Ultra quiet compact 24TB Unraid Dual Boot Gaming PC

Gallery Completed Builds
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First - It’s been fun going down this rabbit hole. I’ve learned a lot - big thank you to JDM_WAAAT and discord community. You’ve helped me build the rig I’ve always wanted.

Started off building a NK4.1 with Combo#4 ($180).

Intention was to have 2 systems. One for server and one for PC gaming. Use my current gaming rigs’ Fractal Define 4 case for the NK4.1 build and get a new case Define 7 compact to house the gaming rig now that I don’t need HDD bay.

Combo #4 let me get familiar with Unraid and sever setup / experiments.
So when the power power supply failed on my gaming rig. I figured why don’t I just build one system?

Only issue was how do I fit 4 8TB HDD + 2 cache drives into a compact case? I found out that Fractal cases can get all their fan mount locations with 3.5" HDD.

So I converted my define 7 compact as a full gaming rig + Unraid.

  • Unraid 3x8TB + 1x8TB parity
  • 2 SSD caches
  • Windows 10 VM with dual-boot. Incase I want to go bare-metal for any reason. Passthrough: 1TB NVMe, nvidia 2060, 3.1 USB controller from the motherboard for hotswapping (helps with VR)
  • Unraid dockers: Unifi, Plex
  • VMs: Win10 / MacOS / Ubuntu

Best part? the rig is extremely quite, power effiecent and compact.

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Next goal: PARSEC streaming!

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Man, what a fantastic build! Congratulations, she’s a beauty. How much RAM did you add?

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I kept my original memory 24GB; I may upgrade down the road.
16GB for VM and 8GB for Unraid.

Core i7-6700k; definitely would like to upgrade to more Cores; i9-10900T would be fitting but I’ll wait until next year.

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Very nice!

this is kinda what I think I need to do with my build ( Here
But not so much gaming focused, and with various drives.

Do you play your games directly on this machine via the VM launched from UnRaid?
What do you use Ubuntu and MacOS for?

Thanks

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Sorry for the late reply.

I play most games on the VM launched from UnRAID but with CyberPunk 2077 I’ve had to go native mode. Losing 1 Core + Virtualization overhead is too much for that demanding game.

But for 99% of my usage, VM launched from UnRAID is plenty for me.

I use MacOS VM to have my Picutres automatically get uploaded to iCloud and use their app to store and organize it into Albums. Which is an extreme pain to do it on PC SW that Apple provides.

Ubuntu is just for fun - see how things are brewing in Linux land

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Nice setup!

Curious, do you passthrough the GPU to the MacOS VM as well? or always to the Windows VM? you had any problem setting it up? I’ve been having some problems with MacOS GPU passthrough while on Linux works great, haven’t tried with Windows yet.

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Thanks!

I didn’t passthrough the GPU to MacOS - mainly because I was only using it for photo management for iCloud nothing more so I didn’t need it. Sorry I won’t be of much help with Mac GPU passthrough.

Windows passthrough works amazingly well. I have it in dual-boot config - letting me boot Windows bare metal if I turn off the server and boot stright from my MVMe Windows install instead of USB stick for UnRAID.

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That’s interesting and really convenient! Did you install windows as a VM first? Or the other way around? I will try that approach as well.
Thanks!

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I installed it bare metal first then Created the VM using steps from this video:

Video card BIOS and renaming motherboard ID for VM go a long way to to keep things smooth.

One warning/advice, I had my Windows VM run extremely slow with GPU utilization at 100% all the time yesterday. Finally debugged to my integrated Intel gfx drivers. I booted into bare metal disable and uninstalled the integrated gfx drivers things were smooth again. So there can be some finikyness time to time.

Good luck!

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