My 64GB Optane made a significant difference in the overall feel of my gaming PC, despite it having a Samsung Evo M2 SSD. But not with Intel's software - I never could get it to work. I found
PrimoCache and designated the Optane as L2 cache and was off to the races. At $30 for a desktop it was worth every penny. They have a 30 day trial so you don't have to take my word for it.
Indeed I was so impressed with the desktop performance I took an old SSD to use as dedicated L2 cache, threw it into a server where I was having some performance issues due to a vertical market application that had horrible disk speed requirements and saw a dramatic speed increase. I had another Hyper-V host that always had some lackluster disk performance and did the same and the results were pretty amazing as well. At $120 per server, it's by far one of the cheapest and fastest ways to speed up a server, especially if you have some older, smaller SSD's lying around that aren't good for much else.
You can run PrimoCache from the command line (required for free hyper-v server) - it's not obvious and I did stumble across the documentation for it at one point; if someone can't find it ping me back and I'll see if I bookmarked it.
In a lab environment it would probably be even better. Like I said, they have a 30 day free trial so test it out.