Personal cloud computers....the future of the desktop?

[wonder_lander]

Would you choose to "subscribe" to a PC vs buy one?

Here's an example of a provider: https://shadow.tech/gben/

Thanks to the Shadow apps, any budget PC, old Mac or smartphone becomes a GTX 1080-powered Windows 10 machine. Start a game in front of the television and finish it on the go. Work with 3D rendering software on a tablet. Give the best you have to give. Anytime.

Your Shadow computer:
CPU
INTEL XEON
8 dedicated threads
GPU
NVIDIA
GTX 1080 or equivalent
STORAGE
256GB
Secured
MEMORY
12GB
DDR4
Ultra fast fiber included - 1Gb/s down and 100Mb/s up.

Free component upgrades. For life.

Windows/MacOS/Android/iOS apps available.

£26.95 per month

I'm going to give one a trial as I often need to render videos via adobe premiere and my ultra portable 2 in 1 doesn't have the grunt to do it locally.

Anyone else used one?

 

[ian]

It might work for editing, but surely for gaming (as they advertised), the latency would be a problem! Interesting though, let us know how you get on.

 

[dee]

Yeah cant see it working for gaming due to latency either. I use amazon workspaces for a couple things and its reliant on your connection for interface obviously. It works, but theres no way you could game on it. For background rendering etc it would be perfect though. You can log off but its still "on"

 

[Edwin]

There was a similar idea tested on the Gadget Show a few weeks back. Wasn't a comprehensive test, but in the brief spin they took it was obvious that latency killed any chance of decent gameplay (although the system was advertised on the basis that it was pefect for cloud gaming)

 

[wonder_lander]

Obviously, Nvidia think they've nailed the gaming experience with GeForce NOW so it will be interesting to see how Shadow performs.

I've got a code for £10 off for the first month and can cancel before 14 days for money back, otherwise it's the £26.95 per month rolling.

I'm not really a gamer but I'll try and install something and see how it works out!

Activation was instant on sign up, that's good as it said 5 days on the sign up page!

 

[Edwin]

GL with it. Curious to hear how you fare. On the programme, they were testing multiplayer FPS games and the lag was enough to put the testers at a marked disadvantage compared to people gaming normally (i.e. on local PCs)

 

[wonder_lander]

Local internet speed is very solid.

Got Photoshop installed, adobe premiere pro currently installing

 

[ian]

Presumably you have to use your own software licenses and it installs to their hard drives?

 

[wonder_lander]

Yup, so the first thing you do is download a client app that you can then launch your box from.
You then go through a fresh windows 10 install as you would on any new PC.
Once up and running you've got the spec available as above.

Install your own software and games as required and you're good to go.

 

[Systreg]

I can't sign up as Ireland isn't listed on the sign up page, but out of interest, on the site, it says:

For all connections
Shadow is fully compatible with Fiber, DSL, 4G, Ethernet and Wifi. Starting from just 15 Mbps.

I take that to mean that I'd need at least a 15 Mbps connection speed at my end to be able to use it? If so, even if Ireland was available, my internet speed here is only, download 5.41 Mbps - upload1.52 Mbps

 

[wonder_lander]

I'm running it currently over 4G at 60Mbps and it's slick.
The client app has bandwidth from 5Mbps upwards and also has a low bandwidth H.265 mode.

 

[Systreg]

I only have a 3G signal here, and sometimes it only gets 3G outdoors, not indoors at all. The thought was if I could have signed up to this Shadow service, I could have then subscribed to FilmOn.com for a month, and used the fast streaming of Shadow to watch the World Cup on FilmOn, oh well, looks like I'll have to make do with very laggy and buffering 3G

 

[dee]

Surely though the bottle neck for you is your end ? I don't quite get how it will work when your going to have to upload any video projects via your connection to the Shadow server ? I do lots of video / audio stuff myself and it would be too slow to even consider unless very small projects.Unless your just rendering 'non real' files , so CGI stuff ?

 

[wonder_lander]

My bottle neck is a powerful enough computer to work with video and render it out.
I use Google Docs for dumping the raw footage then once it's cloud based it's available on the Shadow box.

 

[dee]

My bottle neck is a powerful enough computer to work with video and render it out.
I use Google Docs for dumping the raw footage then once it's cloud based it's available on the Shadow box.

Okay. Cool. Must be manageable project sizes then. Everything I see is in the order of hundereds of GB. Couldnt imagine having to deal with the cloud .

 

[wonder_lander]

No, mine's only for our local news website so a lot shorter stuff than that....no epic blockbusters )

 

[wonder_lander]

So far so good, using the virtual PC as my daily driver for the past 24 hours.

Not laggy for windows stuff or video editing.
Tested on 4G connection and good, also fibre.
Handy having the same desktop available from different devices

Installed steam and Grid 2 and Fortnite, not had chance to test those yet.

Downsides/Things of note:
No copy and paste between local and remote
The server is in France so you get a French IP. GeoIP is "coming soon"
No iPlayer therefore and VPN's aren't recommended to allow you to "appear" English.
256GB space isn't huge, no upgrade available for more space at the moment but it's another "coming soon". There is a workaround to add more storage by subscribing to another service and mapping a network drive

 

[Edwin]

I presume there’s no way to save things locally if you’re working on the remote machine, so you have to trust their file system?

Or is there a sync mechanism of some kind to provide resilience and backup?

 

[wonder_lander]

I presume there’s no way to save things locally if you’re working on the remote machine, so you have to trust their file system?

Or is there a sync mechanism of some kind to provide resilience and backup?

Not sure, I just use Google Drive as way of syncing stuff between their server, the cloud and any other PC I sign into Google Drive on

 

[Edwin]

That sounds workable enough.