Two players on one PC – starting at a discounted price now available
Two players on one PC – starting at a discounted price now available
We're looking to refresh our setup with a modern upgrade. Our current setup uses older R9 290x GPUs, which are quite outdated. To save money and take advantage of today's prices, I'm thinking about getting a single prebuilt unit for both of us. Would it be necessary to keep high-end dedicated GPUs, or should we focus on essential components? Any suggestions on what to avoid and what hardware is must-have? All ideas welcome—cheers!
The 290's are actually decent GPUs. The rest of the systems are fine, keep those saved if you were me. There are other programs like Aster that allow sharing a GPU among multiple tasks. I’d prefer to avoid a single shared PC whenever possible—it causes a lot of trouble and usually costs the same as a regular setup.
I recommend QEMU. It's open-source and free compared to Unraid. Unless your setup includes an Intel Integrated GPU with gvt-g, sharing the GPU isn't permitted (on NVIDIA) or is quite restrictive (AMD). Therefore, you'll need an Intel GPU to allow sharing between host and VM.
Unless you have a very strong GPU (such as RTX 3080/RX 6800 or better), even with a bug-free sharing method, it might not be more capable than a few 290Xs. And without a CPU with over eight cores, you won't enjoy the experience much, since you'll need at least a couple of cores for the hypervisor and more—four or more per core. A CPU with ten or more cores will likely cost more than two six-core units. Yes, you just need one motherboard, but on Intel a 10th gen i9 will demand a costly board to run well, and on AMD, their R9 models are either overpriced or hard to find. It's an interesting idea, but I don't believe it's worth the hassle, and even if you manage it, it probably won't save much money or improve performance significantly.