Kenton Varda is a developer at Cloudflare. A few years ago, he and his wife Jade Wang moved to Austin, Texas, where they bought a lot and started building a new house. They had Kenton’s father Richard Varda, who is an architect, to help them, but Kenton himself was deeply involved in both the design and construction of parts of the interior.
The house is built for LAN parties. All around there are a total of 22 gaming stations with screen, keyboard, mouse and soundbar hidden in specially built cabinets that can be folded out for playing. The computers themselves are rack-mounted in a server room and connected with fiber optic Displayport and USB cables as well as network cable.
20 of the computers are identical and use Core i5-13600KF, motherboards and graphics cards from Gigabyte in the form of Geforce RTX 4070 and Z790 Aorus Master, 32 GB working memory and 1 TB SSD from Corsair. The other two are Kenton and Jade’s personal workstations and have different specifications.
In the gaming stations, there are 32-inch 4K monitors from Corsair with simple cable-connected keyboards and mice in the form of Logitech K120 and M500s. Kenton Varda explains that he has never appreciated more advanced keyboards and mice for gaming.
Rack mount gaming PCs. Image: Kenton Varda and Jade Wong
Instead of messing around with installing Windows on 20 separate computers, the computers over the network boot from a disk image that can easily be kept up to date. This way, guests can easily start up a computer, make settings to customize the system to their liking, log into their own Steam accounts and play. When they then turn off the computer, it is reset for the next LAN visitor.
The network uses 10-Gbit Ethernet to make the computers start up as quickly as possible. In an update, Kenton Varda writes that the many network technicians who have complained about how all the cables hang from the ceiling and are plugged directly into the switches are right: They should have been sitting with sockets in the wall.
In total, the computer equipment cost the equivalent of approximately SEK 825,000, which was a fraction of the house’s total cost. In fact, the custom built cabinets for the gaming stations cost about the same.
If Kenton Varda and a house built for LAN sounds familiar, it may be because he 13 years ago carried out a similar project in his much smaller home in Palo Alto south of San Francisco, which also went viral.
Source: www.sweclockers.com
