My Cheapest Combo Yet - Cloud Gaming Server with an X79 Microcloud

It's Saturday morning. I've got a full cup of coffee, an X79 MicroCloud, and an Nvidia Tesla P4. Let's have some fun. Welcome back to Craft Computing everyone. As always, I'm Jeff. So, I have covered the Nvidia Tesla P4 a number of times on this channel. Essentially, this is a shrunk down GTX 1070Ti in the smallest possible form factor. It has the same 8 GB of GDDDR5 memory and the same 2560 CUDA cores, just a much smaller package. But this card was supposed to be used only for GPU compute, not traditional raster, as there are no video outputs on this. However, through the magic of Nvidia's VGPU, we can use this inside of a virtual machine and play games. And that's exactly what the plan is for today. Now, seeing as how this is my fifth video, I think on the Super Micro MicroCloud, uh instead of doing a whole bunch of assembly and explanation, uh here's a note I prepared earlier. This is rocking an Intel Xeon E5 2643 V2 that is a six core 12threaded processor but with a 3.5 GHz base clock. It is one of the fastest singlethreaded Xeons available for this platform. We've also got the Nvidia Tesla P4 snuggled in there with essentially zero wiggle room at all. But it is in there and that's the important thing. So, what do you say we go get this installed in the server and I'll show you exactly what we're doing with it today. All right, out in the garage. Here is the Super Node. Let's go ahead and get it installed into the microcloud once more into the fray. One thing's for sure, installing these has gotten so much easier since I reabled the whole back of the server rack. That just slides right in. And then all my network cables are nice and easy to find. Look at that. And done. All right. And while we're waiting for that node to boot up, seems like a great opportunity to tell you about today's sponsor, Meter. 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To get this up and running, you will need an Nvidia Maxwell, Pascal, Volulta, or Turingbased GPU. That is Nvidia 900, 1000, Volta, or 2000based series GPU. It is not compatible with Ampear or anything newer than that. Up next here in the top right window is our Nvidia SMI, which we are watching off of that Proxmox server. Uh, this is so we can see the Nvidia GPU being split in real time. We can see RAM utilization, GPU utilization, power usage as well as temperature all in this one little window. And finally on the left hand side is parseek and this is what we will be using to connect to the VM and actually play games. So over here in the prox window, let's go ahead and make that a little bit bigger so we can see exactly what it is we're doing. Uh we've got our Windows VM already set up and I do have the Nvidia card passed through already. Now, the cool thing about this is we have multiple options on how exactly we want to pass through this GPU. Uh, right now I have it set so all 8 GB of video memory are passing through to the VM. However, we could technically split this card into smaller chunks and pass it through to multiple VMs. We could choose a 4 GB model or even a 2 GB model and run essentially up to four GPUs off of the single card. Not really recommended unless you're doing nothing but casual games, something like Stardew Valley or the original Risk of Rain or, you know, think 2D elements with some basic video encoding. Uh, for anything more modern than that, any kind of 3D game, you're going to want some more video memory. Either four or 8 GB is what I would recommend. For today, we're just going to stick with the single 8 GB VGPU profile as we'll be testing some more modern and pretty demanding games on this. Also, I'm not going to disable the frame rate limiter in the VGPU driver. See, VGPU is meant for virtual desktop or a 3D enhanced virtual desktop. So, you run a VM, you have a little bit of graphics horsepower behind it, and you can browse the web or decode video off YouTube or something like that, giving you more akin to a standard desktop experience rather than a remote desktop experience. As such, it limits all of its video output to 60 frames per second or 60 hertz. for gaming. Maybe that's not the best thing because we like high refresh rate monitors. We like 120 Hz. But this is a very old GPU. Again, the Tesla P4 launched, I believe, in 2017 and is using the exact same GPU die as the 1070Ti. However, it is only a 70W TDP instead of the 200 watt TDP of the 1070Ti. So, we are working with lower boost clocks and lower power overall. As such, I don't expect a 9-year-old small form factor 70watt GPU to be able to render all modern games at 1080p ultra settings and 120 frames per second. That's just not realistic. But if you're looking for something to enhance your gameplay on a Steam Deck or an Android handheld or heck, maybe even use your phone as a gaming device, something like this could enable you to do that pretty easily. We'll get more into the use cases later on in the video, but for right now, let's go ahead and fire up this VM and play some games. So, for this, we're just going to right click on the VM and click on start. About 2 minutes later, it should show up in my Parseek monitor and we can connect and start playing some games. So, while this VM is starting up, you can see right here under processes, we now have a single VGPU process that's running using 8 GB of video memory. And that is our VM accessing the card and partitioning off the entire 8 gigabyte profile. And just like that, we have vGPU win 01. So let's go ahead and hit connect. And just like that, we have a Windows desktop delivered at 1080p and 60 frames per second. The cool thing about Parseek is it does have a built-in performance monitor. So you can actually see the encode time for both the host and the decode time for your client. that is the device that we're streaming from right now. So right now the host GPU is taking about 14 milliseconds to encode a single frame. The client is taking an additional 2 milliseconds to decode that frame once it's delivered. So in all we're sitting with about 16 milliseconds of latency. Why is that important? That's about one frame at 60 frames per second. So your overall latency on a local LAN like this is only going to be an additional 16 milliseconds or one lost frame. Now, I've already got Steam installed on here, and I've done some preliminary testing inside of here for performance using 3D Mark, Fire Strike, and Time Spy, and the results were pretty fantastic. Uh, I'll display the scores on screen right now because I honestly don't remember what they were, and I'll give a couple comparison points as well. Uh, but I did have to solve one issue already, and that is the MicroCloud is not aware of the GPU inside of the of the system. And so the fans don't ramp up in response to GPU load, only in response to CPU load. So after about 4 minutes of running 3D Mark Fire Strike, the GPU overheated and refused to respond. It actually hard crashed my VM and I couldn't turn the VM on again without powering off the node entirely and then booting it back up. Luckily, the IPMI tool for Super Micro does allow us to set manual fan curves. And so what I've done right now is lock the fan at 50% RPMs. And so we're running an 80 mm fan at about 10,000 RPM. It's louder than anything else in the MicroCloud. It is now the loudest server in my rack by far. But our graphics card is staying nice and cool. It was hitting 92 Celsius under full load at the stock fan speeds. Now I think it's hitting between 54 and 56 Celsius. So we've got plenty of air flow. And the server's in the garage, so I don't have to listen to it anyway. So, let's go ahead and start off with something fun. Uh, let's go and do some Recfest. I haven't played Recrefest in a while, and this is one that is usually pretty darn demanding, especially with older CPUs and older GPUs. So, this should be a pretty good test. Again, we're running with that E5 2643 V2, which is six cores and 12 threads. I have eight threads passed through to the VM. So essentially, we're running a four core, 8threaded chip with two cores and four threads reserved strictly for Proxmox. Not going to be too greedy with this one. I think we're going to go 1080p and medium settings. So, let's go ahead and hit play. So, we're not doing anything too crazy here. Uh, I've got the Steam performance overlay in the top left corner. So, we should get our frame rate as well as highs and lows recorded right there. Uh, as well as latency spikes and all that kind of thing. uh in the graph right there. We can also see CPU utilization, GPU utilization, and total GPU memory used. So, uh pretty much enough information to see if this is a good idea or not. Well, so far 60 frames per second. Heck yeah. The opening grid in this game is usually one of the more intense se sessions because uh you've got a full 24 cars, all that collision data, all that uh all the AI processing that needs to be done all happening right there. Uh so dude, this is 60 frames per second with a low of what was that? 47. God, I love this game. Yeah, the low frame rate sticking right around that 47 point. Uh sometimes as high as 56. I think the lowest I've seen so far is 40. Trying to pay attention more to driving more than performance. And after that terrible start, I'm already in second place. So, I will take that. All right. So, Reckfest definitely playable. Not only playable, but this is downright great. And in fact, GPU utilization 43%. We could run two copies of this. 2.9 GB of video memory and 43% utilization. We could run two copies of Recfest on this Proxmox node. Maybe if I had an 8 core server instead of a six. Uh it would be a little bit better, but nice. All right, let's uh up the difficulty for the GPU slightly. Let's go with some Oblivion Remastered. I don't think this one's going to be quite as good, but uh that's why we test things is sometimes you're surprised. I think we're going to have to go with software ray tracing, which is going to decimate our CPU performance because our GPU doesn't have any hardware ray tracing available to it. I have no idea what to expect here. Okay, well, at least the menu is at 60 frames per second. That's a good start. First, we'll take a look at our options here. We're going to aim for 60 fps, low settings across the board. Oh, we do have an upscaler. Okay. So, I'm going to start with it off and we'll use TAA anti-aliasing. And obviously, we've got our ray tracing set to software. Um, although this might nah, it probably will crash if I turn it on. Okay, so we'll leave it at that. Let's apply the changes. Low settings across the board. Okay, we've got some massive uh texture clipping issues. CPU is at about 70% trending 80%. GPU is only using five and a half gigs though and we're getting about 30 frames per second. O but with lows approaching single digits. All right, let's let's play a little bit. Let's see where we get. And I am out of arrows. Lovely. Great place to start. All right. Well, that wasn't the worst. I mean, it's not good. Okay. You know, I was a little negative on this when we started. Dare I say edge of playability. I mean, it's it's not a good experience, but combat, at least against single enemies, was okay. Is that texture popping problem gone away? Let's check these rocks again. Okay, that might have just been the uh the ray tracing catching its bearings. I don't see the texture pop in happening anymore. Okay, at 42 FPS, you know, things are trending up. Things are trending up. Low of 26. Heck yeah. Yeah, we're staying at 45 FPS with a low of 30. I think as soon as some of those shaders loaded, you know what? I'm going to call this playable. Let's kill a scamp real quick. I mean, again, obviously, it's certainly not the best looking game, not the best performing game. There's going to be little problems here and there, but when you consider we're running on a 14-year-old CPU and a 9-year-old Enterprise graphics card, I'm willing to let some things go. I'm convinced. I I think once uh some of those cache shaders loaded in, I think we're sitting okay. Like I said, 45 FPS, low of 33. Combat seems nice and smooth. I don't dislike this at all now. All right, I'm gonna call it there. Oblivion remaster against all odds. Actually kind of playable. Who would have thought that? Let's set the difficulty up yet again with some uh Borderlands 4, a game known even more than Oblivion Remaster as being insanely difficult to run. Uh, this is I don't know if this one's going to go great, although I didn't think Oblivion was going to go great either. And that one's shockingly playable. While we're waiting for these compiled shaders to load in, uh, this is a great opportunity to remind you that craftcomputing.store exists. Pick yourself up one of these fantastic insulated coffee tumblers that was designed and made right here inhouse. Okay, so on the menu, we're at 24 frames per second. Let's see, where are we at? Are we low across the board? Motion blur is off as it deserves to be. Everything else basically as low as it'll go. And 24 frames per second on the title screen. I don't know if the shaders are counting up or down. Yeah, this one's definitely CPUbound. Uh, 100% CPU utilization. 96 100. We don't have the CPU for this game. 26 frames per second with a low of 20 in a game that is famously a Twitch shooter. Boy. Uh, we'll give it the old college try. Nope. This is awful. We're climbing the stairs and I'm already down to 20 FPS with a low of 11. Yeah, this is bad. I can't even see my shots leaving the gun. Yeah, this one's not playable. This is awful. H I can't aim. It's so jittery. I I literally can't track where my gun is pointing. Wow. and snapping my head from side to side brings us down to eight frames per second. Yeah, I don't care what your standards are. I I don't think this is going to be playable. Borderlands 4. Jeez, even going to the menu. I hit escape. It took a second to go to the menu. Nope. Borderlands 4. That's going to be a no. Let's see what's next. How about a little Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2. Okay, we're going to try this without resolution scaling again. I've had some pretty good luck with that so far. Uh, and let's go to advanced and then obviously everything at low. We'll confirm that. All right, let's see how this works. So, loading times going to be an issue in Kingdom Come. All right, we are in first impressions. 45 frames per second, low of 30. I think that is totally playable for this game. This game is not so much Twitch reactions uh or, you know, really fast-paced combat. It's very much a a rhythm based combat. Uh so 40s with a low of 30, I think that's that's plenty. Uh, we are using about 65% of the CPU, about 10 gigs of system memory. The GPU is only at 85%. Which tells me we're actually a little bit CPU limited here. Although, no, hold on. We're hitting 60 frames per second. That's why. Okay. Okay. It's just we don't need 100% of the GPU to render this at low. All right. I think that's acceptable. How did I miss? Got him. O. There we go. All right, that's not bad at all. Yeah, we're getting a couple of drops into the 20s, but nothing awful, that's for sure. Like I said, not the absolute best experience, but 50fps, you know, low in the low30s, mid30s, I think that's perfectly acceptable for a game like this. Like I said, this isn't the fastest moving game. You don't need the absolute, you know, best of of latency or lag to to enjoy this one. It's a single player game. I like it. All right. How about we spread a little democracy? Little Hell Divers, too. All right, we'll start out yet again heading into the graphics section. Let's go. Let's try for medium. I feel like uh seeing what medium presets will do. Uh we'll turn motion blur off. Everything else we'll just leave at medium. So, so far we're using about five gigs on the GPU, about eight and a half or nine gigs in system memory. Oh, very nice. 45 frames a second. So, so far pretty consistent about 45 FPS, low approaching 40. So, super consistent frame rate. Occasionally see a ping down to about 25, but uh overall this is nice and smooth. Let's get into some combat and see how we do. RAM utilization sitting right about the same, about 5 gigs on the GPU, 10 gigs on the system. GPU is at 100%, CPU is at 85%. We could definitely use a little bit more CPU horsepower, I think. There we go. I'm going to get my ass kicked. Ah, all right. All right, that didn't take long. Yeah, we stayed pretty consistent that entire time. Mid40s on an average, low 40s for a low, occasionally a drop to 30 or 24. And again, this isn't the best experience in the world, but if this was all we had, let me try the Steam Deck preset. You know, that didn't really improve things all that much. We're getting our average up into the 50s now, but the low is staying about the same. Actually, no. Our our low isn't dropping quite as low anymore. Uh we again we were seeing drops into the 20s. Now they seem to be saying low 40s, high30s. Okay. So, how about a Steam Deck preset for this game? All right. I take it back. The Steam Deck preset, overall, this is pretty fantastic. No real latency spikes, no real uh issues with uh trying to aim. I think any problems that I have in this game is more of a skill issue because I I don't play this one a whole lot. All right, spreading democracy totally possible on a Tesla P4. And you know, I've got to try it. Let's do some crab champions. So, we're at 1080p. We'll go and set our FPS limit to 60. Graphics quality low. Cool. Uh how about a blade launcher? Let's try that. 60 fps, low of 44. Oh, all right. I hit a button combo that kicked me out of Parseek. Amazingly enough, did not die. All right, I'll take that, I guess. All right. Little drops when we're dealing with the uh exploding enemies here. Yeah, you can see all those. I'm going to have to see exactly what frame rate that got down to. I I can't quite pay attention to that crap in this game. Regenerating armor. Heck yes. Okay. And what are we doing here? Some kind of help menu popped up. Oh, I think my mouse is uh I think one of my mouse presets on the track ball is uh causing me issues. All right. So, I will have to overlay on the screen here what uh exactly I'm seeing in this game. Uh, I'll I'll have to look at the FPS counter and we'll do that in post because I can't look at the counter and play the game at the same time. All right, that brings us to the end of our games list for today. Uh, overall, I'm really impressed. Uh, Borderlands 4, that one's a no-go. But every other game that I played, Crab Champions, Hell Diver 2, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered, Wreckfest, all totally playable at pretty decent frame rates at 1080p and either low or medium settings. Most the games sat right around 45 fps and had some pretty respectable lows. That is something I did not expect coming into this, trying some much more modern games than I've tried on the P4 in the past. Remember, this is essentially a four core 8threaded chip. So, something like a an i7 3770 IBridge quad core uh with a 70watt lowprofile enterprise Tesla P4. That's pretty incredible. But I want to try one more thing and that is show you exactly how I would use a system like this. And it's not for using as a primary gaming PC. It is using on something like a handheld or a cell phone. And so if you've got a hundred bucks, you could buy something like this. This is the original Odin. Uh and you can game stream to a device like this. And as we saw with the Tesla P4, that's actually faster than a Steam Deck. So, if you didn't want to spend a whole bunch, you know, $350 on a Steam Deck, which they're completely out of stock of right now anyway, uh pick yourself up some random Android handheld or a cell phone with a game controller and you can create uh a mobile gaming machine for yourself that doesn't occupy your main gaming PC. So, the way we're going to do that is I'm going to go ahead and install Sunshine on this VM. Although you could connect with Parseek as well, but uh going to handhelds, I typically like doing Sunshine. There we go. Okay, so we have Sunshine installed and I've gone ahead and paired my Android device here. Let me switch back over to this main camera. I will do a little bit of HDMI capture off this device so you can see exactly what I'm looking at. But I'm going to go and connect using Steam Big Picture Mode. And what that's going to do is that's going to immediately launch my VM into Steam big picture mode. And now I can use this just like a Steam Deck. I have the same exact interface and I can play my games from the handheld just like this. Let's go and launch Recfest. In fact, I don't know that I need to do HDMI capture because I'm watching the source from Parseek. And just like that, we are in game on my In Odin. And this looks freaking great on a 6 and 12 inch OLED screen. Not only playable, but downright impressive. The latency is pretty much exactly on par with what I'm seeing out of Parseek here. This is such a great experience. And this handheld's only a 60 fps screen anyway. It It doesn't need a massive amount of GPU. Nice. So, yeah, this right here is how I would play uh in a setup like this. Uh, the really cool thing about game streaming is you can get clients for Android or iOS. Use whatever device you have available. And a Tesla P4, they're down to like $65 on eBay right now. So, go snag yourself one. If if you've got a server of any kind and you're running Proxmox, the vGPU script is an automatic install. You can get your GPU up and running. In fact, I've done a full tutorial on that before. I will leave a link to that down in the video description. Put your P4 into a server and start playing games. I am thoroughly impressed here. I did not expect this good of a result, especially upping the modernization of the games that I tested on the P4 since last time. I mean, yeah, it can run GTA 5, but I did not expect to get playable frame rates out of Oblivion, let alone Kingdom Come Deliverance. Those are some pretty heavy hitters. Uh, Hill Divers was a fantastic experience, you know, especially once we did the Steam Deck preset, upwards of 60 frames per second on average with lows in the mid40s. That is just fantastic. And I think that's where we're going to leave it for today. Gaming on the MicroCloud, totally possible. That's a result I didn't expect. And that's what makes experimentation like this so much fun. As always, if you want links on where to find anything, that is the VGPU install script, a full tutorial on how to install it, where to buy parts, where to find a Tesla P4, I will have links, including affiliate links, down in the video description. Make sure to go give those a look. On your way down there, make sure to drop this video a like and subscribe to Craft Computing if you haven't done so already. Thank you all so much for watching, and as always, I will see you in the next video. Cheers, everyone.

Thanks to Meter for sponsoring today's episode. If you're interested in learning more about how Meter can help with your IT Infrastructure, go to https://meter.com/craftcomputing to book a demo today. The Nvidia Tesla P4 is one of the best addons for your homelab. It's a great for video encoding and decoding, and can even be used for gaming through Nvidia GRID. Today, we're running it on my Supermicro X79 Microcloud to see if this 9 year old card still has what it takes to run modern games. But first... What am I drinking??? Coffee. And it's nice and hot thanks to my Insulated Tumbler from https://craftcomputing.store Proxmox vGPU Installation Script: https://github.com/wvthoog/proxmox-vgpu-installer PolloLoco's vGPU Installation Guide: https://gitlab.com/polloloco/vgpu-proxmox Manual vGPU Install Tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTXPMcBqoi8 *Links to items below may be affiliate links for which I may be compensated* The Nvidia Tesla P4 can be found here: https://ebay.us/DLxAEj Check out the Supermicro 5037MR-H8TRF on eBay: https://ebay.us/gA6OCD Supermicro "X99" Node X10SRD-F: https://ebay.us/IlrkDW Supermicro Xeon-D X10SDD-F: https://ebay.us/xC94cD Sliding Rails for Microcloud: https://ebay.us/vLWdHx Intel Xeon E5-2651v2 12-Core (10-Pack): https://ebay.us/e9ydi8 Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 8-Core 4.0GHz: https://ebay.us/CQE67Q Sparkle Intel Arc A310: https://amzn.to/4rn5JzZ Sun F80 Warpdrive 800GB (4x200GB) SSD: https://ebay.us/xZ96ux Supermicro AOC-CTG-L1S 10Gb SFP+ Adapter: https://ebay.us/KzjwcY Dual m.2 SATA PCIe Controller: https://amzn.to/49VG9vY Seagate 8TB Ironwolf Pro SATA HDD: https://amzn.to/3NpiXO0 Follow me on Bluesky @CraftComputing.bsky.social Support me on Patreon and get access to my exclusive Discord server. Chat with myself and the other hosts on Talking Heads all week long. https://www.patreon.com/CraftComputing