My gaming rig

A bit of story.

In 2012, my brother decided as a gift for going away to college, he would purchase PC parts for me to build my own PC from. There was a $500 combo deal upgrade package from Newegg that he found and made mine. I grew upon that initial build as time went on, adding and replacing parts with newer and better parts, until finally its last build. In 2014, I had better income and could afford to upgrade to higher end parts, so I donated that PC to my sister and built my current gaming rig, which has also since been upgraded over these past 4 years.

The current gaming rig I have started out with much less storage space, a different set of monitors, a different mousepad, video card, and webcam. All of these have been upgraded over time.

In addition, I’ve now added an Intel NUC to my mix of networked devices, which I’ve been using as a utility server. I’ve offloaded nearly all of the virtual machines that my gaming rig has been hosting for 4+ years over to the Intel NUC. This has changed my PC’s performance and resource usage in a favorable direction, and it also means I should be able to take my PC offline more often.

There is one problem I want to tackle, the 2x 5 TB WD Black drives are actually unused. They were originally given exclusive access to a guest virtual machine running my Plex server, and they were configured with LVM, creating a virtual volume of 10 TB. The performance wasn’t that great, however. I transferred the contents of them to a single 6 TB HGST drive and had equal performance with less headache. I want to RAID 1 the 5 TB WD Black drives and then possibly use them for general purpose backup storage, rather than exclusively with my Plex server.

And as for the Plex server, I want to move it off my gaming rig. I’m looking at short-term and long-term right now. In the short, I’m expanding the RAM on my Intel NUC from 16GB to 32GB, so I can host more guests on it, which would allow me to transfer my Plex server. I should then be able to move the HGST 6TB drive to the NUC since the drive is using an external USB3.0 interface. In the long-term, I want to purchase a dedicated storage server, host it at a colocation, and use a RAID 10 array of at least 6×4 TB or 8×6 TB enterprise drives. This would then become the permanent home for my Plex server, giving it the maximum efficiency I can offer.

In the long-term for my gaming rig, I do foresee a possible shift from Intel to AMD. The Ryzen processors have intrigued me. This would mean a new motherboard, which means adopting a new architecture platform. And I’ve never used an AMD processor as my main machine before, either. There’s comfort level hurdles to overcome in that direction. I also won’t need 64 GB of RAM either, since I’m moving the virtual machines to my Intel NUC, so if I build a new desktop system in the future I’ll probably split them to 32 GB. It’s unfortunate that the memory modules between my gaming rig and the NUC aren’t compatible, in addition the NUC has an upper limit of 32 GB memory. Sadness. Maybe I should purchase a second NUC? We’ll see.