AAA Gaming On Totally Inappropriate Hardware With Bazzite

Allow me, if you will, to introduce to you “Baby Boris”, my 10th gen HPE MicroServer, which has been sat diligently performing various serverly duties in the corner of our office since I purchased it brand new way back in 2017.

Now I’ll be the first to admit that as far as servers go, Baby Boris really isn’t all that: in the CPU department he has some kind of AMD Opteron APU thing, which has integrated graphics shared with the system RAM. Speaking of the system RAM, he has 16 gigabytes of DDR4 and as far as storage is concerned, he has four 2 terabyte hybrid drives in some kind of software RAID setup, which I must admit I didn’t really understand at the time when I set it up, and I probably did it completely wrong.

But of course it’s not all doom and gloom and Baby Boris here does indeed have some positive qualities - and I’m not just talking about his rather nice googly eyes. No. For example: internally he has a low profile PCI Express X8 slot, which I think would be absolutely ideal for a little itty bitty GPU, just like this one - and as far as that RAM is concerned, I did want to upgrade it to two sticks so we could take advantage of dual channel and see if that would make any kind of performance difference but there’s something very strange going on at the moment with DDR4 RAM prices and that would’ve been quite expensive, particularly for an old machine like this - so I’m going to skip that and we’re going to stick with the stock RAM, but hopefully that won’t prove to be too much of a bottleneck.

Anyway. I think before any of that it would be quite interesting to get some baseline measurements using the stock hardware - if indeed little Baby Boris here is capable of anything even remotely resembling gaming - so let’s answer the age old question: Will It Game?

Well this is all a bit precarious, isn’t it? There we go - so I’ll shove the USB stick in the back there and power this on - and apologies for the lack of direct screen capture like I would usually do just for the very first part of this video, I’m outputting over VGA and this monitor’s quite a weird resolution and I couldn’t find anything that would capture that - but of course, once we’re all up and running, I’ll get some direct captures on the go so we can get to some decent video quality.

So it is just F11 to enter the boot menu - and this thing is quite slow.

There we go: “SanDisk Extreme.”

“Install bazzite-deck” - and with this of course, being a fully AMD system, I don’t foresee there being any serious problems with this, any kind of driver issues or anything - I think the basics should work.

I’ll tell you what, at the very least, I should probably give this monitor a clean just so we can see what’s going on.

There we go, that’s a bit better, isn’t it? I think that’s the first time that’s been cleaned in how many years.

Yeah - and inevitably this is bugging me now, so let’s give that a quick polish as well…

There we go. There we go Boris, I promise when I take you apart to do those upgrades, I will blast all of the dust out as well - and here we go - and it seems to have defaulted to Italian on this system for some reason - and there we go. We’ll just go through…

…and I’m already connected to the wired ethernet here which is nice and fast - so the one thing that I need to look at is this hard drive situation - so we have our four 1.8 terabyte drives there…

“Automatic Storage Configuration”

“Free space by removing or shrinking existing partitions.”

Oh my goodness…

“Delete all.”

Okay! I’m not quite sure how that’s going to end up looking but it seems to be happy with that.

Like I said, I know nothing about this stuff - this corporate IT rubbish.

It’ll be fine.

“Updating kargs”. Uh?

Ha ha - so it turns out that it was actually completely and utter Italy broken after all, and I think I know the reason - so the USB stick that I installed Bazzite from was set up for my Atari VCS, which I featured in a previous video - and I used the “bazzite-deck” version for this - so the version that’s aimed at the Steam Decks - and that boots into Steam Gaming Mode, which only supports newer GPUs - and I think the issue is that it doesn’t like the integrated graphics in this machine - so I’ve gone all the way back to square one, I’ve re-flashed the USB stick with the standard desktop version of Bazzite that doesn’t boot into that gaming mode, and we’re going to try again.

So hopefully after a jump cut, I’ll have some slightly better news for you…

“Updating kargs”…

…and here we go! This is looking much better - so we have a login prompt here…

…frantic disc activity going on there…

“Updating Steam runtime environment”, “updating Steam.”

This is very, very nice. I do like the default KDE desktop that comes with Bazzite - I think it’s a really nice setup.

It’s Doom! Alright, it’s a game from 1993 so I suppose it’s to be expected that it would run on pretty much anything - although, to be fair, this is the recent remastered version running on Nightdive’s KEX engine - so I guess it’s got that going for it - and for those of you who were moaning at me in the previous video, I also worked out how to get MangoHUD working so we can see the real time FPS count and the CPU and the GPU load and everything as well.

So perhaps to be expected that it runs Doom perfectly fine, as Doom does literally run on everything. But yeah, this server, I can honestly say in the eight years that I’ve owned it, has never run a game of any kind. It’s always just been used for very boring server duties, so Doom seemed very appropriate for its first inaugural gaming experience. There we go, we’ll just kill off the last of those shotgun guys.

Oh, there’s one more around the corner - there we go - so, yeah, now of course filming stuff directly off the screen isn’t ideal - you can’t really see what’s going on so what I’m going to do now is attempt to set up some kind of direct screen capture setup as well - probably using the DisplayPort connectors on the back because then we’ll get audio as well - there’s no other way of getting audio out of this server, so hopefully I shall see you in a second for some more gaming!

There we go! Back onto Old Faithful here - my COVID-era, Samsung curved 1080P bog-standard office monitor with my HDMI splitter. Of course, that’s all hooked up to one of the DisplayPort connectors on the back, and that’s all working great, but I still don’t have any kind of audio output - so I think what I need to do is go into the graphics configuration of all places and there is an option in here for “GNB HD audio” and then we can come back out - apparently you can’t press F10 to save and exit for some reason - so we’ll just go to this: “Save Changes and Exit”.

Back at the desktop now, and pleased to confirm that the audio is all working okay now so that’s great to see - and it’s just occurred to me actually that one thing that we haven’t done is to take a look at those wonderful specs of our little Baby Boris here.

So yeah, here we go. Hardware: Four processors - so that’s obviously quad core - it’s a single quad core CPU or indeed an APU in this case, an AMD Opteron X3421 - so yeah, apparently that’s a thing. 15.1 gigs of RAM and AMD Radeon R7 graphics, which it has quite rightly identified as being integrated.

So there we go. That’s detected all of the hardware in there perfectly fine as you might expect from a Linux system running on a server - and I guess we’ll play some games and see how they perform on these wonderful AMD Opteron integrated graphics.

So from Doom, the OG released all the way back in 1993, to Doom 2016. A game that I enjoyed very much when it was released and I think a very, very worthy entry in the franchise indeed - and as you can see here, not running great on this system. We’re getting about 15 FPS up to about 20, I think. I think I may have seen a 20…

Perhaps it was only as high as 17 or 18. I don’t know.

But yeah, everything is turned down to the absolute lowest possible quality settings here - it is running in 1080P so it does have that going for it - but as you can probably see, I’ve got all the anti-aliasing and everything turned off, all the motion blurring and everything, just trying to give it the best possible chance and it’s pretty much completely and utterly unplayable - and I ended up dying very, very early on at the hands of this imp, which I’m going to blame on the performance - and not on the fact that I am notoriously terrible at games.

But I think my testing here has raised a very important point, and as you may have spotted the GPU and the CPU pretty much running completely and utterly flat out at all times as you might expect running this stuff, and one thing that I do know for sure is that the thermal side of things isn’t great in this machine: I don’t think that APU has its own dedicated fan, I think the whole thing is cooled by the case fan at the back. It’s never been cleared out of dust, it’s never been repasted - and actually, you know what, although this was just going to be a bit of fun before I slap that proper GPU in, I’m actually interested in giving it the best possible chance that I can now so what I’m going to do now is open this up, clear some of that dust out, repaste it properly, and then we’ll run through and we’ll do some proper benchmarks.

Ha! So, as suspected we have this 120mm fan here which is doing all of the cooling here - no separate fan on here, which is our CPU and GPU kind of integrated into the one unit and that’s very, very hot indeed - so, yeah, definitely I think a repaste is-

Ack! I think a repaste is definitely in order.

…and there it is. Ha! Look, “processor”. Very good.

Ah! It’s still very hot!

So that’s that all repasted and dust-free - and I have taken an executive decision and left the front panel off - so literally this is just kind of a mesh, a filter. I think that’s probably not ideal for airflow, but I have put the outer case back on so we do have the top and the sides, so obviously we’ve got nice airflow through the case there just to give it the best possible chance - and of course, speaking of giving it the absolute best chance that we can, I have come into the BIOS here. We’ve got the “Integrated Graphics” setting and I’m just going to force that to use the full 2 gigabytes of system RAM as VRAM so we know that we don’t have a bottleneck there. It was probably doing it automatically anyway, but hey, may as well have that 2GB set from the get go.

[Demonic presence at unsafe levels. Lockdown in effect.]

[He cannot be allowed to leave this place. He would ruin everything.]

Looking surprisingly good there actually in Doom 2016! I think it’s fair to say that we have gained at least a couple of FPS so that’s great to see - not really playable still and of course we are very early on in the game here, a very confined space with not many enemies - and there’s no doubt in my mind that later on in this game with some of those huge environments and all the projectiles flying around and enemies running around that this would be completely and utterly unplayable on this APU, but hey, we have a bit of a basis for comparison there, which we can use to compare to that GPU later on - and most importantly, I think that thermal issue is solved as well: the fan wasn’t running flat out the entire time, which is great to see, or perhaps more importantly, great to hear - or not hear in this case.

But yeah, that’s enough of an impression of how well this game runs on this system - to be honest I’m surprised it runs at all - so yeah, onto the next one.

Onto Wreckfest now, which is one of my favorite racing games of all time - and I know based on some of your comments that a few of you out there have actually gone out and bought this game off the back of seeing it in some of my videos and that you are very much enjoying it, which is always cool to see. I do really, really love this game.

Of course, made by Bugbear, the same people that brought us the FlatOut series, and it runs surprisingly well on low end hardware - this game engine actually scales really, really well, which is why it’s great for testing out all of these various systems - and speaking of performance, I have gone with the lowest possible graphics settings, as you might imagine, and then I went into the advanced settings in the actual game itself and turned a few of the options off as well, which of course has lowered those requirements even further, and we’re getting pretty good results actually: I’ve got a destruction derby type thing going on here with 23 opponents and we are getting a very solid 20 FPS as a minimum, I think, actually peaking up as high as 30 in some places, which is really cool to see. This is a really kind of visually involved game - lots of debris flying around everywhere, we’ve got cars and scenery deforming and stuff - so yeah, quite an impressive feat, I hope you’ll agree.

Then onto an actual race of course - and we do get off to a bit of a sluggish start here - we’ve got all of these cars jostling for position, all on screen at the same time. We’ve got debris flying around left, right, and center - and yeah, it is a bit of a slide show but I am very pleased to report that later on in the race we are getting around 30 FPS - up to around 30 FPS anyway - and the game is actually quite smooth and quite playable at this frame rate. It’s actually, dare I say it, quite an enjoyable experience and that is of course, helped by my Xbox controller here, which I’ve just plugged in, and yeah, I am playing a racing game on a server using an Xbox controller. What a strange sentence.

Oh, and it’s crashed! Okay, well that was GTA V there. That’s the Legacy version, there is also an Enhanced version available on Steam, but I decided to not even bother with that - it’s got a load of extra graphical enhancements and stuff included. I went in and changed the graphics settings here again, of course, to turn everything down to the absolute minimum - although again, it’s still running in 1080P mode, and yeah, not a very good story at all - some weird graphical glitches in some places that some of the models like those trees and things, absolutely hilarious to see them in that lowest texture quality setting - and yeah performance-wise, really struggling to scrape 10 FPS in some places, average is probably around 15, something like that - I didn’t really see much higher than that. The game is completely and utterly unplayable in this state and to be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever seen it looking this bad either.

Onto something a bit more modern for my next game - and this is Indika. It’s a third person puzzle game where you play as a nun, oddly enough, and it has quite an interesting story, some very adult themes and stuff, and some very strong language as well if you are interested in picking this one up, I will just forewarn you, but yeah, it’s an indie game. It was released last year and it’s quite a compact experience: it took me about five hours to complete, but really, really thought provoking, this one. I enjoyed it a lot and I do recommend it, and of course it’s a great game for testing stuff like this because it’s built in Unreal Engine 5, so the technology is bang up to date - and as you might expect, of course, I’ve gone through and dialed down all of the graphics settings as best as I can - it doesn’t actually have that many options to play with - and as I have completed this game there is a level select option available to me so I’ve loaded up one of the puzzles from fairly early on, just a bit of exploration, looking for a tool so we can get this thing out of the way and clear this roadway.

As you can see, it’s running at about 7 or 8 FPS. It is pretty much completely and utterly unplayable, but it is a very modern game, very kind of complex graphics here. We’ve got this fog, we’ve got you know, some quite complex scenery and stuff - so again, the fact that our little friend Baby Boris the HP MicroServer is running this at all, I think is quite impressive.

You’ve probably spotted the GPU, which is pretty much completely maxed out at 99% the entire time. But yeah, a good test of this - and again, the fact that it’s running I think is pretty miraculous, which is pretty much on brand for a game featuring a nun, I will say.

I have been blown away so far by the performance of Baby Boris here, our HP MicroServer with its AMD Opteron APU and its integrated graphics. I think it’s fair to say that when this system was first designed by HP’s engineers way back in 2017 that gaming probably wasn’t a consideration of theirs - that the onboard graphics are basically just there to serve up a desktop or even a terminal so people could do basic administrative tasks - so I wasn’t expecting it to be anywhere near that capable - and I’m actually genuinely impressed. But there is one upgrade that I do think will be very worthwhile - not to mention very easy thanks to the inclusion of that low profile PCI Express slot - and as mentioned, it’s this rather sweet, itty bitty little GPU.

So what is this thing exactly? Well, this is an AMD Radeon RX 550. It’s a budget low end card from 2017, so the same year as our server here. It supports DirectX 12 and this one is the 4 gigabyte model, so it is the higher end model of the two - there was also a 2 gigabyte version, and to be honest, there’s probably some GPU bros in the comments shouting at me already for picking this card because of course there are far, far better options out there for low profile PCI Express. But for a start, it’s an AMD Radeon, so it’s going to be supported perfectly under Bazzite - so no driver issues, anything like that.

It is also very low power consumption as well - I only have a 200 watt power supply in this machine, I don’t have any external connectors or anything like that, so this is entirely run on slot power and does fit within our power budget - and also ultimately, this isn’t going to be a gaming machine: it’s going to be a NAS in the end so this is only really needed for transcoding duties and stuff, if that, so I didn’t want to spend a fortune on something just for the sake of this video.

So that’s my justification for buying the RX 550 - and the other thing that I’m going to do just before I pop this in as I have repasted the Opteron APU in the machine, seems only fair that I should repaste this as well while I have it out.

Ah, now this does always amuse me: so you can probably see just underneath the card here, the back half of the edge connector, just sticking out, just hanging out of the back of the connector. But of course, that’s the joy of PCI Express - it is fully forwards and backwards compatible, and the slot itself has a little notch in the back just for this very eventuality.

…and here we are up and running on that new card, booted up to the desktop, no problems whatsoever. I’ll just go into “About This System”, just see how it’s been recognized. Yep - so we have the AMD Radeon RX 550 series there, discrete GPU, and of course our integrated Radeon R7 graphics there still up and running.

So what I’m going to do is just reboot this and go into the BIOS and just disable that - and that should just be under “Chipset” here, “Graphics Configuration”, “Integrated Graphics”, “Disabled”, exit back out, “Save and Exit” - and now if I just go back into “About This System”, hopefully our integrated graphics are gone, yep, there we go - so we’re just running purely on that AMD Radeon RX 550 GPU.

Back to Doom 2016, of course - and if you cast your mind back to that previous test that we did only moments ago, we were getting about 17, 18 frames per second using the integrated graphics here - and that was with all of the graphics settings turned right down as low as they could possibly go. It was not a pleasant experience at all - the game wasn’t really playable and I did suffer quite a lot in this initial quite small enclosed area.

So, as you might expect on those exact same settings with the new GPU, we’re getting more than double the frame rate - that’s probably no big surprise. But I think the big surprise here is when I started fiddling with the graphics settings and seeing how far I could push this, and I turned it all the way up to “Ultra” and I was still getting around 40 frames per second. It was dipping as low as sort of low thirties, maybe a little bit lower than that in a couple of places, but a much, much smoother experience. Very, very playable indeed at this frame rate - and I did speculate earlier on that perhaps going out into some of the bigger, more open areas would completely and utterly choke those integrated graphics. But of course, I had to try it on this new GPU as it was running so well, and again, it’s still getting around 40 frames per second, as high as you know, nearly up to 50 at some points as well.

Still a very smooth experience and an absolutely incredible looking game as well still after all these years. This has genuinely blown me away just how good this looks and how well this runs on this new low cost secondhand RX 550 GPU. Bear in mind that this is a MicroServer aimed at small businesses that has had a budget GPU haphazardly shoved into it - it is absolutely not a gaming machine at all.

It’s Wreckfest time once more, and again, as you might expect, running the game on the exact same graphics settings as we were with the integrated graphics before, we are now getting double - if not triple, perhaps even more - frames per second from this GPU, so whereas before we were getting 20, perhaps 30 as an absolute peak, we’re now getting a nice solid 40ish, if not 50, 60, I think I even saw 70 in a couple of places as well. It is super, super smooth. It is really nice to play. Definitely highly recommended, but of course we can squeeze a little bit more out of this game - I reckon we can crank up those graphics settings, so why not start at the top?

So I thought I would try this on “Ultra” and it’s - yeah, it’s taken us right back to where we started. Perhaps not unexpected. We’re getting frame rates in the single digits, the teens, and to be honest, the story isn’t much better on “High”, I will say, although it is kind of getting up into the almost playable territory - it’s around where it was before on those integrated graphics with absolutely all of the options turned off.

No, as you might expect, “Medium” is the sweet spot for Wreckfest on this RX 550 GPU - yeah, it looks great and it plays great on Medium. We are getting some very inconsistent frame times, I will say, it is a bit all over the place, but then this is quite a complex game - you’ve got stuff flying around all over the place. You’ve got physics, you’ve got bits of debris, you’ve got cars and track items deforming all over the place - so it is a very, very busy game - and to be honest, I think our little MicroServer here with its GPU is actually handling this surprisingly well and I would call this playable. I think this is kind of 30 FPS, 40 FPS - I wouldn’t want to play it with any less than that, but hey, I grew up playing Quake on a 486DX4/100 at about 10 frames per second in the nineties, so any better than that is good by my standards.

GTA V once more - and again, this is the Legacy release, not the Enhanced version available on Steam - and I’m not quite sure what went wrong with my integrated graphics test with this game: It looked absolutely horrific, it was running in single digit frame rates, and I don’t know if there was some graphics setting that didn’t get applied properly or something like that, but this looks a million times better despite supposedly running on exactly the same settings - so I’m not quite sure what’s gone wrong there. Hey, maybe the engine’s doing something, maybe it detected the limited VRAM and was limiting something itself above and beyond the built-in settings? I don’t know, I’m not an expert on GTA V’s graphic settings, but hey, we can see that it is a massive improvement - it looks a million times better.

Alright, it doesn’t look great and it also isn’t running great. I think if we have determined one thing from this test, it’s that Baby Boris, our HPE MicroServer here, is definitely not the ideal GTA V machine, but hey, it’s running an awful lot better than it was - it’s an improvement, and it didn’t crash this time!

And speaking of games running at single digit frame rates, of course we have Indika to check out - our third person, nun-based puzzle game running under Unreal Engine 5, which of course means that it’s bang up to date as far as engine technology is concerned - not particularly well known for being a well optimized game engine, I think it’s fair to say, I think it’s kind of more targeted at you know, much higher end, much more expensive modern GPUs, so our 8-year-old system here was always going to struggle, and the fact that it ran it all, as mentioned, I thought was pretty miraculous.

But with our new GPU, we are again seeing a good performance increase here: we’ve got double the frame rate. Unfortunately, that means that we are still in the kind of low to mid teens, so still not really playable, although I guess more playable than it was before. It’s not a fast-paced game, it’s a puzzle game, it’s kind of plodding around looking for bits and bobs and trying to kind of, you know, solve physics puzzles and that kind of thing, so you could probably play it on this system and it does look really nice even on this 8-year-old GPU, I will say - so it certainly has that going for it.

Personally, I don’t think I will play it on this system as I have a much better one to play it on and - well - I mean, I’ve already finished it and it’s a puzzle game, so I know how to solve all of the puzzles, but yeah, you know, it just goes to show. A modern Unreal Engine 5 game running on Baby Boris here, our HPE MicroServer from 2017 with his freshly upgraded bargain eBay GPU.

So there we have it - one last flight of fancy for Baby Boris, our HPE Gen10 MicroServer recently decommissioned from my place of work and soon to be pressed back into service as a NAS - and what did we learn from this video? Well, if you take an old server and you stick a secondhand eBay GPU in it, you can play games on it - and maybe that’s enough?

So thank you ever so much, I don’t really think I have too much more to add, but if you do have any thoughts do let me know down in the comments - and of course, don’t forget to give this video a little thumbs up and subscribe to the channel if you want more of this kind of stuff.

So a big thank you to my supporters on Patreon and Ko-Fi, and my YouTube channel members as well. They get videos a little bit early and also ad-free - and finally, I think all that’s left to say is a big thank you to you for watching, and hopefully I’ll see you in the next one.