Hi,

I'm looking to essentially split my PC into 2 PCs while my girlfriend is over to play games but want to do SLI when she's not here.

My current setup

Asus Formula VII

2 Nvidia 970 cards

Intel 4790k CPU

1TB SSD

250GB SSD

6TB HDD

 

I dont' want to format the 6TB.  The 250GB is empty and the 1TB I'm currently using as my OS but I'd be willing to format that.  Can you give me any advice on how I might do this?

 

From what I've read.  I'd need to make 3 VMs?  2 /w 1 GPU, then make another 1 with 2 GPUs for when I want to SLI?  Is this possible?

Would it be better to buy another 250GB SSD and use one for Data, and the other for cache?

I don't care about any other unraid features, I'm just wondering if it's possible to once in awhile just switch over to the 2 PCs with 1 card then back to 1 PC with SLI without issues.

Regarding sound, I have a firewire card for my KRK Ergo to my studio monitors and my motherboard has digital output.  Also my monitors are display port with audio output.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

Thanks,

SLI is not supported through a VM at this time as we have not been able to test and confirm it for ourselves yet.  I believe AMD crossfire may work because it doesn't seem to use anything proprietary, but even that is unconfirmed just yet.

[...shortened]

 

- Windows is pretty okay with swapping out gpus. Windows 8.1 did not care swapping between a gtx 580, 670, or a 9600gt. ( a different thing is multiple gpus of different series/brands, which might catch issues as for which one will be the primary, drivers ect.)

- changing the assigned gpu is not that big of a deal, in my case i simply changed the gpu in the unraid webgui via smartphone which took me about 15-30 seconds.

 

my suggestion therefore would be to go with 2 vms and 2 virtual disks and just change the assigned gpus if need be. Your way with 3 configs should work proper to. Takes me about 15-30 sec to change this with my smartphone so i dont care to much. You might want to look into the upcoming generation of gpus though, with which you might accomplish sli like behavior without actually going sli-ish. I did not fully understand that topic yet though.

 

As for the ssds, if I do have multiple ssds, i want to capitalize on it aswell, so i put them into raid 0 to get thereotical write speeds of about a 1000MB/s. I do not know if you can have that with the 2 different sizes of your ssds. I use 2 850 evos of the same size.

 

If you game you will probably want to pass trough a usb controller, less cpu required, less latency and more stable connections. If i want install gamepad, it cant be done without it because there is no hotswap. If you pull out your mouse cable and plug it back in, the mouse will not be recognized by the os anymore unless you reboot, same with usb stick ect. So you probably want to have usb passtrough. If you do not care for tiny gains in latency, you do not use hardware that doesn't work without a native controller, and you do not need usb sticks and whatnot in your vm, you can live happily without it also.

 

As unraid is a pretty easy (if not the easiest) way to go for pci/gpu passtrough, and you stated that you do not want to use any other features of unraid, why dont you just use your 1 tb ssd with a native installation and sli, and whenever your gf is coming over, you boot up via unraid and use the gpus passed trough to 2 vms? Your 2nd ssd with 250 gb is well enough to install multiple copies of windows (if your games are stored elsewhere).

 

You could put your steam games and whatnot on your 6tb hdd and for your unraid use one of the plugins which mount drives "outside" of unraid. I haven't tinkered around with this yet, however, you should be able to just use your data as is that way. As performance goes, 3-4 cores of my 4790k were all i needed to play everything i desired so far (no oc), so you should be okay with going for 2 games.

 

"Would it be better to buy another 250GB SSD and use one for Data, and the other for cache?"

 

you do not have to draw a hard line cache/data - as you can have user shares that stay in cache all the time. so you will just have your data on your cache drive. You can tell unraid, what shares you want to use cache for. If you for instance make a share for movies, you probably do not need to cache that data, because your hdd will write at about the speed as 1gb lan will be able to push with. Even if you want to write from via the same machine that hdd should write fast enough. So for instance you would not need a cache enabled for this anyway. Also you could make the vmdisks permanently stay on your cache, which will make much more sense in terms of speed. My windows 8.1 starts in under 5 sec, which is, without uefi.

 

I never used firewire equipment, but if this is a pci(e) card, do not forget that you will have to pass it trough to your vm to be of any use to it. If it is some build in motherboard thing, make sure IOMMU groups will even allow you to seperate it from anything (did you check so far, if your gpus are in different groups?) I do not have any issues with the gtx 670 build in audio over hdmi/dp so far.

 

The machine i am writing on is a vm with a 670 gtx. I had 144 hz gaming, 4k 60 hz gaming, benchmarking, oc, and all that kind of stuff running without hickups. I doubt anyone would even be able to realize this is a vm, without specifically looking for hints like red hat drivers

 

my next step for instance is to get a ps2 emulator to run with a ps3 controller over bluetooth and then stream some hd gameplay of it.

Hi Morti - Thanks for the reply!

With help from Jon and a bit of searching, I was able to get this working great.  I haven't thoroughly tested it yet but I've had a few games running at the same time.  I've done a bunch of tests and so far it's about a 10% decrease in graphics compared to barebones, IF that.

Current setup, 2 monitors, 2 970 GPUs, 4790k CPU, 250G SSD, 500G SSD.  My NTFS PC is 1TB SSD /w 6TB HDD.

What I did was use 1 250G SSD, split that up into 2 VMs /w windows 10.  I then used my 500G as the cached drive to install all of my games.  So far only a few games have issues but apparently that's cause they share some cached files?  Gives me an error in steam.  I'm able to simply change the DVI to DP on one monitor to do the switch over when I'm on the VM instead of barebone.  I have to enable CPU GPU on my mobo, and enable the 2 virtual settings on my mobo from barebone to get unRaid to start and display.  I've had to create another brand new steam account aside from my own so that the 2 PCs can play together.  I don't see an alternative but maybe Tunngle which I'd have to spend time on which I haven't yet.  I think the free 2 play games are excellent for testing right now from Steam and wait for the steam sale in probably a week or so.

 

I still have a few questions though and answers.

 

1. I can't seem to connect to the unraid GUI through my smartphone?  I have to bring my work laptop home which is kinda annoying.

 

2. I can change around my SSDs but seems like right now, I'd stay with my 250G for windows and 500G for shared games or just use my 1TB for everything as the array drive and not used cached but I don't see the gains there as the games will be limited by the GPU mostly.

 

3. Morti, I'm not sure what you mean by using the passthrough?  Initially I had issues using my keyboard and mouse not starting so I had to recreate the VMs to get them to work, but you're saying through the game controllers and VM2 K&M to a USB hub?  I have a few USB 3.0 hubs /w about 7 ports.

 

4. I've decided to just keep my 6TB on the side for my barebone as from what I've read it'd be a headache to copy over and these VMs are essentially to just play games.  And I'd be on my barebone one mostly anyways.

 

5. Since my 2.1 which I use for my PC is using a firewire external soundcard I REALLY want to konw how to get this card to work on one fo the VMs and any help would be greatly appreciated.  So far I just use headphones on the output of my 2 Samsung SA850 monitors.  I'd love to use a non-firewire soundcard for 2.1 though so any suggestions! I use KRK Ergo to 2 Adam a5x's and KRK S10 sub.

 

6. Any other suggestions are welcome

 

Hopefully some of what I've said helps some newbs like me

 

soo, yup, it's been a while i noticed.

 

1. did you install another browser on the smartphone maybe? My standard browser did not like to search for stuff in the local network. go with firefox maybe. Works for me by just typing in "//tower"

 

3+5. Guess i spoke about passing trough a whole pcie Card. Probably would work to find a pcie firewire card and passing that card through. What I mean is, giving a vm a physical device.

 

Maybe, if yo uhaven't already, you can write an update about how you used unraid for the last months and what's working and what's not.