Remote Desktop Playing @Home

Remote Desktop Gaming

Yes codding rocks, scripts make you smile and git is the new winamp but once in a while it's nice to play a bit.

Most people now days have laptops, company laptops or personal laptops, which in general, aren't suitable for gaming nor you want to risk your working tool by overheating it. Installing games on work computers isn't also the brightest idea in the world. There's also the physical part of it, you don't want to move to your desk or across the living room to play. 

Desktop's aren't exactly portable

Alternatively you can get a gaming laptop, but those are a bit more expensive than usual, also a bit bigger and with less battery life, certainly your company won't get you one and sometimes they're a bit flashy... not ideal for a formal meeting.

Care to take it to a formal meeting?

Solution: get a cheap desktop, put a GPU on it (I did it with my dell T1600 cheap homeserver) and do all the gaming on it remotely How? With a program called Parsec. The principle is very simple: 

• Install Parsec on Desktop and laptop (or all the computers you want to interact with)
• Create an account (FREE)
• Login on all computers
• Connect to one of your logged In computers
• You're IN (literally, you're inside a remote desktop on that computer)
  
  

  

  Pick one of your computers!
  

So you get the following: You -> Laptop -> Gaming Desktop nice

So why Parsec? Because it was developed with gaming in mind it's low latency software allows you to run games as if it was on your laptop. 

Remote Desktop

Basically it comes to this, you use a remote desktop client to play games but don't forget it's a remote desktop so it can be used for programing, for server maintenance, remotely viewing videos etc

Requirements for remote desktop gaming @home

Assuming your Desktop has a decent/recent CPU/CPU/SSD you'll pretty much run every game out there, the main requirements are just two:

• Network speed - The higher the resolution and FPS the higher bandwith you'll need. So if possible network cable attached to the DESKTOP and pick a nice spot for your wifi-router.

Having said this, i can play with almost no lag at 1920*1080 in the same room with a 2.4Ghz 1000Gbit ISP router. 

Parsec will even show you statistics of your network performance and bottlenecks.

 

Lenovo X250 tweeking in linux

Why the Lenovo X250?

My needs: a daily driver laptop, very cheap, light, small, upgradable and serviceable. (want to swap hdd, thermal paste etc) and Linux friendly. All things considered, I came up with a bargain on eBay, a 12.5"  Lenovo ThinkPad X250, i5 5300U with 8gb RAM, 128gb SSD, 2 batteries and HD screen with a barely noticeable bruise (which shall be swapped latter) for 130Euro.

X250 condition

X250 keyboard and screen

The Lenovo X250 in 2019 It's preparation for linux daily driver.

The batteries, yep no typo --two batteries-- this model has 2, one internal the other external were ~82% capacity each, the screen bruise is somehow noticeable, the fan and thermals were alright, yet first things to do; swap thermal paste for a top of the line one and swap the 128gb SSD for one bigger a 256SSD.  Keep in mind that there's a whitelist of LCD screens, if not on the list no brightness control on windows.

So price tag till now:

• X250 + Postage = 130Euro
• Grizzly  Kryonaut = 5Euro
• Western Digital Green SSD 256Gb = 33Euro
• FHD IPS screen ref ( ref MTM 20CLS0XA03 20CL)  = 75Euro

• Linux Mint19 = Free

X250 Interior

The thermal paste change settled the temperatures in full load (15min test) under 65 degrees, ( s-tui tool to monitor and stress CPU, sysbench to stress).

The i5-5300U CPU has a 'built in' GPU, the HD5500 and together both can consume up to 15w of power. When this power consumption threshold is exceeded the frequencies are lowered and the performance of the CPU, the GPU or both it takes a hit. The CPU/GPU throttling can also happen when the one of both achieves a certain temperature threshold, in the case of the X250 this doesn't happen due to good cooling. Even with default cooling/paste I could run stress tests at full CPU speed.

Undervolting Lenovo X250 and optimizing battery life

Next I decided to undervolt the CPU, this would allow even lower temperatures, more battery life and avoid package throttling, the 15watt limit! If both CPU and GPU consume less, less throttling will happen (duhh) and more performance one will get.
To undervolt I used undervolt python package, after a couple tests I could lower my voltages with the following values:

--core -100 --cache -100 --gpu -55 --uncore -70 --analogio -50

The values might get lower but I want full stability under all circumstances.

Hint: Don't just do stress tests, use the computer normally, and use it while doing the tests, I happen to pass lots of tests with -130mV in the core but crashed when opening firefox for example.

In order to test I installed sysbench and ran the following command:

sudo sysbench cpu --threads=4 --time=300 run

My results were the following, yet what matters is that the temperature didn't go above 63 degress Celcius.

CPU speed:
    events per second:  2675.87

General statistics:
    total time:                          300.0013s
    total number of events:              802769

Latency (ms):
         min:                                  1.09
         avg:                                  1.49
         max:                                 30.35
         95th percentile:                      1.52
         sum:                            1199489.59

Threads fairness:
    events (avg/stddev):           200692.2500/865.84
    execution time (avg/stddev):   299.8724/0.00

5 minutes after the test the temperatures drop to an very acceptable 37 degrees!

Battery life: depends a lot on what I do, compiling, watching youtube, browsing, screen brightness, but safe to say that at 50% screen brightness, light browsing 5 hours easily.

Now 2 important packages needed to be installed, these (basically) will tuneup the SO so it consumes a lot less energy, TLP will even make your fan be quieter in normal use: powertop and tlp

To install TLP:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:linrunner/tlp
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install tlp tlp-rdw 

$ sudo tlp start 

To install and configure powertop:

$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install powertop

$ sudo powertop --auto-tune 

On my lenovo X250 these steps gave me an extra 1h battery life and LOT quieter fan.