Steam Server - thoughts

[Bluecube]

I currently have a Xeon powered home build server which runs a fairly standard bunch of apps - Plex, Sonarr, etc. nothing too taxing. Currently it's a headless unit. I have a couple of PCs and a laptop or two in the house, one of said PCs is a SteamBox. I was thinking of replacing the graphics card in the SteamBox when it occurred to me that I could put a powerful graphics card in the server and replace the SteamBox with something like a low powered NUC and stream Steam games from the server. This would, of course, also be applicable to all the other machines o have in the house. It sounds straightforward. Too straightforward.... Has anyone done something like this before? And am I missing anything obvious?

PS I'm aware the stream quality depends on the network. I'm ok with that...

[Bagnaj97]

It is that straighforward! The catch is that there are a few games that don't work well with streaming - most recently I've had trouble with Child of Light and horrible input latency. The framerate and stream latency were fine, other games are fine, it was just something to do with Child of Light. Results can also be mixed if you try streaming non-steam games.

You can always test it, streaming from your current SteamBox to another pc in the house?

[Bluecube]

I've tried Borderlands 2 a few times and it works fine. Will test a few more games just to see!

By non Steam games, you mean games not bought through Steam? What about those bought elsewhere but are played via Steam by a shortcut on the Steam app?

[Lee H]

If you have a fairly recent Nvidia card in the PC why not look at using the limelight application thats available for streaming games as well.

Tried it with a nexus 10 32 GB and borderlands 2 and it worked well and they've just updated their website as well as changing their name ;

http://moonlight-stream.com/

[KeyboardDemon]

This thread is giving me ideas. Someone hide my wallet quick!

[shaithis]

Oh, that moonlight looks good, just a shame it appears to need GFE installed. Their main page made it sound like they were providing client and server functionality.

I really do not like GFE!

[Bagnaj97]

What about those bought elsewhere but are played via Steam by a shortcut on the Steam app?

That's what I'm on about - you can stream games (or other programs) added to the Steam library that way, but I've had mixed success. Blizzard titles have been fine, Minecraft was hit and miss (I can't remember the specifics but I think I had to run it windowed for it to work), Dolphin (GC/Wii Emulator) just crashed when I tried it but is widely reported to work.

[scaryjim]

This thread is giving me ideas. Someone hide my wallet quick!

Dual s771 board, two L-series Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, around £100 for an 8-core, 8gig server with very reasonable power draw characteristics (the L-series Xeons are ~50W tdp....)....?

Get the right board and you should end up with an x16 PCIe 2 slot (at worse at x8 slot). Sounds like preparation for mantle/DX12 to me...

[Bluecube]

Dual s771 board, two L-series Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, around £100 for an 8-core, 8gig server with very reasonable power draw characteristics (the L-series Xeons are ~50W tdp....)....?

Get the right board and you should end up with an x16 PCIe 2 slot (at worse at x8 slot). Sounds like preparation for mantle/DX12 to me...

You'd really go socket 771? I've always looked at 1366 as my age limit.

[Bluecube]

Excuse the multi post... I'm going to be trying Street Fighter IV. If a game like this can be handled well then I'm going to start planning...

[KeyboardDemon]

Dual s771 board, two L-series Xeon processors, 8GB of RAM, around £100 for an 8-core, 8gig server with very reasonable power draw characteristics (the L-series Xeons are ~50W tdp....)....?

Get the right board and you should end up with an x16 PCIe 2 slot (at worse at x8 slot). Sounds like preparation for mantle/DX12 to me...

Ahhh... but where would I put it?

I think my crazy moment has passed and I need to think about my current PC which might have recovered from some annoying issues, so I might not need to look at replacements just yet.. Fingers crossed.

[Bluecube]

I'm having second thoughts myself. Might fillet the SteamBox, pop everything in the Node 804 I won a few weeks ago, slap in a SATA card, five hard drives, and go... Only difference between the big server box would be moving from a Xeon to an i5. Doubt I'd notice any difference.

[scaryjim]

You'd really go socket 771? I've always looked at 1366 as my age limit.

Depends on budget, surely? That £100 includes a pair of 2.5GHz quad core Xeons with 12GBMB of cache, as well as 8GB of RAM. That's a lot of power for the money, and there's a really good supply for the parts (apart from the motherboards actually - finding one that supports the newer Xeons is a bit of a pain).

You can get a lot more power out of a 1366 set-up (after all, you can get 6-core/12-thread Westmere EP at 60W TDP), but you're going to end up spending more money on it, and there's a smaller choice of components.

[Bluecube]

My concern would be the power consumption which would be a tad high I imagine. I agree it would be a hell of a machine for £100 though!

Straying a tad OT, I've seen brand new dual socket HP z800 workstation motherboards on eBay for around £60. Albeit, a tad pricier but coupled with dual hexcore Xeons... I can't justify that in anyway cause I know there's no way I'll ever need such a powerful machine but still..!

[gl30]

Apologies for the ignorance but what server and client combination would you use to stream it?

[Bluecube]

If you're referring to my initial post, it would be a Xeon based server with likely a 280x streaming to a Celeron based NUC.