Can You Use a Server as a Workstation?

all right so here in front of me I have a Dell poweredge r720xd server and we're gonna see if you could use this server as a workstation so this is going to be quite an interesting video I have no idea what is to come because I just hooked it up and I hooked up drives that have a normal old copy of Windows on it and the definition that I'm giving of workstation is we are going to try to use this for general purpose Computing instead of what it's meant to be used as which is a server so I'm gonna boot this thing up and let's hope it actually boots up seems to be High so when we are in a copy of Windows or maybe this thing won't even boot at all I have no idea like I said I wanted to come of this uh so let's just see what happens [Music] so we are at the login window just turn the bar a little bit so it's easier for me to use the shade that's the right password I actually have no idea what the password for this account is okay so now that I have logged this in we are on a completely unactivated copy of Windows that basically doesn't have anything on it um and uh just set up stock I think I changed with the wallpaper that's about it and we can see I've got a little bit of uh stuff on here now the thing that I want to try to do first is do I don't know some web browsing and just see this works so we can load the OBS website just fine so you know web browsing seems to work just from what I just tested uh we can try launching OBS now the thing that you'll notice is that I'm working off a 4x3 1280 by 1024 Monitor and we are going to try to rectify that here in a minute but we can see that OBS is working just fine we can go at 60 frames per second see what happens when we start recording yep we are still getting 60 frames per second and so for task manager and see oh we're dropping a few frames there um here are all 32 threads of the CPU and all 16 gigabytes of RAM which we are utilizing very well we're only using it 30 percent but the CPU usage is very decent so we are not using a ton of resources here so that is good I mean I'm noticing chopiness around the OS but that's just because we have like eight megabytes of vram or whatever so that's great we could use this as uh just sort of a general purpose computer as we can see web browsing works just by OBS sort of works uh with the exception of the few drop points that we were experiencing at the beginning when we started recording now you'll notice that the fans are also pretty loud and I installed this little fan controller it does not work because uh servers do not control fans on the hardware they are controlled over ipmi and so we would have to figure out how to get ipmi to work on the server which I have not been successful with for whatever reason but that's a whole different video about how that doesn't work but we would have to get ipmi to work first before we were actually able to control these fans but from what I understand there are commands that you can run in the IP minor phase to control the fan speed great if we try to go to configure we can see that all of these things are controlled we have ipmi uh and the fans are all controlled with ipmi there is no way we can set a value for the fan we can double click it doesn't so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab my cinema display and we are going to hook up a video card and see if we can rectify the 4x3 resolution problem here so I've got the cinema display all plugged in and everything well except for plugging the server obviously but we are going to install this video card here this is a R7 250 video card which should work not certain obviously because I have never tried this so there are see how do you remove the Riser card from this oh actually never mind it's not a riser card I'm used to my HP proliant okay so this can just pop into one of many x16 slots and we do have pcie power we are able to power a six-pin graphics card instead looks good so I'm gonna hook up uh everything else and see what happens I get a everything connected so let's just see I have not heard the r sub 250 spin up because like it's pretty loud I can usually hear it when I turn on a system oh okay well well that alone is gonna make it hard to use this uh let's see if the fans keep being this loud because if they do then I think that alone is going to make this project unsuccessful so we'll just see what happens so we are booting into a copy of windows but there as you can see is still no video on the ah [Music] do I seriously have to reboot this again I guess I'll be waiting another 10 minutes for this thing to post because it does take a long time so uh I don't know okay if this shuts off again I'm honestly giving it up because I don't have time for this thing to just reboot over and over again but see the fans are still loud so uh I think that alone is pretty much a deal breaker but let's just see what happens because this is still booted so let's wait for this to boot and what do you do oh wait oh it's not stuck oh it's stuck okay ah there's whoa okay the light on the cinema display went off so I think there's gonna be video but this is like actually ears floating noise deal with so let me just wait for this thing to get to the login window so this is an interesting message updating your system I guess that's doing system updates but it doesn't look like the normal Windows updates so I don't know nothing to worry about just something interesting I found as I've been waiting yay so we actually have uh video on the cinema display I guess the only bad thing is it has to reboot yet again uh but at this point uh at least there's video on the cinema display so I'm just gonna see what happens here uh seems like the fans are calming down but I think they'll probably ramp back up when it boots into the OS just because that's how servers work you stick in a video card and they ramp up I was kind of expecting that was gonna happen on this system in a dip so uh there we go let's just wait for this thing to boot up again oh and by the way just something that I've noticed and this is actually a perfect time because it's about to move into Windows um but one thing that I noticed just off camera was the fact that you have to have the monitor connected to the integrated Port because if you don't uh there is no video with a video card so that's sort of interesting I don't know why that is um but just something interesting that I found so let's just see uh there should be video once this thing boots um and it looks like it's just about to do that or maybe there's one more round of updates I'm not quite sure [Music] Yep looks like we've got another round of updates here I this is the thing that's so annoying about Windows update is the fact that it just updates without even asking you Mac OS will at least ask you if you want to update that is just so annoying and one of the reasons why I don't use a PC as my main computer automated reasons but yep foreign [Music] ERS let's just go to task manager and at least it made the second monitor the cinemas play by main monitor for me that's kind of nice to be totally honest I didn't have to do that myself uh yeah very low GPU usage very low CPU usage so it's working great except for the fans if there was a way to calm those down to idle that would be really nice but I cannot for the life of me get the idrac to work on this server but again I might just have to do a whole video about that because um that is a complicated problem but uh yeah we can see that we are getting the full 1680 by 1050 resolution and I don't even think we have GPU drivers or maybe we do I don't know oh yeah we do have GPU drivers of what it's like um I don't know if they will open because in my experience GPU drivers almost never open oh yeah like I thought it was gonna happen anyway whatever and it looks like those are even Radeon pro drivers I don't know what this Drive used to be in but apparently it was a system with a Radeon Pro card I I don't remember to be totally honest um maybe that was before I put my w5500 in my Mac Pro I would assume that's what that was about uh but there we have it so I guess a sort of final verdict like can you use this as a workstation I guess you could I mean you could use anything as a workstation to be totally honest um but the uh the fan is obviously a deal breaker for me there's no way I could use it with the fan this loud now the other thing is if you want me to like test stuff on here I can do that uh and maybe even make a whole video about testing stuff but this video is mainly just to see if it is possible to use a server's workstation so if there's anything that you want me to test on here like uh DaVinci Resolve or or like virtualization like with uh virtualbox or VMware or workstation or anything like that just put that down in the comments and and I might do that so so anyway that's it for tonight and uh if you have any questions comments Etc please feel free to ask down below so thanks for watching have a good night

Channel: The Network Mystery

Views: 12,651

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Id: lhcTxMKaoeg

Length: 14min 16sec (856 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023