Alriight, and now for something completely different...can you have fun on the t730/DT122s - How is it as a casual gaming machine/emulator box?
The answer is...yes, but with some limitations.
So over the Christmas break I took the t730 down from ESXi 6.5U2 duty, pulled the original SSD out, put in a Micron MX500/512GB M.2 module and installed Windows 10 Pro on it - upgraded it to version 1803 with the full AMD Catalyst drivers. After this is done, I installed a few known emulators to get a better idea of how it should play, along with an idea of what the power consumption should look like - all screenshots are taken at 1366x768.
So here's some results:
PCSX2 (Sony Playstation 2 emulator for Windows)
Ghostbusters NTSC
Okami NTSC
Hm. emulating the PS2 is always a bit of a challenge since you are trying to emulate a 300MHz MIPSIII CPU with 2 VLIW vector units, a relatively speedy GPU, 2 sound processors, an I/O processor (which is a PSX SoC on-die), so you are usually looking at multicore + GPU performance. In this case, the t730 can perform up to about 80% of the speed of an actual PS2. Games are playable...somewhat. The issue is that since I installed the AT29 fiber NIC on the M2 Key E slot, I do not have any ability to test it with my Bluetooth Dualshock 4 controller to gauge playability (Star Wars Battlefront 2 for PS2 is a pain to play on a keyboard emulating a Dualshock controller). That can be remedied with an M.2 based bluetooth/wifi combo card like the Intel 7260HMW.
Power consumption at the tap is about 54w.
ReDream (Dreamcast Emulator for Windows) -
Unfortunately, I only have 3 Dreamcast game ISOs (Macross M3, Air Force Delta and Propellerheads), one is corrupt and the other 2 doesn't show decent screenshots. But gauging response times, I'll say that it runs well enough. I would need to hunt down my copies of Shenmue 2 to see how it works here.
Power consumption is about 48w.
PPSSPP (PSP Emulator for Windows / MacOS X) -
Pretty much 100% quality/framerate locked - it ran at 100% on my Haswell based Apple Macs, so I don't expect it to falter here. PPSSPP 1.70 features Vulkan support, and the latest AMD Catalyst drivers for the RX427BB has support for it. Good visuals.
Power consumption is about 46w.
Here it is on the intro for Outrun 2006
Wipeout Pure
I also have to toss in N64 emulation - if you have PJ64 version 2.3 with the latest HLE graphics, it should let you play Rogue Squadron just fine.
Here's a screenshot of it running the demo for WaveRace 64.
It was running at 20fps because the original console ran at 20 fps during the splash screen.
Power consumption about 47w.
So, what about PC gaming?
Battlefield 2 on the Dalian plant level, 16 bots single player mode, all options turned on and maxed out.
About 60 fps locked, ~55w consumption.
Unreal Tournament 2004 SE, latest patch, all options turned on to "Holy sh-t" level, 32 bots, AS-BP2-Outback level.
Oh, about 34-40 fps.
~52 w consumption measured on the taps.
Actually, maybe I should redo those metrics. I subsequently found out that Windows 10 was running/installing updates on the background.
I still need to test the little box out against MAME...I still need to install Steam and really stress test the bugger, especially with the nVidia GT1030 installed on some more modern games. Let me know if you have any requests for the next downtime test.