This is what I think would be better. Drop down to a 3970X and build two towers. Or even the 3960X and give each a 6 core system. But then do it in two builds. Then make your personal one separate as well. So 3 systems total and can all be rack mounted and located in the closet downstairs or something.
Makes cabling a PITA would probably not do that unless you really want to run up the costs
Someone mentioned LTT
LTT THIS Replaced Every PC in my House!
This is what you may be wanting to do, but a little scaled back? The Infinite cables maybe a little over the top.
Linus has the ability to get ahold of rare and very expensive equipment, usually free even though he likes to pretend how expensive things are.
Considering that the CPU the OP mentioned is 4 grand, and you can get an Epyc cpu for less and will have more PCIe lanes to work with. You can get off the shelf GPUs to work in this setup, I have been able to do this myself.
I would think the expense going into this system would be better put towards something that would work, may not be Desktop easy, but the whole idea that was presented by the OP is not a simple ask in the first place.
I know that Linus tends to put off that things he gets is free costs him in some way, but the idea is a seed that I would go for if I were to be putting close to 6 to 10 grand into already.
Many years ago, when I was a bachelor and we had LAN parties constantly, I ran a 4-head system of this kind on a “budget” build. I can’t recall every part number.
I setup a Dual-CPU Xeon Workstation from surprlus datacenter CPU dumps (commonly known ASRock mobo) with 4 PCIe slots able to handle 4x (less?) PCIe bandwidth. I recall having 4 cores available for each Gaming VM… ran 4x GTX 980’s… full passthrough setup to NVMe OS drives and bulk game installs on RAID-0’ed LVM HDD’s.
The kicker was I ran a gigabit network and just ran Steam Links (this was year 1 of them coming out. I had like 8 of th ose things at one point; can’t buy them now easil? but they did release Android and Rasperry Pi clients and such. ) to each TV I want to have someone game on.
Some performance optimizations was to shuffle various I/O threads for each to my non-Gaming VM CPU cores to handle while also ensuring the hypervisor OS (Yes, Gentoo. I’m a masochist. 20 years of it now) was on it’s own cores (boot params for only those cores to be activated).
I could ramble more if needed or go digging. The streaming games issues limits thing a bit from letting the kids use CAD, but maybe you can have “VM #1 & #2” have desk mounted heads at a desk for those uses when needed for them to sit there.
I investigated the… VT-something extensions for virtualized GPU’s but it wasn’t worth it at that time; even had resolution caps I disdained.
Key questions for you:
- Head vs Headless? (ie, seats in same place vs streaming like I did) A mix?
- Going past 4 GPU’s was hard to find. (You might be able to squeeze the PCIe lanes of a TB3 connected eGPU as another head) Big question for you therefore is: concurrent or dedicated? ie, same time or can you just let 4 kids play at once and no more… thhey can still spool up their personal VM no matter what.
- The cost of what everyone described was extreme. Does the space compactness and question #1 complexities make you just want to spend 1/2 as much building 7 mini-ITX identical builds? I can whip them out for 400$-500$ each depending on details aiming at a moderate 1080p AMD GPU (that 570/580 thingie). You can even save a buck and use APU’s if their game target (or just some of the kids PC’s) is lower end enough and you can just be ready to drop the GPU in later.
X2 for Epyc.
It would certainly provide enough bandwidth, I believe there’s an upcoming Rome workstation motherboard coming out with seven fully connected x16 PCIe 4.0 slots. They’re single slot, so some creativity would be needed with riser cables to space out gaming cards.
I don’t any epyc cpu has high enough clocks for gaming. It’d just be a waste. Sure it might be “good enough” for 1080p gaming with a powerful enough gpu, but it’ll really be a waste, as a TR system (3970x or 3960x) could clock almost 1GHz higher on all cores.
I also doubt there us a good enough single slot gpu for cramming onto an epyc board (perhaps a Quadro RTX4000).
After thinking about it, a one/two system idea might not be good for kids, who will eventually grow up and might want to further customize their own builds according to their personal tastes. And you’ll be left with a “powerful” computer or two with too many gpus to make use of.
Conversion to water blocks? I know Wendell did that video recently and it said the 2080 ti goes down to a single slot with a water cooling block on it.
Certainly a possibility. Wouldn’t want to see the tubing or try to balance the flow across seven GPUs.
Nvidia Grid? That way you could put as many GPUs as you can in the case, and just make 7 vGPUs
I’d just build 8 almost identical systems and put them in a rack.
7x R5 3600, 16GB 3200, RX5700, same board, same PSU, same rack case…
The server gets some trash GPU and twice the RAM.
Done.
If on a less than seven player session a system won’t run, switch to different machine and fix the other one later. If the server has a dead component, you have seven rigs to pull parts from.
I agree with using two computers instead of cramming into one. I’ve tried researching mxGPU or Grid for home use but not worth the money and I can’t find a whole lot of info.
I would go with two 2970wx cpus and the x399 fatality boards, best bang for buck in my opinion. I also wouldn’t worry about usb passthrough, it maybe better on the new threadripper but I’d just give each person a raspberry pi and have VirtualHere running on it. Could even just put parsec on each pi if you do 1080p and can live without freesync.
Or can build 7 3U rackmount computers and shove in a closet. Would have to run hdmi but you can go 40ft and still do 4k 60hz for like $50 and do VirtualHere for USB.
Thank you all for the replies and ideas. It looks like the concept is still a little bit ahead of it’s time for cramming it into one rig. Maybe some solutions for the case, cooling, and GPU’s will come along with future TR series platforms. I won’t hold my breath for it though. The way the world is going I’ll likely be thrown in jail in the next few years for overpopulating the world with 6 kids. 
Yeah, a Ryzen 3600+RX5600XT/RTX2060Ko seems the way to go for now…
What do you intend on implementing?
I don’t intend to implement anything. I already currently have 7 rigs for the family to game on. This concept was to reduce the physical footprint while providing a moderate upgrade/future proofing.
You could reduce the footprint by half with 2 gamers per box. What hardware do you have to work with now?
I don’t see anything coming in the future that would allow seven gamers in one box to be practical. Core count is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Bandwidth to drive seven GPUs is a stuggle for anything desktop, including Threadripper. VDI solutions don’t really offer gaming level performance, and are similar in cost to a nice automobile.
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