[Concept] Home server and video game VM in an arcade cabinet


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Hey y'all!

 

I've been toying with the idea of building an arcade cabinet for some time now, and then it hit me: "Why not build my unraid machine inside the cabinet, and use VM pass-through for the games?"

So I just want your opinions on parts for the machine. Just the server side, I plan on using USB arcade cards cards for the joysticks and buttons of the arcade.

 

My current unraid setup is an old Dell T110 with:

-Xeon E3 4 core 4 thread

-16GB RAM (non-ECC)

-6 HDD

-1 SSD cache

-10 Dockers (Plex gets the most use)

-1 VM (Debian MineCraft Server)

 

I'd like to transplant the above to the new machine.


The parts list I'm thinking about:
-MOBO: Server or workstation class. (possibly dual-CPU even if I leave one slot empty at first)
-CPU: Xeon E5 for multiple cores, and dual CPU support
-ECC RAM: 16GB (32GB wishfull)
-SAS Controller Card x2 (if needed)

-USB Controller card for the VM

-Graphics Card for the VM
 

The VM would be Windows with 4 cores, 6/8GB of RAM, and a dedicated USB card.

 

The questions I have are: 
-Should I build the server inside a chassis (like a Norco server chassis), and mount it inside the cabinet? Or, just mount the mobo to a removable tray inside the cabinet, and figure out a cage or rig for the hard drives?
-Would I be able to connect all the PCI cards into one motherboard? I also was toying with the idea of a second VM with dedicated graphics card to run Steam and be able to home stream.


Let me know what you all think.

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39 minutes ago, deuxcolors said:

-Should I build the server inside a chassis (like a Norco server chassis), and mount it inside the cabinet? Or, just mount the mobo to a removable tray inside the cabinet, and figure out a cage or rig for the hard drives?

Consider 2 major things, cooling and grounding / shielding. A chassis takes care of the engineering for you, if you rig up your own system, you will need to engineer it yourself.

 

Prebuilt chassis = +1 for ease of proper implementation out of box

DIY mounting done right = +10000 for cool factor and custom window view possibilities. An arcade machine is MEANT to be flashy, neon and LED would rock. Liquid cooling would allow you to move the heat to an external radiator if you wanted.

 

Drive mounting same - same, you can go as barebones as you want, 4 strips of angle metal with holes drilled at correct spacing, all the way to building 5-3 hotswap boxes into your cabinet so the drives are maintainable without disturbing the cabinet.

 

The more you custom design, the more you can do things the way they should be done, like filtered forced airflow and such.

 

Much depends on your personal vision and abilities, since you don't talk about budget I'm assuming you are able to do pretty much what you want with it within reason.

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