Servers and thin clients

[whatdistraction]

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post.

I won't be the one that will be personally setting this up; my father will, I barely have any experience in this area.

Anyway, according to my father he had an idea of setting up a Server and thin clients for a long time, so he's about to put this plan into action but, I need to know a few things first.

We are planning on having 4 clients connected to a server at once, we will be using this for mostly gaming purposes, we are hoping to run modern games at at least medium graphics. We have a budget of $1000 excluding monitors, keyboards and mice.

My question is, with a budget like this, will we be able to run games smoothly? Will the server be able to host 4 clients?

Thanks

 

[J03]

If the machines are being used for gaming, then I don't think thin clients are the way forward.

They typically have very weak GPU's/CPU's, as most of the work is offloaded to the server. It wouldn't really be viable for the server to render 3D Games for the thin clients, as the overhead of transmitting each frame would cause pretty severe lag.

A $1000 budget including the server and 4 thin clients might be possible if you use second hand hardware... but you wouldn't get anything new/terribly quick for that sum, unfortunately.

 

[whatdistraction]

If the machines are being used for gaming, then I don't think thin clients are the way forward.

They typically have very weak GPU's/CPU's, as most of the work is offloaded to the server. It wouldn't really be viable for the server to render 3D Games for the thin clients, as the overhead of transmitting each frame would cause pretty severe lag.

A $1000 budget including the server and 4 thin clients might be possible if you use second hand hardware... but you wouldn't get anything new/terribly quick for that sum, unfortunately.

Sorry, what I meant were, dumb terminals behaving as thin clients. There were some words lost in translation between my father and I. I'll try to convince him to increase our budget. Thanks for the help, is there anything else I should know?

 

[dale]

A rough way to think about this is you would need a machine to run multiple copies of whatever game you wish to play, plus consideration for data transmission, heat, and depending on your setup, storage device I/O. Unless you are short for space, I would advise against this setup for gaming.

 

[J03]

I agree. You might want to look into something like active directory, if you want a thin-client style of machine duplication, but the performance of a stand-along desktop.

 

[whatdistraction]

A rough way to think about this is you would need a machine to run multiple copies of whatever game you wish to play, plus consideration for data transmission, heat, and depending on your setup, storage device I/O. Unless you are short for space, I would advise against this setup for gaming.

Okay, what do you suggest?

I agree. You might want to look into something like active directory, if you want a thin-client style of machine duplication, but the performance of a stand-along desktop.

Sorry, again, I had written what my father tried to tell me incorrectly, what I meant is, dumb terminals on its own - no thin client behaviour or anything.