So, it actually fits inside of the chassis. It barely fits the physical limitations: it’s a low-profile, 1-slot card that is very short. I found the perfect solution in the MSI N750 TI-2GD5TLP at 146圆9x38 millimeters. A DAC via USB is a possibility, but I didn’t require it (HDMI audio was good enough) and I didn’t want the extra clutter. Having a card that passes through audio via HDMI is a must, too, since there’s no room to fit an additional audio card in there. I wanted to play fairly recent games, so DirectX 11 was a must and DirectX 12 a wish. This brought on a slew of extra stuff to consider, since I now had to be able to pass through PCI-devices to the VM: the GPU, the embedded audio card, a mouse and a keyboard.
This meant that any gaming needed to be done inside a Virtual Machine. Since I use the server for various other purposes, too, running ESXi as the base platform was a hard requirement. The power supply is only 250 watts, which severely limits the selection of GPUs.Lastly, most gaming cards are very long the chassis didn’t allow for this since there’s all kinds of connectors (for fans, etc.) in the way of the length of the card. There only room for single-slot cards, and these need to be low-profile, too. The chassis is very small, so there’s not a lot of room in there for a full-size graphics card.The physical machine comes with loads of limitations: So I went out searching for a small but capable graphics card to complement the server, but there’s a lot to take into account. In addition, it felt like a waste of resources to not use the home lab server for this. As the occasional gamer, I didn’t want to have an additional PC in the house. A Home media automation system running Sonarr, a MySQL database for Kodi, HTPC Manager, Logitech Media Server, Resilio Sync and the UniFi wireless controller.īut, there was one thing missing: a graphics card, for a 4th scenario.A NAS for both the lab (to host ISO files, templates and the like) and the home media system.I built this server and documented it: Build a Xeon D-1500 (Open) Home Lab with me?. A home lab server, running ESXi and the vCenter appliance with ample storage and compute resources.The goal was to have just a single machine in the house to fulfil all the different scenarios: More than adequate as a server, and it comes in a small and silent package. My home lab is a beasty Xeon D-based server with 128GB of RAM, chock-full of storage (fast NVMe and SSD as well as four 3.5″ 3 TiB disks), a quad-core Xeon D-1521 and two 10-gig ethernet interfaces.
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