Quadro Question

ThomWom · July 10, 2019

So this will require some exposition:

I'm heading off to college as an engineering student. As such, I'll require some computing power to handle CAD, and otherwise I'm still going to want to play some games. However, I have an ultrabook. The plot thickens. I hatched a master plan, of which is mostly completed save for this final factor. My plan was simple: take some money I earned the summer before and buy some old server equipment off eBay. When I needed to do some rendering work, I could remote connect via RDP, work on my project on the server from wherever I would be, and then export it to my PC.

I ended up with two x5650's, 32 GB of your basic DDR3 ECC ram (it's all cheap as hell because it's antiquated and used), my last GPU (1060 6GB) and about 8TB of storage (2TB questionable used Hitachi drive and an expensive Seagate 6TB, as well as an old samsung SSD boot and a very questionable intel SSD that I have yet to use).

My point is I have loved putting all this together; I used it in conjunction with ~~an old~~ a VERY old gigabit switch that I literally found at the side of the road. I mounted it in a Rosewill Chassis and put it on some very questionable racks bought for cheap off eBay. It runs windows server 2016 (license from, you guessed it, eBay) and I've been enjoying the hell outta tinkering with VM's and VPN's and other things.

However, a problem has become apparent.

Those of you who have experience with RPD may already have known what has only recently come to light for me. At some point in the past, Microsoft made the decision to only allow Quadro GPU's to make use of OpenGL over an RDP connection. Therefore, if I would like to play any games or do any CAD come this fall, a GeForce card (such as mine) is nearly pointless. As you can imagine I was quite disappointed.

Exposition aside, now for my question:

If I were to purchase a Quadro, my two choices would be a P2000 or a P4000. The obvious problem there is that I will certainly be bottle-necked by the CPU in games, and in cad as well. My question is to what degree? More specifically, would the extent of the bottle necking be so severe as to make any greater performance from the P4000 over the P2000 mute? I can't afford to upgrade the CPU's nor the RAM, so this really comes down to whether or not it would be worth it to spend extra money on the P4000.

Thanks a bunch LTT community!

Electronics Wizardy · July 10, 2019

The better solution might be to not use rdp, look at other protocols like vnc here and they should work better for graphics heavy use. But you want a very good network connection for this, its gonna be bad over most wan connections.

I used quadros a good amount and still can't get most games to work on rdp, but programs like maya and autocad work fine.

ThomWom · July 10, 2019

3 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

The better solution might be to not use rdp, look at other protocols like vnc here and they should work better for graphics heavy use. But you want a very good network connection for this, its gonna be bad over most wan connections.

I used quadros a good amount and still can't get most games to work on rdp, but programs like maya and autocad work fine.

I originally started this project with a Quadro 6000 from eBay (sold as broken but was actually fine) and just about every game I tried, while admittedly few, seemed to work okay. Thanks for letting me know that I might not be outta the woods with a quadro though; that's worth knowing.

As far as network connection is concerned, there's usually a usable ethernet port in lecture halls and classrooms at the university, and the wifi is also satisfactory. The reason that I am hesitant to try to use any other remote connection protocols is because I am far more confident with the built in solution from ms than with any other open-source program, and I can't afford to pay monthly premiums on another solution