Can my Dell R720 Server Work Well as a Gaming PC?

Hello there and welcome to my video. In today's video, I'll be doing some stuff with my Dell R720 server that it really wasn't ever meant to do; I'll be using it as a desktop computer. I'll try to play games on it, and even do a little bit of video editing.
Music, in order:
Beyond - Patrick Patrikios
The High Line - Causmic
Welcome - Anno Domini Beats
Island Dream - Chris Haugen
Nine Lives - Unicorn Heads
Soul Searching - Causmic
Papov - Young Logos

[@BlackBagData]

I was considering this exact thing for my Dell R720. Thanks for sharing this.

[@ICanDoThatToo2]

Speaking of NUMA, in case you weren't aware, your GPU is connected to *one* of those CPUs. If the game runs on the other CPU, it might slow down a little. I used an R720 as a gaming machine, but set up Windows in a VM under Linux with PCI passthrough. Worked mostly great, though I don't recommend it unless you particularly want that kind of challenge.

[@incandescentwithrage]

13th gen Dell servers, R730, T630 with Xeon v4 CPUs are about the oldest worth buying these days. A lot better performance and efficiency for not much more money.

[@amdintelxsniperx]

honestly the lenovo p520s are the way to go if you just want to game . but as far as servers i agree

[@primeral]

Agreed on the R730, but man are they loud and power hungry!

[@incandescentwithrage]

@@primeral I went T630 to be house-friendly. With the optional high TDP heatsinks it's desktop quiet, although still at ~100w.

[@mamdouh-Tawadros]

Excellent video.

[@dezhocob]

That performance is really not surprising hahahaha! This is like using a canvas as a placemat. It would technically work but you would be insane for doing so!

[@lukedavis436]

I was thinking of gaming on a server when one came in at work its the R720XD version instead, quite a noisy old beast but man you should've seen the sheer joy on my face when i started it up

[@foamyflightmaster9385]

Nice, other content providers say switching off bios vm settings will help give better game performance in some instances

[@RandomBSOD]

This is not completely accurate. Turning off virtualization support does not save CPU cycles that you can utilize towards "gaming" and the claim that it helps is simply because most gamers don't have a need for these settings (placebo effect). And while most servers don't include a "multi threading" on/off switch, many workstations do, and in all instances, turning that "virtualization" switch off will reduce performance greatly (by at least 50% in CPU intensive workloads)

[@brandons9530]

games are not numa aware. i used unraid and split up the cpus some xml config and worked will for how old it is. you could test this by using just 1 cpu.

[@grumpyoldwizard]

Sometimes what appears to be a quick fix turns into a day-swallowing time sink, lol.

[@FlyboyHelosim]

Tell me about it. I recently changed the Wi-Fi card in my laptop and had to reinstall Windows...

[@hitechfl]

I felt that 😂

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Haha, happens way do often, doesn't it? I was going to film this entire video in one day, but it had to take up two days because of the unexpected issues with installing Windows while using the 3050

[@hitechfl]

@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials Yes, indeed..

[@andresbravo2003]

Oh god, I should’ve expected that.

[@Psikeomega]

So I have an r720xd in my basement hosting some of my services and running two virtualized video game servers that my step son and I have been playing with. He's streaming steam and I'm remoting in and playing games directly. There's a reason those r720 computers are the home lab learning server of choice

[@jarsky]

I wouldnt bother with SAS drives if its for home use; just use Consumer SATA SSD's. More cost effective than SAS SSD's, and quieter, cheaper, faster and less power hungry than SAS HDDs. Best thing I ever did on my R710/R720's was to swap out to 860 EVOs at the time. As for the stuttering etc...It's probably to do with Numa. I'd recommend trying to manually set CPU Affinity in Windows for the game you're playing and set it all to CPU0.

[@Nebby_Webby]

Do these R730's have more then one SATA port? idk how SAS works, never used it, is it the same interface?

[@jarsky]

@@Nebby_Webby they have a SAS controller card which supports basic SATA as well. They use the same interface but SAS drives are full duplex. So SAS controllers support SATA but not vice versa. To stop you mixing them up SAS drives have an extra notch between the power and data connectors to stop you plugging it into SATA

[@Nebby_Webby]

@@jarsky that's awesome to know, been thinking about replacing my "servers" with one or two R720's, I can keep my SSD's then. Thanks ^^

[@johnvanwinkle4351]

Nice video on this server. I have 2 I use for home network but no gaming.

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Yeah, I'm hoping to set this guy up as a virtualization practice server soon, I just wanted to have a little fun with it before it finds its home in the rack :)

[@packerfan10]

The only thing I could think of for that CUP issue might be a bios update or a bent pin on the CPU or something.

[@lelandclayton5462]

First problem was running Windows. Second problem was leaving the VM options on in the BIOS/UEFI.

[@Obi1kenobi10]

You can get a drive caddy that replaces the cd drive. I have one in my R620 and R720. I install everything trough USB or a USB CD drive.

[@amdintelxsniperx]

i had a dell t7610 with 2 2697w v2s and it was fine since the single core turbo was pretty high

[@jhonlujan1828]

The consumption of the CPUs seems very low, I have similar Xeon CPUs and in games the consumption is between 130watts and 150watts, check the options and power profiles in the bios and turbo boost

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I didn't check, but I wonder if they were doing something similar during the gaming tests to what they did in DaVinci resolve, that is, not turboing up, that's a good thought you bring up!

[@DanielFSmith]

Check the speed on that SATA CD-ROM link. It may only be 1.5Gbps... and not enough for editing dual raw 4KUHD streams.

[@EinsNameLezz]

Nice video! Thanks for reminding why us why we shouldn't buy X79

[@79huddy]

You can get a xeon to cook on a workstation board with a fsb overclock and some voltage offsets I got a e5 2680 v2 at 3.6 base all cores and 4.3 boost on all cores

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Thanks Eins! And yeah, this platform is probably a little past the point of being worth the money, that's for sure

[@rdsii64]

How loud was your server with the graphics card installed? Because I'm space constrained in my home, my server rack is in the same room as my desk. My R720 is office desktop quiet when its only running one or two services. I'm worried that if I install a graphics card, the fans will ramp up and make it jet engine loud.

[@SlyStarling]

It would be loud if you have these slim chassis servers without a gpu.

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Installing this specific GPU on its own didn't seem to cause the fans to spin any faster at idle, but they definitely spun up more under load, which I guess isn't too surprising. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't anywhere close to silent

[@Ryet9]

look up IPMITOOL and see if that works with ur R720 .. u can manually adjust the fan speed for me.. my R730xd goes NUTS when any NON-Dell card is in there... so.. I either disable the OMG NON-DELL-card detected Logic or manually set fan speed I like the NON-OMG-non-dell-card-not-manually set setting as it will still ramp a bit if CPU gets warm.. but doesn't go complely nuts Just for more clarity... when a non dell card detected for me ramps to 80% fan speed, without that it's a nice-ish manageable 45~50% as it kinda normally would be.. but just a bit warmer due to GPU IPMITOOL saved my hearing!!!!!!!! a bit LOL Edit: pretty sure u need IDRAC for ipmitool, that came as an optional upgrade for the R720s.. if ya don't have.. maybe look at getting one.

[@brucemangy]

It is possible that it could come from the memory being ECC, adding latency ?

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I'm not sure, maybe? I wouldn't think that memory latency would have that massive of an impact, but it sure could be a contributing factor!

[@AKGWolf]

some issues might be cased because the gpu is attached to one cpus pcie lanes and not nececarally the other's. try doing stuff with only one cpu too

[@lucayt6320]

how much it's that server in totally cuz i like it how it perfomance and the way how it's it. like u can play smth with 200 FPS. how much u payed on it?

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I paid about $100 for the server, $40 for the RAM, and $70 for a new motherboard because the old one had some damage on it that was causing the server to misbehave. The GPU was about $200 and the SSD I bought for about $15. Totals to about $425. I probably wouldn't go out and buy something like this for as much money as I paid for it in hindsight, that is if you're looking for gaming, but it could still be an interesting project machine if that's what you're after. If you're looking for something that'll do better in gaming and other workloads, I've actually got a video in the works for something that will be a much better performer! (It'll likely be cheaper, too)

[@lucayt6320]

@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials YOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO THATS CHEAP, OLD AND PERFORMANCED. nah imma buy one and im fr

[@PapaPrime13main]

Try any gaming linux distros just for fun

[@tomaszmilos]

hmm.... When I see that cpu wird bechaviors when you testing that I intrested wats hepend will be if Install proxmox on that server and VM with Windows 10/11 eith passtru GPU to that vm - I maan that tests will be beter when o this test that way?

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Doing a Proxmox VM with Windows would probably be the right way to do this, as Windows is probably not interacting very well with the CPUs on its own. I'll just have to learn it first lol

[@dj_paultuk7052]

Well thats different !. Im a DC engineer in a DC with 1,100 R720's running Linux in a compute cluster. We dont have an issue with performance, but then again we have 26,400 cores 🙂

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I'd bet a part of my issues are Windows just being bad at interfacing with server hardware too, it might work better if I used some Linux like you use!

[@bjornahh87]

u should have added all the drivers for the server, due to powersave and other powersaving functions and installed server version of windows to get as many cores activated as possible there are a lot of tweaking u could still do to gett much better performance.. i use a fujitsu tx200 as my day to day pc with dual 6600xeon works superb...

[@bjornahh87]

btw im doing some raid xperiments on it too. testing out raid0 to 60

[@oscarcharliezulu]

It’s super slow for games but more than you need as a server at home.

[@Bus2000]

This servers perform a lot better using VM software like Proxmox.

[@MainelyElectrons]

Make sure you update the firmware for the server!

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I really should, I'm just scared because I think it's on a version before the iDRAC/LCC merge and I don't want to mess up and brick the board haha. I've already had to replace it once, I don't know if I want to do it again

[@MainelyElectrons]

@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials ohh I can imagine that wasn’t fun. I just used the iso from dells website to build a bootable USB. All firmware upgrades happened without issue and it was definitely worth it. Better to have a bricked server than a thoroughly hacked one IMO :)

[@WillFuI]

During hitman the overlay said the cpus where consuming 39,000 W, I have never seen that glitch before

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Yeah, the MSI Afterburner overlay was not working quite right with the power readouts haha

[@uhohwhy]

gt 1030 LESSGOOOOOOOOOO

[@default1647]

do you turn on all CPUs in msconfig in run ?

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I didn't edit anything like that, I basically just let Windows take the wheel with it. Though, based on task manager readouts and Cinebench performance, it seems like all of the CPUs/cores/threads were working

[@JamesTenniswood]

3d print the caddies!

[@manitoba-op4jx]

yeah, just buy one as a template and print the rest to spec

[@incandescentwithrage]

That would be insane. The official caddies are a mix of metal and plastic with LEDs and a hinged retention/eject mechanism. They're like $5.

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Would fun project for sure! Though, I will probably just buy some caddies and drives, as they can be had super cheap and will be way nicer than anything I could print.

[@luheartswarm4573]

dang 3 minutes to boot is kind of wild tho!

[@Sgt_Church]

That's pretty tame compared to how bad it can get. Unlike desktops, servers boot times are directly linked to how much ram they have installed. And it's counter intuitive. The more ram the longer it takes to boot. 256 will take about 8 min, 512 about 12-15 min. And 1tb it's well over 20 min. Though I do have to note here that you can turn off memory training to speed it up. It's generally a bad idea on ecc to do that if you value your data

[@luheartswarm4573]

@@Sgt_Church im kind of astonished! I had no clue thats how it worked! I guess its kind of mitigated by the fact servers are barelly off and anlot of it can be hot swappable

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

That's cool! I've been thinking of throwing some more RAM into this server before using it to practice virtualization on, it'll be interesting to observe that slowdown firsthand!

[@reinekewf7987]

why a r720? and not a r730? they cost only 300€ to 600€ as base to mid ter model. also dual cpus are sometimes complicated about compatibility and NUMA thread management. therefore i would try a singe cpu 2U height server witch should work better and has similar performance. also in some bios versions having problems with gpus or be more exactly using the video output. that is because the aspeed management controller is technically the main gpu and also can read parallel the frame buffer for ipmi video streaming. so if you use a normal gpu as main gpu you have either the output deactivated and reroute the video stream over the pcie back and in the aspeed ipmi (idrac) or you use the ability to use idrac completely. as i said some bios versions have gpu support deactivated. this means if a gpu is in the pcie it would be ignored and its adress and parameters would not passed to the os, also you cant force or probe this by the os. the r630 and the r730 are basically the same mainboard but the bios is different. on the r730 gpus are allowed as long they dont use the video output as primary or dont have any output at all. for render purpose this is fine yo even can theoretically use up to 64 cpus in a bridge less xfire or sli. so no real time simultaneous single frame rendering rather then parallel multiple frame rendering. on the r630 the bios does not allow gpus at all for two reasons. first is the 35w pcie power limit per slot and second is heat the system is not able to work properly with higher head dissipation in this small form factor, the idrac and the nic would suffer the most from this extra heat. this does not mean there would be no gpu that fits inside with 35w with a pass through cooler. there are cpu that would technically work nit the bios says no. even the r630 and r730 are the same. as i said the r630 is only 1U and the r730 is 2U. both are virtualization server so under normal working condition a gpu is not needed except you use remote desktop for your clients wich is inefficient as hell. normally your clients using the server as a working space but gpu things are done on client side if possible. i have a r630 with e5 2683v4 and 512gb ram this system was used as such server i mentioned and could provide up to 128 clients at once if set up as bare minimum. this means 2 to 4 threads per client and 8gb ram as dynamic shared resources. for normal office things this would be fine and plenty of power. all gpu related things are done at the client side. most of those systems had a tiny 10w apus in it with a small cpu like a intel atom and relative good performing gpu. on this system runs more or less windows or a linux but without a live client part this gets loaded by login. this needs some time, i mean depending on your account settings and data table and connection speed 20sek to 2min. i know many of you would say 128 clients are impossible but i can tell you, you could do more then this but this could bother other members on the same machine 40 to 64 is the sweet spot this would be around 50% to 80% utilization and you still have 1 10gbit uplink free for heavy stuff like external recources, NAS, Internet, downloads and streams. also i would recommend using 8 threads per client shared but socket fixed and 8gb ram fixed address range. this has the best performance. 32 to 50 clients are now optimum. for private propose this does most likely dont matter. i use mine as my server for everything. it is running game servers, tools, services, nas, ai tools like stable diffusion and a llm. my r630 system running on ubuntu 22.04 lts and ideling most of the time around 3% to 5% only the ai tools using the full system power. i dont have a gpu in it so yea it is slower but both of the cpus has a combined fp64 of 23TOPS, fp32 44TOPS, fp16 83TOPS, so yea even only cpu bound i am fast as 9 gtx1660 in fp32 and fp16 and it gets to fp64 the gtx gets even worse because it can handle only 150 GOPS at fp64. yea the whole system uses about 600W at full power but still more efficient as 9 gtx 1660. in order to get use of the full power for ai workload i use 6 sas 12gbit 512gb SSD drives in raid10 and 2 sata hdd with 5tb als long therm storage in raid 1. my system is able to feed the system with 6gb/s to 7gb/s. i know a nvme would be smarter but cooling those is the problem if placed in a pcie carrier. there is no space for a cooler and buying a proper x8 or x16 a pcie3.0 nvme card is way to expensive with a price tag of 600€ and above for only 256gb. also i use cheap used sas ssd they kost me only 30€ for 512gb yea they might be dead quickly but i dont be worried about that sins i use raid 10 and i have bought 20 and only using 6 of them. my system runs now for 1,5 years and no drive fail sins.

[@NdxtremePro]

Fun fact, you might have been able to use the iDrac to install Windows even with the on board graphics disabled.

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I should totally figure out how to do that, that sounds super cool!

[@NdxtremePro]

@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials And super useful for cases like this and managing the server from another computer. It lets you mount iso files over the network, and other nifty tools as well.

[@adinnugroho6544]

I did notice some Tearing when Gaming 😅

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Yeah, there was quite a bit of tearing on the monitor I was playing on. Probably due to the super low and inconsistent framerates

[@h.i.t.m.a.n_47_911]

if i had that server i'll use it for hashing and cracking

[@incandescentwithrage]

A single socket AM4 system would be faster without all the heat and noise.

[@TNTUP]

11:43 it sounds like the card is struggling at 63kW 🤣🤣🤣 Oopsie!

[@liblevi45s53]

Yeah, single core performance isn't their strong point. We had two E5-2680v2s but switched them to the E5-2667v2s because the single threaded performance wasn't as good. The 2667s have the best single core performance of that generation. Best multi-core is the 2699.

[@toto99303]

Your SP SSD is the worst possible, I had the same one and it has very bad controller and low r/w speeds. That's why you have slowdowns when editing. Try nVME on the PCIE slots and you will be amazed.

[@frostsmaker8966]

For gaming and video editing, you need a High Ghz processor. Maybe a 6 Ghz processor and Graphic card with bigger and faster vram such as GDDR6 or GDDR7 24GB vram or maybe 128 GB vram in the future. LOLs. The server is designed for servers, to be able to answer the request for maybe hundreds of thousands of rows/ seconds from a database or for redundancy to make sure your database is secure. Servers are good for database servers, or for NAS servers to store your data. For AI servers, you need GPU servers. GPU servers are not mining rigs, it is designed for deep learning or AI. Mining rigs also have many GPUs on them but they use slow USB raiser for crypto processing data transfer. GPU servers are the most expensive of all. Can you run the game and video editing on GPU servers? absolutely. Can you crack the password with it? absolutely. Can it burn my electric bills? absolutely. :)

[@bentheguru4986]

Hey bud, simple way to understand these is look at the R series workstations. The almighty R5400 and R5500 rigs for old school. R7910 is basically a R730 and I run a small fleet of them as servers and my daily driver. Use the workstation drivers for easy setup. Yes, can swap CPU's, BIOS and generations of CPU's can be touchy. Boot times, nope, thats your storage badly configured and I bet you were in IDE mode rather than AHCI. Windows desktop does not handle multi-P (P= Processor socket) systems and can scale badly. Running server editions does run better and has less bloat as well.

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

Thanks for the tips! As for boot times, it really didn't seem like it was much to do with the storage, the server just takes forever to configure its memory and iDRAC, then load some things, and initialize firmware interfaces and such. Once it gets to the point where it's pulling from the SSD, it seems to go pretty fast, though there is still a chance that the SATA drive isn't in AHCI mode as you mentioned.

[@bentheguru4986]

@@CompHwTipsAndTutorials You can turn some of that off but the magic comes from having the "Precision" BIOS on them that rips through it and boots pretty quick. Then again, mines my daily driver and stays running 24/7.

[@thesmokecriminal5395]

The results are quite bad tbh and it's so weird cuz when ppl put such xeons in Chinese mobos and pair them with similar or even better cards they get way better results...

[@SlyStarling]

ECC memory could be a possibility and or Chinese manufacturers using better xeons

[@CompHwTipsAndTutorials]

I think it's likely to be more of an issue with Windows 10 not interfacing very well with the hardware of the server, because I was also expecting better performance based on what other people have achieved with similar Xeons in different boards.

[@thesmokecriminal5395]

@@SlyStarling his xeons are literally top of the line

[@demorez5]

you know you don't need to connect a monitor or keyboard to the server to install windows, right? also, the fact that you are gaming on the server apparently directly (e.g. with a monitor and keyboard connected) makes this video kinda pointless

[@rbn-190]

He could have used iDRA, yes. But you try to sound smart and are wrong.

[@glubrix]

In my opinion you just wasted your time, just look at the CPU specs to understand that it would have been poor, especially in games