Gaming On An Old Tesla GPU: 980ti Performance for $100?!

literally anything that does graphics computation can get you to where you can play a game now i might be holding in my hand an athlon processor with radian vega graphics and you might be thinking is this another video from yet another youtuber that's like look just play the apu the integrated graphics is totally okay you can run with that the answer is no no we're going we're going to hack windows and we're going to make things happen that are not supposed to happen we're going to reveal things that are not supposed to be revealed or at least that you're not supposed to be reminded of let's take a look there's basically three different cpus from amd that have integrated graphics this is the lowest end this is about a 35 dollar processor at micro center 50 msrp it's the athlon 3000g this is a dual core with vega graphics and sort of the weakest of weak sauce vega graphics it's an am4 cpu that'll work in a lot of different motherboards but not every motherboard you got you got to also have bios compatibility as well and because it's so low end you don't see a lot of bio support on higher end motherboards for the lower end apus i mean it's just kind of a fact of life but i mention it because it's duke two cores and built in vega graphics now i wouldn't ask you to play games on the built-in vega graphics we're gonna get to that uh middle of the road is something like the ryzen 5 3400g it's four cores has built-in graphics a higher end something like the 4750g we reviewed the 4750g and the asrock desk mini x300 a little while ago that is a very capable very powerful machine it doesn't have any pci express expandability in terms of adding another gpu so you'll have to be happy with whatever the the apu the integrated graphics can provide for you you may be looking at an intel based system with its igpu and the 11th gen igpu it's a pretty good upgrade over the 10th gen igpu but again you know it's still that igpu territory it's not quite as good as discrete graphics most of the time when you use hardware in ways that it wasn't intended there's no software support and you honestly will have a better experience something like linux rather than windows but the dirty little secret is the software support for the hackery that we're about to do it's already built into windows it's just for laptops like this surface book it's got you know built-in graphics and it's all in the screen the processors in the screen a weak sauce batteries in the screen memory literally everything pretty much for this entire computer is in the screen i can hit a button i can separate the keyboard from the screen but there's a gpu in the keyboard an nvidia gpu a pretty decent one and more battery because there was just not enough battery up here it's just it's it's anemic it's not it's not great so this link here it's a pci express by four link don't let microsoft call it anything else that connects the cpu to the gpu and a lot of laptops have this kind of setup usually not pc express by four but usually there's some kind of a connection to a discrete piece of graphics in a laptop so that you get better performance as a result of that windows really handles that situation well and the secret is that the built-in gpu in this case our intel cpu or or you know our other laptop that display is hardwired to the output of the built-in graphics of the cpu it's not hardwired to the gpu that's not really exactly how they do it i mean sometimes it can be a shared bus and we're getting into the weeds here a little bit but by and large the cpu is the thing that's connected to the display so how do you get information from the graphics card the discrete graphics are the add-in and video graphics card and a laptop how do you get that you know the output of that if it's not physically connected to the display and the answer is that the memory copy happens over the bus there's a little bit of a mechanism there in the system that will copy frame by frame as they're rendered from the gpu to the built-in gpu and in windows there's a menu option you can actually say which gpu is your powerful gpu and which gpu is your weak sauce gpu now nvidia almost left the genie out of the bottle with this uh about a year ago a year and a half ago give or take because you could actually have multiple discrete gpus you have like three gpus in a system and windows 10 would let you sort of pick which one went where and so you could sort of use gpus in kind of an off label kind of a way you could get a cheap quadro graphics card add that to your windows system and then all of a sudden your geforce card is acting like a really expensive quadro and that's the secret that that companies are very nervous about reminding you the consumer or you the person that's interested in the product about and that is there's really only a small number of spins of the silicon there's little knobs and tunables that have been turned but when a graphics card company goes to make a gpu there's really not a lot of variations of that silicon sure some things might be fused off some things might be turned off some things might be moved around but the really expensive ai gpu usually is not a lot different than the you know cad and workstation gpu is not a lot different than the the gamer gpu and that's what it's taken me so long to get to the tesla k40 here that is a sub 100 graphics card on ebay can be used like it's a built-in gpu on a laptop and it's really not a big deal to set that up there's a couple registry entries that you have to set and you know things like boost clocks don't work exactly the same way fortunately one of our level one community members gigabuster.exe which is you know sort of a fun name in and of itself has figured out how to manipulate the registry so that you can use your tesla you know uh ai machine learning data center card as a gaming card because at the end of the day it's the same silicon kepler in this particular case but also the maxwell variants of this those are a little more than a hundred dollars the kepler version of this performs about like you know a 980 ti but we've got 12 gigs of vram because this was an enterprise grade card so if you want to do this there's a full write-up and guide on the level 1 forum but basically it's just a little bit of registry changes you'll also have to use nvidia smi from the command line the reason for that is the gpu out of the box will only run about 745 megahertz you want a faster clock than that for better performance generally the enterprise the data center parts those run at lower clocks because they're running 24 7 and they need to be 24 7 stable gaming gpus are anything but 24 7 stable so you'll need to run nvidia smi and find sort of the sweet spot for your card well we've had a couple of more days and a couple of more gpus to test that came in from ebay i'm happy to report the maxwell-based teslas also work really well in fact even better than kepler because well they're newer so with maxwell you don't really have to fool with the nvidia smi everything's great there but it's not all roses not every game actually works perfectly correctly we found that dirt 5 for example was a little problematic and buggy when we're doing this but we also tried it on a laptop and a laptop with multiple gpus is also a little problematic and buggy so they'll probably get fixed in the game especially if you're trying to play dirt 5 on a laptop but most games actually work really well also phys x now physics is kind of important especially if you're playing like batman arkham knight especially on a lower end machine having that calculation happen on the gpu i mean this this game is basically built to show off physx well you can do this standalone physx installer because you got to do you know the tesla drivers from the nvidia website so they don't really include that exactly but if you do the standalone driver you can actually pick the tesla gpu so you can install those separately install them first then you install the other drivers and hey you can use the same gpu for both physx and the rest of the game and it works so this is not a solution without caveats but if you can get your hands on some cheap tesla cards this might be an option during this uh great gpu drought of the 21st century the other consideration is cooling physically these cards are designed for servers which have active cooling you might remember from the tesla v100s which are still thousands of dollars on ebay that i 3d printed some adapters so that i could use those in a desktop case now in a server case a server chassis there's no problem there's baffles there's little bits of plastic you guys might remember from the gigabyte chassis they have little pieces of plastic to help direct airflow through the gpus and those gpus even though they're 250 watts 240 watts 260 watts depending on how you got the tdp configured they don't have a fan and it's not because they're you know super efficient and they're not generating a lot of heat they're doing a lot of work that's not how the laws of thermodynamics actually works at all yeah all of it is going to heat every bit of it every bit of it is going to heat not even a little bit that's not it's all going to heat it's all going to heat so the situation here is that you need air flow you need to dissipate that heat through air flow and servers that's usually a lot of fans at the mid plane not every device has its own fan but in a desktop chassis you're going to need some stuff so fortunately there's 3d printable adapters you can convert a desktop fan or a blower style fan in order to cool this and if you don't cool it it's going to overheat and not run correctly so this is not a solution for the faint of heart i mean using a tesla gpu for gaming not generally recommended but this is level one this is how we do things around here at the end of the day this is basically the same silicon that you find in the gamer gpu once upon a time somebody paid thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars for this class of gpu now it's basically e-waste and we're gonna game on it and you might be thinking wait a minute aren't companies making mining grade cards playing nvidia certainly making mining grade cards how are they any different than this and the answer would be they're not really not a lot of difference practically no difference in fact these gpus don't have a physical output just like a laptop gpu and the driver software and all of the the plumbing necessary to get the game rendered on one gpu and then transported to the other gpu to display it's already there in windows we don't have to do a thing i get not supporting it officially but at least don't make it more difficult than it needs to be companies especially during the shortage right now because hey if you can get 980 tr level performance for about a hundred dollars why not check out gigabuster's how-to this has been a lot of fun to work on you know check out this system it's really a lot of fun you got to be careful a little bit though because i mentioned 12 gigs of vram a lot of these enterprise-grade gpus that have a lot of vram will not boot correctly on older platforms now the platform we're using here to be sure it's b350 with the uh well we did some testing with the 3400g and the athlon 3000g but also the 4750g i mean eight cores with a 980 ti that's a pretty solid gaming experience but sometimes when you add these gpus to older machines it won't even boot and the reason for that is because the bios architects at the time never figured that there would be 12 gigs of vram in one of these older machines and so there's not really enough pcie rom bar space that kind of thing if you're going to set this up there's also some best practices that you'll need to follow you know you'll want to turn on above 4g decoding you will want to uh you know turn off csm you want to try to make your system as uefi compatible as possible so that you've got you know sort of the newest platform that's a little bit more on the windows side than the hardware side just to get windows to do what it's supposed to do there's some bio settings you'll need to change all that's detailed in the how-to this is not something that everybody can do with every single piece of hardware you know we tried it on older systems like z77 z87 and it really it wasn't pretty even x99 was not universally well supported it might work on one x 99 board but not another x 99 board x 299 should be okay um you know b 350 you know first generation those should be okay i think older systems like the you know 8350 probably not okay you're you know your mileage may vary so yeah 12 gigs of vram for 100 bucks and reasonable gaming performance um yeah not bad pretty well done thanks again buster i'm well this is level one you can find us in the level one forums i'll see you there [Music] you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 121,470

Rating: 4.929626 out of 5

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: AYDnGeqvwAA

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Thu May 13 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/capn_hector]

Nope. K40 is more or less the same silicon that's in a 780 Ti, 980 Ti is significantly faster and you're not catching that.

(technically it's a newer revision but it's still Kepler and performance doesn't drastically change to the extent that you'd need to catch the 980 Ti, 980 Ti is much faster, like 1.5-1.75x as fast)

[u/Achmedius69]

Where would u be able to get these for 100$? Used, eBay or AliExpress?