Hi all-

 

I recently upgraded my unraid server to allow for more robust plex transcoding, gaming etc. The gridrunner videos were enormously useful. As things have evolved, I use it almost exclusively for gaming at this point. My current setup is:

 

xeon e3-1245 v6 (4 cores)

16 gb ecc ram

gtx 1060

windows 10 VM installed on separate nvme drive which has 3 cores (core 1-3; core 0 used by unraid) and 12 gb allocated to it

 

My question is how I can I configure unraid and the VM to maximize gaming performance? Should I assign all 4 cores to the VM? If so does it make a difference to bind unraid processes to a higher core? For what it's worth the server is NEVER used for gaming and plex transcoding simultaneously.

 

I'm inclined to keep it as unraid with windows as a VM since I occasionally use it as a media server, but would it be a significant improvement to just install win 10 natively to allow it to access the full 4 cores and 16 gb, then just set up the media server through windows?

 

Any thoughts are appreciated!

Edited July 10, 20187 yr by glc001

1 hour ago, glc001 said:

My question is how I can I configure unraid and the VM to maximize gaming performance?

In my opinion I would say you're close, or already there. 

 

1 hour ago, glc001 said:

Should I assign all 4 cores to the VM?

Personally I would leave it, as-is, I'm a believer in keeping a dedicated core for unRAID. 

 

1 hour ago, glc001 said:

If so does it make a difference to bind unraid processes to a higher core?

I assume the Linux kernel prefers to run on cpu0, so based on that assumption I start from highest core# and provision downwards. My personal preference based on that assumption, certainly doesn't hurt.

 

1 hour ago, glc001 said:

but would it be a significant improvement to just install win 10 natively to allow it to access the full 4 cores and 16 gb, then just set up the media server through windows?

Significant? probably not, would you see improvement, yes some. Going to hazard a guess of about 10% (high-side 15-20%) over-all improvement. Would you see improved FPS, not likely as that's going to be your graphics card, and it's not taking a performance hit in VM; maybe a few frames per second difference as you would have more CPU and memory resources, but again I doubt significant improvement.

 

You could probably get away with bumping the RAM on the VM to 14GB.

That's my, "two cents" for what it is worth.

2 hours ago, Jcloud said:

You could probably get away with bumping the RAM on the VM to 14GB.

Maybe, maybe not. The VM management takes a chunk of RAM, and the docker subsystem takes a little as well. I wouldn't be comfortable squeezing unraid into 2GB in this scenario.

Thanks for the input, it's much appreciated! So far it's working very well, with the only minor exception being a few hiccups while playing witcher 3 (very cpu intensive game). I'll leave it as is and revisit the issue when I upgrade my graphics card if I feel like I'm being limited by only having 3 cores.