraid case on JBOD? If so what about redundancy?

 

EDIT: Just clicked on your link, 8 disks 10tb each and 2 parity drives, how can you get 80tb with 2 parity drives?

Edited by GiGo
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iamspartacus

Looks cool, more pics of your artwork please  :)

 

So your media server is in the Unraid case on JBOD? If so what about redundancy?

 

EDIT: Just clicked on your link, 8 disks 10tb each and 2 parity drives, how can you get 80tb with 2 parity drives?

 

 

It's 80TB raw, 60TB usable (though it's now 70TB usable as I've just gone down to single drive parity, thanks 4K media :) ).

 

As for Unraid, the JBOD case just holds my spinner disks.  It's attached to the main case (or artwork as you will) via SFF-8088 cables and an HBA.  So effectively they are one system logically while being physically two different cases.

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GiGo

It's 80TB raw, 60TB usable (though it's now 70TB usable as I've just gone down to single drive parity, thanks 4K media :) ).

 

As for Unraid, the JBOD case just holds my spinner disks.  It's attached to the main case (or artwork as you will) via SFF-8088 cables and an HBA.  So effectively they are one system logically while being physically two different cases.

 

I understand now :) 

 

Come on, more pics of the artwork ;) looks amazing!

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denz

That is impressive awesome work it looks like it is ready to explode with those water cannisters watched too many movies. 

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iamspartacus

That is impressive awesome work it looks like it is ready to explode with those water cannisters watched too many movies. 

 

 

Haha you're not alone.  Half the people who come over and see my computer have said "It looks like the bomb from Die Hard with a Vengeance."

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  • 4 weeks later...
Blueeyiz702

Beast,looks like a nitrous injected four barrel holly carb warmachine that eats other gaming PC's.

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iamspartacus

Beast,looks like a nitrous injected four barrel holly carb warmachine that eats other gaming PC's.

 

 

Thanks.  Funny enough, BEAST is the hostname of this server  :D .

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