NVIDIA Tesla M40 - A Gaming and Transcoding DEAL...with a catch

Yeah we all know the GPU market sucks...but what if there was a decent GPU that the scalpers don't care about. Well, the NVIDIA Tesla is that GPU...but it comes with a catch...or two.

SOFTWARE

GUIDES

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My Studio Equipment:

0:00 Intro
0:42 Whats the catch?
2:07 Cooling system
3:15 What to use it for
4:07 The plan
5:28 How to get "video output"
8:06 Cooling performance
8:56 Gaming performance
10:54 Transcoding performance
12:40 Overall Thoughts
14:42 Conclusion

[DavidHansen]

I picked one up on eBay today, and found your video by searching for cooling solutions. :)

I've been wanting one for ever, and been looking for a while now for my media server, and what tipped me over was playing with Stable Diffusion and running out of VRAM on my 2080 Ti. The 24GB Tesla is going in my server with twin Xeon 12-cores and mucho RAM. Super stoked, can't wait to play around with this. 😍

[caseykreicar]

nice video! yeah the most practical application for these cards is video editing with adobe or davinci (or any application that utilizes CUDA cores and huge amounts of VRAM alongside a CPU workload as well). there is a 24gb version also probably more applicable to blender rendering

[everydreamai]

It's a Maxwell chip so it has a pretty early version of NVENC hardware, something software can't really solve and quality will be less than a newer chip. This is the same line of chip as the 900 series desktop cards, though it has more compute and memory than even a 980 Ti, thus being closer to a 1070 in framerate at the cost of 100W more power.

24GB makes it a good option for people who want to play with machine learning. Slow on compute by modern standards (like 1/8th the speed of a 3090) but it will let you create rather large images in AI art creation tools and such with the huge memory footprint.

[bne]

It's crazy that these are $150 or less in the US. You could hook a Kraken G13 to it and cool it with an existing AIO or use a 3D printed fan shroud and a 6000 RPM delta fan to cool it.
In other countries, these are like $500 minimum, so we have to buy the K20X, which have shit DX12 and Vulkan support unlike Maxwell cards :(

[sceancrottynesi]

Your video reached the Italian market! Nice idea and nice workaround for gpu shortages! Thank you!

[Cracko]

Right now you can get them for about ~$65 before shipping and tax.

[brentpolk]

I have a K80 a M40 and a P40. I render with iRay and use Topaz Ai apps along with Ai video upscaling. I love them! Being able to render in the background almost as fast as my 2080Ti is a GOD SEND! I use the "crap" shrouds, but using a server fan without issue.

[GenerativeAI]

Please tell me which version of driver is best for M40 24gb on PC? I couldn't install Nvidia Driver for Tesla. It keeping failed. :(((

[jamesdonnelly]

First vid of yours I have seen and instant fan. Speaking of fans, which type of 40mm fan did you try with the shroud? I have just printed the shroud as I found this. But if you used those little 80ma fans maybe some thicker 180ma ones might do it. Worts case I have a 3A centifuga fan kicking around which will fit ona shroud..I think about $15 for that. Will let you know...

[brentpolk]

I use this card and the P40 to render. Octane and iRay work flawlessly on these.

[castlehill]

This is quite literally the only card which can do what I want that I can afford.

But my concerns over the lack of display outputs and the hackiness of the entire affair really are holding me back (I have zero recourse if something doesn't work). Knowing how some games like Halo Infinite are so finicky with drivers...

[corruptedsmurf]

Honestly, the "Subscribe please" right into the mic gave me a good lol. Subbed.

[zanderfiletaufeis]

You Could also get A Rajintek or a used accelero 4 for cooling this Thing, i cooled it with the 10 years old Scythe Setsugen 2 which was to my surprise compatible and it didnt get that hot it got only 82°c wit the fan running on 5v

[bne]

There are real budget alternatives available. The Tesla M2090 goes for 20-30 bucks frequently. Works for esports titles and has 6GB of VRAM.
The K20X which you can easily cool with a 3D printed fan duct and a Delta PWM fan. Also has 6GB of VRAM and GTX Titan (Kepler) performance at $70 cost. In the current market, that's pretty damn good.

[ahuesphoto]

A new case like Lian Li Lancool 216 with a dedicated fan on the PCIe expansion slots would also work for cooling a passive GPU like Nvidia Tesla and AMD Instinct

[akiresu_x]

I really want to thank you for giving me this option. My GPU is dying and i need a new one, i think this the best option.

[vanloggins]

just bought a 12GB M40 off eBay for 48 bucks. My plans are to install it into my supermicro unRAID server to use for plex transcoding. If successful I plan on upgrading from a Dual Xeon 2695 V2 setup on the super micro board to something a bit lighter on power requirements but still strong enough to handle the rest of the docker containers and VMs that I run on the server.

[cultureshock]

so with one of teh sff ones which go for 85 bucks rn... i can turn my dell 7050 into a server and then use my laptop to game like geforce now... with parsec..or just use the igpu out on my desktop...i may do that i s its worth getting if i am using a rx550 rn...

[ericwills]

I just ordered a m40 the power cable adapter and a Arctic Acc Xtreme iii cooler, do you think a gt240 will work as the display out ?

[WillYork]

Little late on this but isn't the Epyc CPU cost like 14.k? So the value vs cost is kind of alright in my mind. Even out here in 2022.

Your Desktop is about 3k (just off the top of my head) you get 3 minute 800mb files with either cpu or gpu encoding
Your Server CPU is roughly 1.5k and get 8 minute 300mb files
Your Server GPU is around 150 and get 12 minutes almost gig files

I still think a GPU would work great to start this off.

Love the tests though. Made me want to buy a couple of these cards to cram in my server! I don't have epyc processors but I do have dual Xeon so I might try a handbrake test just to see how that works on those as well.