I have a gaming PC (i7-6700K/32GB Ram) and server for CPU-intensive computations (perfectly parallelized since each thread does its own thing and results from many trials are compared) as well as personal entertainment (plex, nas, pfsense, minecraft servers, websites, SQL databases, in total 10 openVZ containers and 3 VMs).
I broke the gaming PC trying to install a M.2 extension card. While I’m trying to fix that, I put the disk and GPU into the server, and setup a VM with PCIe passthrough to keep using that as my desktop.
So, everything runs pretty well, except some games (RuneScape) doesn’t play at 60fps like it used to (and runs up super high utilization on a single CPU core) and 4k video at 60fps stutters once every few seconds (the GTX980 apparantly does not have a VP09 codec and either I think does the Xeon).
Since this is actually a smoothish experience (discord is the only app that laggs like crazy) I thought I might as well downsize and use the server as my main computer. I never shut down either of those computers and this will save me some modicum amount of electricity and centralizing things is always nice.
To fix the 4k60fps stuttering and make some single threaded games run smoother, I wanted to upgrade by installing a pair of E5-2667V2 for $350. I was wondering if this is a good choice or if I should save up (on top of selling my old gaming rig once its fixed) since 1st gen Ryzen is getting cheap and is still modern (it feels kinda wrong spending $350 on old CPUs when newer CPUs like the 1950X are around the same price and does relatively similar in passmark), or wait a year and upgrade to a Xeon scalable platform (with dual golds or something cheap). My sort of only concern with this is that it’ll require a new motherboard and DDR4 is getting expensive.
Anyways I just wanted to ask if it’s a good idea before committing to it.
NXT client is fucking horrible for this and with the engine team all taken for mobile and the summer updates its been like this for at least 4 years now.
also make sure your drivers are up to date cause that’s a big bottle neck on performance of rs
im not much for pass through but runescape is not a benchmark of optimized software at all its gonna hate everything you put it on
Well the server could always be “faster”. The scientific computing tasks pretty much scale linearly with processor speed, and I use plex to transcode live TV broadcasts into smaller h264 files, so that could also use a boost. It was 2 years since I put it together, so due for an upgrade anyways.
I was also just thinking to myself, why do I need 2 computers and couldn’t think of a reason really. So might as well save some money and electricity by selling one (since I leave both on 24/7) and using the money from that sale to upgrade the other (better CPU and GPU). I just don’t want to make the wrong decision on buying old CPUs vs new ones I guess.
The gaming PC only had a m.2 2260 slot, I bought a m.2 2242 to 2280 adapter on Ali Express and after installing just the adapter it wouldn’t POST. Tried removing it, still wouldn’t POST. I think what happened was that since the m.2 slot was on the back of the board it wasn’t very tall “off the board” and the adapter had metal parts (screws, screw holes that didn’t have screws in them but was for some reason still exposed copper), so it might have bridged a couple connections on the board. So the board is probably busted and I can’t visibly see any damage but I can go and see under a microscope if there’s any damage I can try and fix, if not I’ll borrow a friend’s Z170 board. Then assess from there if anything else is busted.
Yeah my drivers are all up to date. All I know is that it used to be at 60 (with frame limiter), now its at 30 with the same GPU, and CPU utilization on 1 core is at 100% whenever it’s running. It seems pretty clear that’s a bottleneck.
In that case, I’ll just take my work laptop home or use the Surface Pro 3 tablet I have… I might have too many computers… TBH I’d be more annoyed if that happens since I’d have to wait for Amazon glacier to spin up a 4 hour backup.
Yeah, I should really have turned the gaming PC off at night but I just never bothered and I feel better about not turning off a VM than an actual computer.
