Should I buy a discrete video card

[dtgoodwin]

First a little background. I am running Windows 2008 Server EE (full install). I have 3 virtual workstations running. A windows 2003 server doing very little at the moment, a XP Pro install running an old Tomcat web process that isn't compatible with Vista, and a Windows Home Server with several add-ons. The first two virtual machines have their virtual storage on the system volume. The WHS is using 4 pass-through drives. The 2K3 server and XP have 1 GB each, while WHS has 2 GB. I am running it on the following hardware:

MSI K9N2GM-FIH - GeForce 8200 motherboard
AMD Athlon 5200+
4x2GB GSkill PC6400 DDR2
2xWD2500KS system drives in RAID1
1xWD5000AAVS WHS system/data drive
2xWD5000AAKS WHS data drive
1xWD10EADS WHS data drive

I do not need more graphical power than the integrated solution provides. My question is that I've never known when you run a headless server and connect via RDP, is the onboard video still rendering output? I know the integrated graphics if used, would be using some of my memory bandwidth. I am wondering if I would gain general system performance by installing a low-end discrete video card. My system is performing well, but there are times when I wish for more performance.

Do you have a suggestion of a video card that has good server 2008 (64-bit) support, as well as very low power consumption/noise?

 

[Slugbait]

ATi (and now AMD) has never supported SRV with their consumer cards: you WILL run generic Windows drivers...which means no dual-display, etc. If you want an ATi card with SRV support, you will buy a FireGL card. On the other hand, nVidia does support SRV with their consumer cards.

But I digress...in answer to your question, I believe that the onboard video does still render output, but only for the machine itself, NOT the TS session. Terminal Services uses the RDP video driver, not the video card drivers.

You can get better performance by upgrading the video card in the client machine. I'm probably wrong, but you might get a boost simply by dropping the server's color depth to 16-bit (or 256 if you don't mind fugly...).

 

[dtgoodwin]

Thank you for the information about driver support - I was not aware of that.

Perhaps I should have stated my desire for more performance a little more clearly. Back in the day of the 815 chipset and slow SDRAM, I remember that synthetic non-video benchmarks showed as much as a 20% increase in system performance by releasing the bandwidth used by integrated graphics when replaced with discrete. I know DDR2 has much higher bandwidth, but as I am using 3 VM's, plus the host OS, I'm sure that there are times when memory bandwidth is heavily used, though admittedly I doubt the impact of integrated graphics as a percentage is nearly as great as it was in the days when memory bandwidth was so much lower.

I don't need any more video performance - I rarely RDP to the server - only about once a week to check it's health. I'm primarily interested in any system performance gains by freeing the memory bandwidth used by the integrated graphics.

I will try hooking up a monitor to the server and setting the video resolution as low as I can, and drop the color depth to 256.