I set up the PCoIP today and I must say I'm rather impressed with the entire setup. I confirmed with a vendor I work with that I could have a 30 day no restocking fee, so we made the purchase. I just needed remote KVM, everything else was bonus. He said that Mac OS compatibility is a bit off (the sound doesn't work), but I didn't really care about that for my application. I asked about how the host adapter connects to the computer and if they've tried it in any other OS. Then I asked them about other OS compatibility. The EVGA pre-sales rep I spoke with informed me I needed the PCoIP Portal to work with the Host Adapter and not the Zero Client. For those of you not familiar with RHEL5, it's ancient and crusty, but pretty solid. I called EVGA and asked if the PCoIP works with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.5. Also on Teradici's site they feature a few of the other designs other vendors have, but I decided to go with the EVGA product because it seemed to best serve what I was trying to do. They (Teradici) claim there is no OS dependency. Using my Google-Fu I found the startup providing the technology for PCoIP. The Host Adapter seemed to be aimed at Windows computers and VMWare, but alas, the machine in question was GNU/Linux!. Poking about, I thought perhaps I could use the EVGA Host Adapter and then the Zero Client. I happened to get the EVGA email about the Zero Client, and it occurred to me that the product might fix the problem I was trying to solve. That fiber would have been expensive to run, so we felt like we didn't have an option other than trying to baffle the machine and duct it to a fan somewhere else. Those units are about $2k for the pair and then you still need a fiber path. Our final consideration was KVM over fiber. FreeNX supposedly has better compression and renders on the server, so we figured that would have better performance. Secondly, VNC would have really bad performance over the link.

First, VNC has client side rendering, which defeats the purpose of having a decent graphics card in it (which we purchased because we expected to put this in an office). Our initial thought was VNC, but we discarded that because of two reasons. Idling the server never stopped the fan noise, but it occurred to us that even if we fixed the idle fan noise the computer still had to spin up to run modeling simulations, so we needed to find some sort of solution. Quad socket beast with the fan noise to go with it (4U Tower form factor).

I ended up buying the older Host Adapter and Portal client.īasically at work we needed to use a server class machine as kind of a desktop. This is intentionally in the wrong section because the PCoIP section is empty except for the new post for the Zero Client, which is not what I bought. So at work we just picked up the PCoIP and I wanted to post a review for you guys.

Evga pcoip zero client