The Ultimate Linux Gaming Trashcan 

Go to www.piavpn.com/ActionRetro to get 83% off Private Internet Access with 4 months free!

well i have to compliment the design a bit - you don't often see a computer where installing ram makes you feel like you're replacing uranium fuel cells

Action Retro: "If you enjoyed taking heavily depreciated professional grade tech and using it entirely unprofessionally..." Me: Stares at maxed out NeXT Station Color Turbo...."Yes, yes I do."

when the graphics card is bigger than your computer you're definitely doing something right.

As someone who had his hands in many tens if not hundreds of Xeon class servers over a period of 15 or so years, I can say that the thermal compound looks totally normal and would have been working fine. It looks crusty as it solidifies with heat, so when you pull it off it leaves a textured appearance. But strapped to the CPU it would have been uniform. The difference in single thread performance is likely down to the larger 30MB cache on the E5-2697v2 vs 10MB of the E5-1620v2.

I'm sure someone has already mentioned this, but plugging the monitor directly to the eGPU is preferable, otherwise display data coming back from the GPU will be taking up some of the already very limited Thunderbolt 2 bandwidth.

oh no he's installing the nVidia driver from nVidia instead of the gpu repo :(

The 4070 only has a single eight PIN Connector which can support a maximum of 150 Watts ... plus 75 Watts max from the PICe Slot it cannot draw more then 225 Watts. So the extra 650 Watts power pupply is overkill for both graphics cards IMHO.

First law for nvidia on linux is to never use the nvidia installee, for ubuntu use the graphics ppa

You're using 22.04 LTS. It's kernel predates RDNA2. That might be a (not the) problem...

I did this exact same upgrade (except for the video card) when I had my Pro 13 a few years ago. I liked the challenge of the CPU replacement.

After having watched several Jeff G videos about getting these big gaming cards working over external interfaces, it was pretty clear you were in for a challenge. Glad to see that the integrated video on the can works well in Windows at least.

Wait? .... why do you need a driver for the AMD 6750XT graphics card? OK it might be different for thunderbolt, but the Linux Kernel should support the card out of the box. Which Ubuntu and kernel version did you use? I'm certain a recent kernel will support it. And i'm pretty sure 650 Watts are recommended for a complete system with CPU etc. A Radeon 6750XT only draws 250 Watt maximum. Sure the might be spikes that are higher but 400 Watts should be enough. for powering the card alone.

So, ram speed is only reduced if you install 1866mhz ram, I have 128 of 1066mhz ram in mine and theres no reduction in speed with my 12 core cpu

Remember, any trash can can be a gaming trash can if you use it as a basketball hoop.

When using thunderbolt 2 if you ask it to send the image back to be output over the build in graphics on the computer then you are throwing away performance, if you want the best performance possible then run a monitor directly from the external GPU that way your not chucking away bandwidth sending to much data over the slow thunderbolt 2.

Me: [starts shopping for a trashcan]

I like these these systems are becoming so cheap, it's good to know they're actually a great windows gaming PC for the price.

Loving this series. I did the same CPU upgrade with a cheap Mac Pro off eBay recently. OpenCore Sonoma guide next?

This kind of puts some cold water on my idea of setting up an eGPU for my linux laptop so I could theoretically game when I dock it at home. It seems like the sort of project where I could spend a boat load of money and still come up with absolutely nothing in the end.

Can you passthrough the eGPU to a Windows VM? Sounds like more in the spirit of this channel than running Windows native.

I would have gone with Arch, or some other rolling release distro. Having the latest packages really helps when it comes to gaming. Also, why not plug the display to the eGPU directly?

I thought you got your hands on the leaked Xbox

For those that are interested in playing more modern games and have a viable low-medium end computer (as of 2024), I'd recommend getting the version with the 2697v2 as stock, as well as the dual FirePro D700s. Oh, and you may as well put 128gb of ram in there. Boom! You got a very high ram set up with a decent CPU (12c/24t, 3.5GHz), a decent GPU setup (7 teraflops, 12GB of VRAM), and 128GB of RAM!

bro refuses to install mint 😭😭

I would suspect that there is a wierd pcie4 to pcie3/2 miss match. Seen that happen with pcie4 compatible cards running on pcie3 riser. Had to force the primary pcie 16x slot to run at pcie3(default is auto) in the bios. Dont know if that can be done for the egpu enclosure.

I was watching and suggesting windows in my mind, then you did it. It works well for such generation.

I've had a similar fight with a trashcan trying to work with egpus. The problem was that Windows often wouldn't boot with the thunderbolt card connected, and I couldn't get the OSX patches to support a modern eGPU. I might have another go as the weather turns colder and having a space heater would be useful in the office 😂

IDK im not an apple guy really but that "trashcan" upgraded would prolly make a damned good steam box, it even kinna looks the part of some unknown modern game console. Wouldnt mind having one myself to tinker with. FYI, A 2060 - 3050 would have made a pretty competent gaming setup.

8:38 ice trays.. what a great idea

Used one of these as a workstation at my job in like 2014. Always liked the design even if it was hilariously impractical in many ways.

Had a 970 EVO in my iMac 2019 and was SO disappointed. macOS had trouble with trim, so every restart was a test of patience. Took about 5 minutes each time. Booting into Windows via Bootcamp was no problem, it was just macOS. Just for you to consider when you swap back to macOS (maybe possibly eventually) and notice the same: it is the SSD.

The constant references to Spindler are especially hilarious with reference to a 2013 machine😂

The RX6750XT works plug and play on a Linux 5.17 kernel paired with Mesa 22.2. I'm currently using the same card on Fedora 38 with a 6.4 Kernel and the latest version of MESA. There was absolutely no reason why that card shouldn't have just fired up on the version of Ubuntu you were using. I can only imagine you were trying to install the AMD Pro drivers, if so why?...... as for NVIDIA why the hell are you downloading them directly from NVIDIA? NEVER, EVER download GPU drivers from a website for Linux.. use you distro's package or driver manager. Your video doesn't make it clear exactly what you did but it looks like user error to me, sorry. Can you clarify what you did please?

Been thinking of buying a trashcan Mac. It'd only be my second Mac ever after my 07 polycarb, but those little turds always spoke to me.

I've told people for years these weren't bad computers, they were just expecting way too much from a company like apple.

I love the design of the trashcan Mac Pro... but I compared the maxed out Geekbench scores compared to the M1 Pro I'm on right now and good god.

Keep the Linux dream alive and maybe try using KVM! If you can do some tricky by having the integrated GPU dedicated to video output on the linux OS, and then passing the nvidia GPU to the windows VM

Your videos are allowing me to get on with my life while protecting me from janking up my life too hard with my ADHD brain. Thank you

You get a bun, he gets a bun, and I get a bun too! We all get a bun!

The firmware probably doesn't support the 6750xt. Would be nice to try again with a 1080ti.

You inspired me to install Ubuntu on an old Dell machine with an Nvidia 1050ti GPU. Problem is, I still can’t figure out how to get Steam to work. Nevertheless, I will prevail!

Too bad about the plot-twist ending after all that work, but hey! You've saved a bunch of Linux geeks a lot of time by letting us know what _doesn't_ work.

I believe that CrossFire is the reason why this Mac performs graphically better on Windows, if Apple enabled crossfire on MacOS instead of leaving the decision to developers, the Mac Pro would’ve a little more powerful, and yes, Linux to this day is still a mess with drivers and components (especially gaming ones), maybe I would suggest you try again with some Debloated Windows version (like tiny10 or ghost specter) just to see how much performance upgrades you can get, by the way, great video, I believe it was exactly what I would do if I bought this machine

This was really entertaining to watch. I couldn't help but wonder about that power supply. It looked like it might be a pretty standard ATX power supply in that eGPU enclosure. If so, it might be worth it to swap the psu out for a stronger one just in case you need that overhead in the future.

I love these crazy videos. If I had the extra cash, I'd be very tempted to pick up my own trashcan Mac

it showing as nvidia corporation device is just because it doesn't have the updated PCI IDs for it, this will not prevent the card from working since the name is entirely cosmetic and for the user if you want it to show the actual name of the device run sudo update-pciids and it'll fetch the latest PCI IDs from the internet

It's too bad it only has a single m.2 slot, otherwise you add a gpu the jank way via a m.2 to pcie slot adatper. I guess maybe you could run the OS of external storage instead but not sure if that would work. Unfortunately crossfire is a rather mixed bag and doesn't work in most modern games.

Looks like the kind of design a technician would have nightmares about. Looks gorgeous though

The difference between a pro and an amateur is that pros get paid... You, sir is a pro!

An Intel Apple product with Linux (then Windows) installed on it, an AMD GPU (then an NVidia one, then stock), and a controller for a Microsoft console. Gotta love the mishmash.

Sometimes it does not works. Loved the video. I wonder if Apple build a machine like this, it could have 3 M2 ultras and a bus, and it will be easear to clean than the Studio (that I love, not get me wrong). Simply the thermals were not there, It was evident to me, but for some reason it was not for Apple.

The 400W power supply gets the RX6750XT running without any problems. The recommended 600w is for the entire system, the card itself consumes 250w. but still a great project. I actually don't think the Mac is that ugly

If you've ever seen Auralnauts Star Wars ...."Thank you, Magic trashcan."

Linux is so good for gaming now that i hardly ever log into my Windows partition. I need it for University work because their software runs like rubbish in a VM but it's been like 2 months since i logged into Windows and I have been gaming / being productive and watching films and videos every day. I would recommend people to use an Arch based distro when gaming because of access to better GPU drivers and the latest programs but Ubuntu based systems are fine. Debian's packages are a little too old for proper gaming in my opinion but vintage / retro style gaming is great on Debian. I am on 535 Nvidia drivers in Arch but anything past 525 on Ubuntu is really unstable.

I daily drove Arch on my MBP with an eGPU for a while, though it was a whole thing to setup. What I learned was two things: 1. you cannot hotplug the GPU, it needs to be there when the system boots 2. You need to tell the window manager to use the GPU as the primary graphics device (in KDE/KWin, I had to set the KWIN_DRM_DEVICES environment variable to /dev/dri/card1). Then after logging KDE would spring to life on the eGPU.

If that shroud were clear with a bit of ligthing, that thing would look cool af.

It's probably been said, but that RTX 4070 only draws like 200W. I know you probably were just addicted to the jank, I get it.

It's funny because every time you remove the case on this one I get the same feeling I had when I saw Darth Vader remove his helmet in The Empire Strikes Back..

I wonder if the reason the 6750 is failing is because you're using it in a PCIe3 capable Thunderbolt 3 enclosure so it attempts to operate at PCIe3 specs, but then you've got the thunderbolt 2 to 3 adapter which can't tell the card that the link is only PCIe2 capable. People ran into these kinds of problems with PCIe3 risers on PCIe4 capable motherboards. The card would see the mobo was capable of 4 and try to use it, not knowing that there was a non-compliant riser in the way. You had to tell the motherboard to only use PCIe3 signalling but you had a chicken and egg problem. The 1050Ti maybe worked because it was old enough that it was only trying to use a slower specification. Maybe it's only 8x wired? Maybe some quirk made it decide to be a PCIe2 card? eGPUs are always fiddly.

"You were supposed to destroy the sith, not join them!"

Things I’ve done: 1. Upgraded my trashcan to 12-core (with a lot of help, but it was open heart surgery feels!) 2. Use Windows on a trashcan for gaming 3. Use a 6900XT eGPU with massive 750W power supply on a Mac Mini 2018 for AAA gaming, if you can call MSFS 2020 a AAA title? It sure needs the processing power. But what I’ve never tried is to grab my TB2-TB3 adaptor and connect the eGPU to my trashcan. I’ve seen a few articles about it though - you need to add special support to get eGPU working over TB2. Read up online first! And that’s before you even go beyond macOS.

about bus speeds, if memory serves capacity by itself doesn't limit clock rates, but 4 sticks of memory tend to have lower clock rates than 2 due to bus issues, and larger capacity sticks might have lower maximum clock rates by themselves. of course, apple could also be mucking things up by automatically setting speed based on ram count...

If I recall correctly from my days of mac: egpu will function only if display connected to gpu you can actually see that your fans are not spinning which means no signal (and I may be wrong but not all docks supported, you can dig throu mac os egpu forums for more info). Also never install nvidia drivers through package from nvidia website, in my 5 years of linux it never worked once especially on ubuntu (apt-install should do ). Trashacans are fun, I'm hunting one to use as a homelab.

The interesting thing about those universal blue images (like bazzite) is that you can switch out to any other image with a single command. Or switch to another ostree based OS like the official Silverblue or Kinoite. You don't even lose your data or flatpak apps.

I think it looks great without a cover,real R2D2ish.Maybe you could make a clear perspex cover for it.

In my experience, installing the Linux drivers directly from Nvidia causes nothing but pain and suffering. In my very early days of using Linux, I ruined a couple installs trying to do that!

I am very surprised that this machines has an M.2 slot, PCs didn't have those as a common standard for another couple of years

The PSU in the external GPU should have been more than enough to run any of the GPUs you tried. 400W is plenty for almost any GPU out there. Yes, the AMD card recommended a 650W PSU, but it also is accounting for you having a whole PC powered by the PSU as well, not just the GPU. If you could not get almost anything to work with only the PSU inside the enclosure, then I would guess that the 400W PSU is simply not working properly.

If you have two GPU's the standard setting for the nvidia-driver is "On demand". The Desktop is then always using the dedicated GPU and the discrete GPU is only used when needed or you tell the system to use it. Ubuntu has an Option "Use discrete graphics" when you launch programs. Actually you can run the Steamlauncher with the dedicated GPU and the Games will run on the discrete because most of the games would not run on the dedicated anyway. At least this is how it works on my Lenovo with discrete NVIDIA-Card.

"runs non-modern games" "oh my god it runs"

18:53 Bravo ha, I love your comment and I agree with you 100%

I used to be an "old school [K]Ubuntu fanboy" as well, until I tried OpenSUSE. It just seems that little bit more polished. Plus, YaST is super slick for managing things that would otherwise be kinda tedious.

12:16 Depending on how old the kernel is on distro you've chosen, the amdgpu in the kernel may not support your GPU. I couldn't get Debian working on my RX 6600XT for instance, because Kernel was too old and doesn't even attempt to initialize the card(not even single dmesg line). Maybe the recent Debian works fine, but idk. I could compile latest Linux kernel myself, but I didn't want to go that route.

I was really hoping the Linux only way would work. I am sure there are some Linux guys out there that have done this.

13:18 ain't no way, what a madlad

Just picked one of these up for £100 and I'm stoked. It's much faster than my 3770k and 7970ghz and the size and quietness is fantastic. Always been an apple hater but the aesthetics of this thing are great, and build quality

I would love to see you benchmark a bunch of new-ish games on that Win10 trashcan system.

It would look great with a clear cover.

Sean, it's really funny to see your beard grow throughout the video, showing how long and hard it was to get to something working :P

I wanna see gaming on a ThinkPad with an eGPU, myself. I got it to work on my x200, exactly once. The ultimate Linux gamer experience, surely.

You are a madman... and I LOVE it. :D

That CPU swap has been my favorite one to do. Yes it's a crap ton of work and shouldn't be, but I guess I'm weird and like computers like that. I let my kid drill a hole in the old cpu and put a key ring on it. He thinks it's so cool.

I find it hard to believe that Ubuntu couldn't get that Radeon 6750xt working. I have Linux Mint on my main rig with an Asus Tuf Gaming 6800 OC and Mint recognized it right off the bat and offered to install the correct driver. It has been running like a dream ever since. More than likely it is Apple's fault, not Ubuntu. Apple is notorious for setting up their systems so they don't work with certain 3rd party GPUs. However, Apple used to use Nvidia for their GPUs and for a long time never removed support for Nvidia cards even though they stopped using them. So in the end this doesn't surprise me at all as I have seen it happen with several older Apple systems that myself and others have tried to upgrade.

Good vid, just wanted you to know though there’s a 60Hz hum in the background audio.

I remember when the trash can came out and was always wondering how the hell it was built, given its weird shape. I thought they might have built the whole thing on a large flexible PCB and rolled it up to fit the case.

1:00 I died when you added "Tire" LOLLLLLLLL

Yes, I did the upgrade to 128GBs and yes, it reduces the RAM speed from 1866Mhz down to 1066Mhz. The issue here is not the memory, but rather a technical limitation of the Xeon processor memory controller. However, that is still a lot faster than any swap file even if it on an NVMe storage medium. Everything pretty runs of memory on my 2013 trash can at this point. I also installed an AngelBoard which allows me to install regular M.2 drives. I also have an eGPU, however, the newest MacOS (Mojave) won't allow the use of it. Thanks Apple. They say it because of stability issues which is BS of course. Yes, you won't get the full bandwith the card is capable of (in my case, it is a 5700XT) due to the Thunderbolt 2 port being only capable 0f 20Gb/s vs. TB3 which can do double. However, it could still work with the TB3 to TB2 adapter from Apple. Apple simply wants you to buy a new system (their standard strategy). There is a workaround for this which does not require turning off SIP (system integrity protection). It's called "Kryptonite." It is still a bit of a hassle though.

neat 970 evo. I've got two 1TB units, one in my desktop and one upgraded the gen 2 256gb SSD my laptop came with.

Without its case, the Trashcan looks like something from the Death Star.

LOL, r/linux is going to fire plasma torch from all exhausting orifices. :-))

“Thank spindler”😂

I'm not sure you understand how PSU's work - That PSU in the eGPU enclosure most likely has enough power for the GPU's, its "DEDICATED" to the GPU, doesn't have ANY other Power to supply to anywhere else, all you have to do is make sure that the 12v Rails that are connected to the GPU provide over the wattage the card actually uses at full load. Yes there are TRANSIENT spikes , but you wouldn't encounter that issue until you are actually at LOAD.. you act like it wouldn't power it all all. I have worked with several eGPU enclosures including ones from AliExpress, and used a 500 watt PSU to power a 3080 which pulls close to 350watt at full load. The 12v rails were near its max for that one.

9:35 I found Clorox wipes work great to clean old compound off.

thanks for the video.

This is the level of jank that I subscribed for.

I like how tou intergrated the ad into the theme of the video

just a quick tip the gpu power supply requirements assumes you have one power supply supplying power to the entire computer so the 400w but we fine for any gpu except for like a x900 amd gpu or a xx90 nvidia gpu assuming the gpus max power draw is less then the 400watts the power supply can provide

Man, what a plot twist!

And here I thought I was the ultimate Linux gaming trashcan.