Questions about building a Nas/Gaming VM

[carstensm]

Hi there,

 

Total noob here coming from the 2015 Linus video...

I've been wanting to build a NAS for a long time, and for a really long time have been looking at a dual mobo arrangement, but after coming across the LTT video, I thought this would be a really cool space to get into, but am a little worried about a couple things being compatible with my current usage, hopefully you guys can let me know if this will work.

 

Current Specs:

CPU - 7700K

RAM - 32GB 2400mhz

MOBO - Gigabyte z170 sli xp

GPU - 1080ti

Hard drives: recently bought four 4TB NAS drives and another 1TB SSD to go along with my current 1TB SSD, per LTT instructions.

 

I mainly use the machine for gaming/hosting media, home recording studio, light video editing, print layout production, etc.

 

Concerns:

Audio: I live in a very small house. My PC and 3440x1440 gaming monitor are in my office, and then I route cables through a wall to a 4KTV directly on the other side of the wall which is the living room. Due to this constant switching around depending on what kind of game I want to play, I switch between a lot of different audio inputs and outputs, including:

 

• Gaming monitor speakers
• Headset out of the front panel
• 5.1 outputs out of the motherboard which feeds my receiver/TV
• USB laptop dock in front of the TV I sometimes plug a headset into
• USB audio interface for recording music

 

Will all these be able to be passed through properly/easily?

 

Horsepower:

In the LTT video, he's using a 6700K, which is pretty similar to my 7700K, but that was 5 years ago... will my 7700K be enough to handle NAS/gaming at 4K60 and 1440p120hz? I don't mind taking a little hit on performance, but don't want to lose out too much.

 

At heart, I am more of a tinkerer than a gamer, although I do play a lot of video games haha. This project really excites me, but I'm particularly worried about my various peripherals and USB devices working properly. 

 

Thanks for all your help!!

 

PS: also, would love to hear other creative things people have done with an unRAID set up like this!

[MadGuy]

There is a guide from spaceinvaderone which explains alot on how to do things. Would recommend watching that. Since you can load unraid on a usb stick with a trial, you could test that aswell. Depending on how you configured  the current "nas" you might need to migrate data though. If it unraid already you dont need to do alot.

 

IOMMU Groupings are important to know if you want to passthrough an onboard audio to the windows vm. For me i went with a usb audiocard on my 7700k asrock mobo . But thats just stereo for my headset. There is a way to use pulseaudio, but i dont know it has 5.1 support.