glc001 Posted July 10, 2018 Share Posted July 10, 2018 (edited) 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, 2018 by glc001 Quote Link to comment
Jcloud Posted July 10, 2018 Share Posted July 10, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
JonathanM Posted July 11, 2018 Share Posted July 11, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
glc001 Posted July 11, 2018 Author Share Posted July 11, 2018 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. Quote Link to comment
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