Should You Buy an Intel Arc for Your Media Server?

The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

LINKS:

Follow me:

Support the channel:

Videos are edited with Davinci Resolve Studio. I use Affinity Photo for thumbnails and Ableton Live for audio editing.

Video gear:

Other stuff that I use:

As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases

Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:36 Sponsored message
02:55 Why buy an Arc GPU?
04:42 Test system and initial benchmarks
07:47 Unboxing and installing Intel Arc
09:16 Power draw and ASPM tuning
11:18 Setting up the card in Jellyfin
12:11 Performance in Jellyfin and ffmpeg
13:30 Thoughts and alternatives
15:39 Outro

[WolfgangsChannel]

The first 200 of you will get 20% off Brilliant’s annual premium subscription.

LINKS:

[lukas_ls]

Unfortunately, the PCIe Slot can’t really provide 75W. That’s a common myth but not entirely true.
It’s true but under certain conditions:
The specification rates the Slot at 5.5A on the 12V rail which is only 66W at 12V. But at the same time the 3.3V rail may Provide 3A too which is 9.9W. Therefore in theory the slot could provide 9.9+66W =74.9W but that’s only true when you use both 3.3V and 12V rails simultaneously which is usually not the case on GPUs. GPUs usually only the use 12V input. Implementing circuits to use both 3.3V and 12V just for additional 9.9W max is simply not worth it.

[owlmostdead]

The Arc a380 is still the best GPU for a dedicated streaming build, since the newer iGPU's only support decoding AV1 and not encoding

[lakerssuperman]

I just moved from an iGPU 630 in my server to an A380. While I did it to add AV1 to the mix, it is also significantly faster than the already fast 630 iGPU was with x264 and x265 video.

If your system is otherwise fast and capable the ARC card is an amazing way to cheaply add first class transcoding capabilities to your system.

[DavidHnilica]

man, You're good. That's "exactly" the question I was asking myself when I saw the ARC releases this week. And You got the video in before the end of the week. Well done ;-)

[bne]

While I do have the ASRock A380 in my system too, I just wanted to point out that the Sparkle A380 actually seems to NOT require an external power connector and thus, you should be able to use it even in older office system or with TFX PSUs. Might be harder to find though.

[Ken-ixvx]

The king of power efficient homelabs is here with new information! These types of videos really hit my niche interest spot in.

[pat_e]

I would suggest Tiger-Lake Intel CPU, as Tiger-Lake also enabled HW AV1 - Decoding (which means: you can keep smaller AV1 in your Jellyfin Library and HW-transcode if needed from AV1 to H264 or H265).

[blipboop]

I appreciate the start of this video so much. Although this approach may lose you engagement in the short term, I'm certain it will earn you loyal and dedicated fans, the type who will actually support you on patron etc.

[Vader]

I just found your channel and it's made me a lot more inspired to finally spin up my own media server. Keep up the amazing work.

[poorlyplayedgamer]

I use the Arc A380 as a dedicated encoder for my streaming set up. I use a PowerColor Red Devil rx6900XT as the main card. Does amazingly well. Like, I have not seen dropped frames even testing in streaming 4K content. 10/10 would do again.

[evilspoons]

You should compute total energy used to transcode the movie (as an efficiency benchmark) - I know some people do streaming where encoding happens on-demand, but others will do a pre-rendered lower quality transcode (I'm doing this with Plex at the moment). Average power used in watts times time it takes to do the conversion in seconds gives you joules (or watt-seconds, if you want to call it that.)

I believe there's enough information in your video to work it out from the frame rate and the power figures, but as a future talking point it could be handy.

[Sabbelbacke]

Thanx for the amazing video.
One thing I´d like to add:

The ARC380 Encoders are of much better quality than previous iGPU Encoders (like the Kaby Lake 630 you mentioned) and even better than older Nvidia NVENC Encoders. AMD often is not even worth mentioning...

Stuff like B-frame support was only added a few years ago in HW-Encoders. The dedicated Encoders in GPUs are mostly fast - but have gotten better in terms of encoding efficiency (meaning picture quality compared to bitrate, not power draw in this case) - and intel has included very good encoders.

[wildefyri]

So outside the edge cases you mentioned, it only really makes sense to buy this card if you require / desire AV1 encoding. Good for data hoarders who are trying minimize the amount of disk space a library takes up (plus future proofing their library's) or if you want to do some kind of server / capture card setup when major platforms start supporting AV1 streams

[bobtheunplayer]

The 1W GPU idle is part of the Intel Deep link recipe. Enabling ASPM is one step, but a 12th gen or Intel CPU with and iGPU is needed. The iGPU is set as the default graphics output in the BIOS. The monitor should be plugged into the motherboard graphics output. The 1W idle comes from the GPU doing nothing, not even rendering the desktop. The Intel driver automatically select which GPU to use depending on the rendering workload.

[lspcie]

Every video should have this TLDR intro 👏🏻

[Ilost]

Thanks for the video, I had the same question when it came to arc A380 in a media server use case. I am at 13W idle on a RTX2060 with power tuning and an undervolt. The A380 is surprisingly efficient when not plugged into a monitor.

[nobodyshomeuk]

Could you redo/do some tests with transcoding AV1? It's a place where Arc uniquely shines in terms of price to performance that nothing else seems to come close.

[firenado]

the pcie slot does provide 75W however that's spread across 12v (66w) and 3.3v (9w) so you are capped at lower than 75w and that's why there's a power connector. Bit annoying since 10w lower wouldn't really affect processing power much I would have thought but oh well.

[perpetualtech]

I run an Asrock Intel A380 low profile card in my server to do plex transcoding. Works great and uses minimal power. Very impressed with it.