So! I come to you guys for a bit of advice. Please bare with my ramble
3 Monitors - 2 27" 1080p (1 of which is 120hz Gaming Asus Monitor) & 3rd- Acer 4k2k 28"
I have a Desktop
i7 4790k
16gb Ram
4 SSD’s in raid 0 (120gb each)
Nvidia 970 FTW
750 corsair PSU
I also have a server
2x INTEL Quad Core XEON E5530 @ 2.4GHZ
64GB Ram
1 SSD
4 7200 RPM HD’s
Optional 6790 laying around.
500watt PSU
With that out the way, I find myself switching between Linux and Windows, reformatting every month, I truly dislike dual booting, I’ve tried doing it a couple of times but find it frustrating and since everything is more convenient on windows I end up sticking with Windows. How is this an issue you may ask? well, since you’ve asked (in my head) I do not want to be on windows, its memory muscle, nothing new to it, every new version is just a prettier face with tweaks (IMO). The game I mostly play right now is Elite Dangerous and is not Linux compatible, which makes me sad ;'(
What should I DO!
a). Should I just stop being a Mitch and dual boot?
b). Should I try my luck with VMWare 11 and give 2gb of vram?
c). should I use my server as a desktop on linux and my PC for gaming on a separate monitor?
d). Will Leap computing Solve this issue in the kind of near future? (I’ve pre-ordered months ago)
Answer I’m leaning towards is C
I do not need much video performance on Linux if I am going to be doing my primary gaming on another machine.
But I pay for electricity and do not want a high bill and server hardware is an electric hog… or is it?
Anyway to reduce to power consumption of a server?
What do you guys Do / Think?
Should I run some test with option C? or should I not bother?
FYI
I am currently located in Jersey City, My mom does not pay for electricity in NYC (Chelsea Area) and has 60/60 fios.
I'd dual boot, but it sounds like you aren't too keen on that idea. I dont like to have too many seperate systems when I can dual boot and solve the issue (unless you want to use windows and linux at the same time). I'd rather use a KVM and a single monitor setup as well if you chose to switch between the 2 systems, but that's just me
Edit: what is your server currently doing? If nothing, then you might want to go with option C just to make use of it
I have a laptop with Linux that I do almost everything on and a desktop running Windows for gaming and the Adobe suite. Works great. I especially like having separate machines for work and play.
I would have the linux server elsewhere and remote into it when ever i needed to use it. another option would be have it be a vm host and have linux virtual to remote into. that way you could quickly create a new vm for experimenting.
My mother does not pay for electricity and has 60/60 fios, I can possibly host the server there, but doing that means windows will have to be my default OS here.
I have almost 10down less that 1 up :( now I'm sad.
Back on topic i been running windows 10 and have a linux vm running in hyperv. It works petty well. You could also do it the other way around with gpu pass though to windows vm.
If linux would be your your host os you could use kvm to pass the gpu to a vm. Otherwise have linux be a vm on windows but you would not have the gpu pass though.
easy way to see what the power usage of a computer would be is to get a uh draw tester, it tells you how many watts the system is pulling from the wall, from there you can maths to the cost per month, per year.
Ah, so I finally got the solution I've been looking for thanks to green, GPU passthrough works as expected, dedicating an entire GPU to the VM following these 2 guides.
if you get stuck, check this one out as it solved all the problems
I say E. quit whining and keep using windows. The only reason you disregard Windows is because it looks the same. Also the memory muscle is BS. So you don't like the tweaks that come with it then stay at Windows 95. Seriously if you want to game then Windows really still is the only platform to go at this time. The entire Windows 10 Kernel and System uses less than 1 GB of memory here. And seriously running 2 machines is nothing. The server will idle decently especially without a fancy card it wouldn't cost you an arm and a leg. I pay around €100 for a 24 disk fileserver that runs 24/7 and I think power is more expensive here than in the US.
Have you ever looked into running either Prox-Mox or Xen on that server? with the specs on that box you probably could run 3-4 virtual machines with any flavor of linux you want. keep your desktop windows and use Putty / VNC to console into Linux. maybe that helps? maybe not? here are the sites if you want more info.