Question Ambitious n00b with a grown-up bank account

[Electric mayhem]

Hi all,
So I'm getting into this as a hobby (I've decided) and I'm going to start building my own gaming rig that can also act as a media center for different rooms...
I got the idea from a piece I read about a multi headed gaming system:

Multi-headed VMWare Gaming Setup

As powerful as modern PCs are, sometimes it feels like a waste having just a single person using a PC at a time. By using various server virtualization technologies including virtual machines and PCI passthrough, we created a multi-headed gaming PC that allows up to four users to game on one...

www.pugetsystems.com

So... This project a bit insane, and really just to push myself to learn a new skill and end up with something totally awesome, if exceedingly unnecessary. Obviously, jumping right to a ridiculously complex system like the build in the article would be foolish, as I have almost NO experience with this sort of thing. So... I'm thinking a piece at a time, with the end of getting a virtual machine in 3 - 4 rooms being the end goal for a year or two down the road.

Note: I understand this idea to be UTTERLY ridiculous for someone who last built a PC in 1993, and will likely not be cost effective, but real learning sometimes requires time, resources, and ambition.

By trade, I'm an electrician, so cabling in the house, and fishing those cables to any room is just a matter of materials cost and getting around to it.

 

[Newtonius]

Now this is a project I would love to get started for my family too. I'd recommend you watch some "linus tech tips" videos about this, he does this all the time and has very informative videos in an easy to understand manner. He also has a large audience and forum to ask around.

First and foremost, you're gonna need a steep budget, depending on the amount of people using this server at once you could require something like a literal 32-core, 64-thread CPU like the new threadripper or epyc rome server processors from AMD (ranges from 1000 - 3000$ USD but is way better than intel currently due to new lithography technology, 7nm transistors). These CPU's require motherboards that support much more RAM than a standard computer.
(You will need to wait a month or so for the new thread-rippers to release as well as their motherboards if you plan to go this route)

Next would be the GPU. You'll have to get 1 GPU per computer, and you said 4 rooms, so 4x 2080 Ti's or 2080 Supers (depending how big you want that hole in your wallet to be) thus every computer has a dedicated GPU for their system. (Which also points to why the new AMD lineup is great for this, it supports much more data lanes / data bandwidth to the PCIe slots, so no loss in performance the more you populate the PCIe ports).

You're gonna need a moderate amount of storage, luckily for you WD red has 4TB HDD's at only 160$ a pop. So no need to worry about data storage issues. So for the VM's get a single dedicated HDD for each and for the Host Sever get a 2.5" SSD or m.2 nvme SSD for reliable performance across the board.

A very important next step is the chassis. You gotta hold this monster together right? There are numerous options, you just have to make sure your mother board, video cards, hard-drives, fans, and don't forget the power supply, will all fit. I'd send you chassis recommendations but there's just so much planning.

as for the client computers you'll have in each room, they can be basic computers with low specs.

There's much more knitty-gritty to this but I don't have a lot of time to flesh out the details, so take whatever keywords I threw out there and feel free to ask questions, it may sound all vague to someone who hasn't built a computer since 1993.

 

[Electric mayhem]

Ok... 32 core 64 thread processor??? Holy💩. The Puget systems build was only using 4 cores per VM, I think... could I maybe get away with like a ryzen 7 or 9? . Also is it possible with kvm extenders to ditch the individual room computers and just have a tv keyboard and mouse? As mentioned it's easy fur me to run pretty much any kind of cables I need. Or make them, really.

I'm also not looking to play the most insane gpu based games out there. The likelihood is that only two of the VMs would ever be going at any time or two VMs for games and one streaming service... I just kinda want to pick the room I wanna be in. 😊