Combining two builds

[gkarag]

Hello, this is my first post here. Just discovered unraid and I'm very interested in potentially using it in my setup.

 

I've always had a gaming PC, upgrading it here and there. I also built a gaming PC off of an old desktop for my wife. From all the extra parts, I put together another PC, which is running windows and I used it to start experimenting with making a media server. I use it mostly for Plex, but I'm trying to expand it so I can use it for self-hosted storage, and more. I work as a software engineer, so I'm building a few different webservers that I run there at all times.

 

I'm looking to improve that setup, and expand the storage, and that is how I discovered unraid. I was planning on backing up my only HDD, and experimenting with unraid for that server, before I get some more drives. However, after reading even more into unraid, I saw that I can also run windows VMs and combine everything into one. This peaked my interest as I usually have both my machines running at all times (for different reasons).

 

But I have a few questions that I haven't been able to find the answers two the past few days reading this forum, reddit and other resources:

- How much would combining the two impact my gaming experience? (I've read that this won't be the same as running the gaming PC on its own, but I have a pretty good CPU/GPU for my gaming PC)
- I have a lot of parts that are pretty decent. Would it be worth investing in a motherboard that I can combine them all on (2xCPU, 2xGPU, all the RAM)? Will that improve the performance, or would it be overkill?

 

The parts I have available:

My existing media-server:

- BIOSTAR Hi-Fi A70U3P Motherboard
- AMD A8-7600 Radeon R7, 10 Compute Cores 4C+6G 3.10 GHz

- 16gb RAM (2x8)

- NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 

 

My gaming PC:

- MSI Z270 PC MATE

- Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20GHz   4.20 GHz

- 24gb RAM (2x8 + 2x4)

- NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti

 

Would I be able to utilize both CPUs and both GPUs if I combined everything? Would I be better off selling the remaining parts? All I was looking into getting was some more drives for storage, but I wouldn't mind investing in a new motherboard if it meant I could utilize everything I have. I'm thinking, this way I could use 1 gpu + 1 cpu for the media server at all times, and then the other for gaming, without having to share resources. Any advice would be appreciated