What's the BEST Low-Profile GPU for your Home Lab?

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🎥 Curious About the equipment I use to make my videos?
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Music (in order):
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
0:52 Sponsor - RAID members
1:24 Why This Video?
2:05 Nvidia RTX A2000
2:40 RTX 3050 6GB
3:36 Nvidia T1000
3:58 Quadro P620
4:39 Intel Arc A310
5:20 Integrated Graphics and Test System
7:08 Idle Power Draw
8:03 Jellyfin transcoding
11:34 FFmpeg
12:49 Handbrake CLI
13:48 Object Detection Using YOLOv5
14:30 3D Rendering with Blender
16:16 Price and Value
19:28 Other Considerations
21:24 My Takaways

[jburnash]

This is EXACTLY something I've been wondering about - especially if any of these would help with transcoding - or local AI

[pixel_vengeur]

No way you used the 3D printed PCIe display stand I put on Printables for the GPUs, I'm so surprised to see it in the wild.
Thank you <3

[OmegaoftheEnd]

The Raid Shadow legend joke was amazing, made my day.

[adam_knocks]

I snagged an arc A380 low profile for $110 a few months ago for my Plex server. Thing is a transcoding beast and only pcie power required. The few bucks more for the few extra gigs of GDDR6 ram really is worth it when the family is streaming multiple videos.

[jafizzle]

AV1 is honestly a game-changer in my opinion. I got an A380 for $110 and the performance in Jellyfin is excellent and the AV1 streams it produces look genuinely amazing. At one point I was comparing different stream resolutions in Jellyfin and it seemed like the resolution wasn't changing, then I realized that it WAS changing but was having trouble seeing it because I was looking for compression artifacts rather than resolution. I am so used to associating low resolution with compression artifacts (blockiness) that seeing 720p or 480p without compression artifacts genuinely broke my brain for several minutes.

So basically, if you're looking for a GPU for your media server, I'd really recommend prioritizing one that has AV1 enc/dec. Intel has made AV1 very accessible.

[CarlosMonteros]

Really useful video! Many of the issues you were having with the Intel A310 is probably due to the lack of Resizable BAR on your motherboard/CPU. Transcoding still works great (I currently have a $110 A380 in my Jellyfin server) but any 3D rendering will suffer or fail.

[samiraperi]

My first checks for getting the A310 transcoding to work on Ubuntu: 1) kernel version, 2) necessary firmware bundles. And if you have jellyfin installed it has its own version of ffmpeg. But I dunno, I'm running it on Debian testing and it just works after I installed the necessary bits.

[Sam_Koch]

As a German I do love the efficiency angle of this video. Our power is expensive so I am currently using a N100 mini PC that takes care of all my transcoding. The idle power and full system power of it is unbeaten.

[wredia]

Literally have spent hours looking at different models and guides regarding low profile cards that don’t need a power supply connector. This is a great resource! Thanks!

[fedfer]

I loved seeing Arc being finally included into these benchmarks but I would have really loved to see the A380 perform against the other cards instead of the A310, especially considering its price point is much closer to the other cards. I think some of the problems you had on Arc could've been solved through some tinkering with the linux kernel but that's not really straight forward ( I'm saying this cuz I've heard of people getting the A380 down to 1W reported power consumption ). Also I would've loved some AV1 decoding benchmarks! Considering that's one of Arc's biggest strengths.

[Heavy-C]

Perfect timing. Setting up my first server as we speak!

[hgghyxo]

I believe the mentioned i5 and i7 has the same integrated iGPUs, so should really matter which one you tested, however would nice to see a comparison between iGPUs at this point, as it seems like a very suitable choice just for jellfin

[Ivanos]

Yes the A310 is indeed "made for" home plex and jellyfin servers if you ask me. But i also found out, there is also a very low powered version of the A310. That has a base clock of 1ghz. Think it was also the sparkle.

[darrellgeorge]

Bro were you in my search history this morning?

[SvRider]

I got a Tesla P4 for $75 and the cool part about it is that it has 2 encoder chips on the card. It also runs off the PCIE slot so no power cables. The downside is I had to 3d print a shroud to use a blower fan into it to lower temps since no built on fan. Works great though.

[cooperised]

Fun fact, at 15:50 "samples/minute per watt" is actually measuring energy per sample, or rather its reciprocal. Divide by 60 for samples per (watt second), which is the same as samples per joule. 1 divided by that gives joules per sample.

Doesn't tell you anything different, of course. I just like the way these units work!

[kendrakirai]

Something to remember about putting a gaming class card in your server is that you are leaving almost all of that performance on the table. The encode/decode parts are separate from the general processing parts, so you're paying for performance you may never use, on top of the far greater power draw.

[Chris.Brisson]

I recently purchased (for $123) a new Nvidia T400 for use as my daily driver (an upgrade from Intel 14500's UHD 770). I'm not a gamer, so integrated graphics is generally powerful enough for my typical usage (fine for triple 2K monitors playing YouTube videos), but performance with a few dozen Chrome tabs open is noticeably improved with the T400. The T400, which employs the TU117 (same chip as the GTX 1650 and the T1000), benchmarks more than 50% faster than the UHD 770. The card's 4GB of dedicated GDDR6 video memory makes a difference.

I did not want to heat up my office space, so I sought a low-power card, and the T400's 30W max power draw ticked the box. I had built my PC nine months ago with the intention of using only the integrated graphics, and finding a suitable motherboard with triple display outputs really constrained my options. Desirable motherboards generally offered at most two video outputs. Had I known that I'd be using a T400, I would have selected a more sophisticated motherboard with Thunderbolt, not caring about integrated video ports.

[matthewbanville]

Thanks for this video, my first PC was a Tandy 1000 TL/2. Loved that machine!

[noscpe]

0:52 When I heard Raid Shadow, I almost skipped ahead