Thinish clinets for gaming

Message

marshall_j · Post by **marshall_j** » Thu May 01, 2003 3:59 am

Hi hi,

Has anybody ever tried creating a diskless client that works with gaming?
I really like the idea of getting rid of the noisy HDDs and a new super quiet PSU + Zalman CPU cooler.
Then have all my stuff stored on some server which I know is all possible except for the performance of games. I figure if I got a total of 1 Gig RAM then I would probably have enough to load most games to memory but they would still need to access data on the server I guess. This is easy through NFS of whatever but what would the performance be like?
Currently I'm talking 100Mbit speeds but what if I went to 1Gbit speeds? Anyone have any idea at all?

Seoushi · Post by **Seoushi** » Thu May 01, 2003 4:15 am

I dunno what you mean by noise hard drives. Mine is darn queit unless I stress it decently hard, extracting tarballs etc, then it isn't that loud. On the other hand my cdrom is loud, probley because its a sony (heard they are one of the loudest). There is also ut2k3 live cd which is just a boot cdrom for the game, works great with nvidia cards. loading stuff over the network for gaming would be slow I think especially if it was a group of people, I'm on 100mb also, gigabit would just be to expensive to be worth it I think.

marshall_j · Post by **marshall_j** » Thu May 01, 2003 9:21 pm

Noisy as in the whine from it when it's spinning. I'm a silence buff.
Really was just thinking of it as a fun project than a serious thing. Think clients for gaming would be cool if you could get around the load times.

hook · Post by **hook** » Thu May 01, 2003 9:29 pm

a friend of mine solved the problem with stuffing sound-isolating materials in the inner side of the box - he says it's a bit warmer in there, but he hasn't had a problem with that at all

djprotoss · Post by **djprotoss** » Sat May 03, 2003 3:56 pm

Aye acoustic padding is the way to go. You can get a practically silent HD by buying one of the quiet ones and you can get (i forget from where, possibly acasa) what is effectively a 5.25 mount for a 3.5 drive that surrounds it with foam padding - it really cuts out the high frequencys, (read whines) but temp goes through the roof.

Failing that, if you are running Linux (duh) and don't mind the load times, what is to stop you having a bit more ram and having something like /opt as a ramdisk? then you copy the game over at the start and run it entirely from ram. This does mean big load times (unless you can fit it onto a boot cd (dvd?) and have that copy it into ram), but it would be much cheaper than gigabit ethernet.

Don't go for Zalmans though - yes they are quiet, but they generate a lot of heat and there are quieter, cooler fans out there. stop by places like tomshardware and anandtech and look at the comparisons, then head somewhere like overclockers.co.uk (if you are a brit) for the parts (I like oc as they sell the h/s seperate from the fans). I suggest one of the ones that bolts on to the m/b - you have to check compatability, but since they don't have to worry so much about the weight of the H/S, they can have a much bigger block = you can use a slower fan.

Just my thoughts (and no, I can't hear the noise of my PC

)[/i]

koala · Post by **koala** » Sun May 04, 2003 3:10 pm

It might sound stupid, but have you thought about long cables? :-b

Matje · Post by **Matje** » Mon May 05, 2003 11:17 am

I actually use thin clients as gameservers for lanparty's, and that works great, don't know why this wouldn't work. 100 Mb is more than enough by the way. I can start three ut2k3 servers simultaneously without noticing any slowdown and they all boot from one server. Server has a RAID btw.