I’m currently still working with a 955 Phenom from 10 years ago as my computer was only my gaming rig but now it is being used for so much more.
Here is what my computer needs to be:
Main workstation for my business
NAS for my business
NAS for my wife’s business
Gaming Rig for myself
Gaming rig for my wife(Steam in home streaming to her laptop)
Gaming Rig for family room TV(kids)
Plex media server
With Gen1 Threadripper on good discount I’m looking to grab a 1920X on eBay for a good price or on other websites.
Also looking at motherboards.was leaning to the ASRock Taichi for the dual LAN but I am looking for suggestions here as well.
However, wondering if I should also look at 2700X? The CPU is only going to be a little cheaper but the motherboards are quite a bit less.
Any input would be high appreciated
might be able to do everything and one game system simultaneously. Not sure about two at once, would need more than one graphics card and a lot of memory. @tkoham and others will be of greater assistance
I do think you may be able to build two AM4 based machines to split the work between them cheaper than one threadripper that is big enough spec to do it all at the same time. It will run close, definitely.
I personally don’t like the idea of NAS in my main machine, i’d go all SSD in the workstation/gaming box (they’re cheap enough now) and split the noisy/slow spinny disks off to a dedicated NAS box (something like a B350 based ryzen 2200G or previous gen baseline R3 or such) that you can put out of the way / further away from your ears, etc.
Keeping your NAS seperate will also reduce risk, etc. of your gaming activities impacting your NAS (crash due to game/video driver/malware/whatever, reboot required for updates, etc.). To be clear i’d run Windows on bare metal on the 2700X gaming box and FreeNAS on the B350 based NAS. I’d run plex via freeNAS plugin. I’d do VMs with either HyperV or VMWare Workstation (or virtualbox if so inclined). If you need to game in a room other than where the PCs is, do via steam link box (or steam running over the network, streaming - so long as you don’t need to game in both places at same time).
One big threadripper system will be a compromise IMHO (mostly because of the NAS concerns above), and i don’t think you’ll save much by trying to cram everything into one machine. TR board plus bigger PSU plus TR CPU = almost/likely able to buy a B350 board and second smaller PSU, with the cost difference. I dunno if you’d be able to get a case as well, but you could also drop to a b350/b450 board on your 2700x as well to shave costs. You could also maybe drop to a 2600X to further shave costs… if you had to.
You’d need to buy enough RAM to do it all whether it is all in one TR box or split between two Ryzen boxes.
A single TR box will be less flexible too IMHO. The 2700X will be better at gaming as well (if that’s a concern).
Trying to make one box do it all via virtualised windows gaming VMs might be funky and interesting, but it will not work as well as a dedicated gaming PC. And you WILL spend a lot of time setting it all up and dealing with any wierd issues that you might seen in games, etc.
no one likes to hear this, but intel HEDT/server is a much better platform for running homelab/multi-vm right now. no patching or custom kernel compilations, no messing with the bios past switching on the vt-features, and no wondering if the next AGESA or kernel update is going to break things again. I’d say separate the gaming and server stuff like the others said, and put the rest on a xeon blade server in the closet.
Well there a couple reasons why I was looking to take this approach.
Mainly because I have a Caselabs M8 and I live in a small house with my wife and two kids. So having one machine being able to do multiple things is highly beneficial for us.
I also think “home cloud” computing is the future as you can have all you game consoles in the house me Steam Links and pick up your games anytime in any room.
I definitely don’t need a separate NAS for everything. I like that idea but a single NAS would also work for both my wife and my work.
That said, I could probably sell the M8 to help finance a server build and new gaming rig.
I could probably use the motherboard I have now in a cheaper case like the Fractal R6 as the server(955 Phenom but should be enough for NAS and Plex).
Just saw that Phanteks is coming out with the Revolt X, Im thinking I can try to Mod an ITX NAS into the M8 and then have my computer separate but in the same case still.
I once had the goal of ‘one box, all the things’, I took a z800, ESXi, ran pass-through to 5 2TB HDDs to a FreeNAS VM, CentOS for a log indexer application, another CentOS for Plex, Ubuntu server for a website host (second NIC on z800 going strait to my DMZ port on router) and then even “physicalized” a Win10 VM by giving it a GPU and USB pci card. Literally used the Win10 desktop like once, thought “cool”, and then made the z800 headless and in the closet (door always cracked open). ESXi wise, since getting more education I found I didn’t follow a lot of best practices the way I set it up as well. Hypercovergence is a big buzzword right now, but I’ve yet to see it at my work become something it advertises itself to be- and my work has been throwing money at this buzzword.
With the right plan, and $$ for parts to make certain bottlenecks less of an issue, you could have a nice ‘one box does it all’, but like other posters here, I’d have builds for specialized tasks, and if I were to do it over, I would have my NAS as it’s own bare metal build.
That was going to be my suggestion. Get a small ITX board for the basement or back of the case or something like that, or better yet one of those small server boards the C920 or whatever they were for the nas and then build a gaming/VM system separately that can talk to the small PC so you can have a headless setup on the mini one. Just power to it really and then leave it alone.
same caveats apply there, and since TR is on the table I’m assuming we’re not talking minimum wage budget.
I mean you can go back as far as ivy bridge and get ryzen performance with a little OC if you don’t mind buying used. There’s definitely ways to make that work if you do have severe budget constraints
I long ditched the idea of one box, multiple uses. Pcloud has now replaced the NAS, and gaming capable NUCs and laptops have replaced the big box PC’s. Turns out the kids are perfectly happy with games not set to ultra graphics settings
Some good suggestions on here, I was doing the same and deliberating between threadripper and the 2700X.
But really just wanted to build a beast that I can’t afford lol.
2700X seems better in most cases.
Definitely seems a better idea to offload some tasks onto some old/cheap PCs.
I have my stepdads old pc to run centOS off and then threw 3 old HDDs in there.
I suggest offloading the Nas to your old pc. I bought unraid to run a cheap powerful easily expandable storage system. Based on Linux it just runs in the corner. Then spec the new system as required.
