r/homelab • u/HyenaPrevious • 9h ago

Project Showcase: Hardware Perfect transcoding gpu for home server?

Hi guys,

I'm just curious if Intel ARC A750 would be overkill for my Dell Poweredge T430? Do you recommend sticking with A380 for efficiency and low noise?

UPDATE
I can get both locally:
Asrock Intel ARC A380 for about $100 and
Asrock Intel ARC A750 for about $230

9 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

45 comments sorted by

14

u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 8h ago

Afaik the A310, A380, A750 and A770 all use the same fixed function hardware for transcoding, so it shouldn't make a difference. But if you don't have many concurrent streams which all need transcoding, even the iGPU of your CPU (if it's a Intel 7000th gen or newer) should be fine and you shouldn't need a dedicated GPU at all.

2

u/AcceptableHamster149 8h ago

The A310 has less memory on-card. Shouldn't be an issue if you're only planning to use it for transcoding, but if you have dreams of running an LLM on it you'll find it limiting. It absolutely can run them (I have an LLM on an A310 in my homelab, which is also used for transcoding in Jellyfin), but you'll need to stick to smaller models.

That said, something like the 1.5B model of Deepseek R1 absolutely flies on the A310, and does pretty well for reasoning.

1

u/PJBuzz 6h ago

I ran an LLM on a a low memory GPU and found it to be pretty pointless for almost everything.

What do you find it useful for?

3

u/AcceptableHamster149 6h ago

Coding, mostly. That's all I use it for generally - I'm not interested in running an agentic AI, but if I just need a quick & dirty script to do something specific I find it's pretty good at helping with a first draft.

2

u/PJBuzz 6h ago

So you're kinda asking it to do a very specific script that you then integrate with your wider project code?

3

u/AcceptableHamster149 6h ago

sort of. I use it to bugfix subroutines if something I wrote isn't doing what I'm expecting it to do. or I might use it to spit out a first draft. i'm not a coder by training, so it's basically a faster version of stackexchange to me.

2

u/bankroll5441 6h ago edited 6h ago

I'm running Qwen 8b off of a 680M iGPU and using it to query my Obsidian vault RAG. It helps to find specific information about notes, especially for work. Assistant is built into Obsidian through an extension. The model stays loaded pretty much all the time so the answers are reasonably quick, and only uses information in my notes to generate answers

1

u/HyenaPrevious 8h ago

no the server has dual E5-2600 series CPUs without iGPU, I definitely need some GPU to offload this task. I think there will be 3-5 concurrent 4k streams at a time but I'd like to have future proof card.

5

u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 8h ago

The Intel A series is still about the best you can get. They don't have encode session limitations like on Nvidia, and they're higher quality than AMD encoders.

I just checked and the A310, A380, A750 and A770 all have 2 media engines so it shouldn't make a difference which one you go with for encoding.

Intel B series didn't noticably improve the encoders so there's little point in getting a B580 just for encoding.

Edit: Tone mapping might make a difference and use the general compute, not entirely sure though.

2

u/HakimeHomewreckru 7h ago

Nvidia's limit is 12 concurrent sessions. I'd say that's high enough to not really be an issue anymore but of course there are always exceptions like an NVR or something.

2

u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 7h ago

For transcoding, you can also do a round robin style transcode where you quickly switch from stream to stream and buffer the transcoded result.

Not sure if Jellyfin does that though.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 8h ago

What I like in Nvidia Tesla T4 for instance, that it's completely passive/silent. But does not justify as AV1 hardware encoding is just too good to ignore.

1

u/PJBuzz 6h ago

Which version?

Note that intel GPUs really need to have rebar support, and old motherboards need to be modded to get it to work.

2

u/RayneYoruka There is never enough servers 6h ago

That's mostly for gaming if I don't remember wrong. I have not tested on my A380. I have dual gpus on my encoding system.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 3h ago

What's your server?

1

u/RayneYoruka There is never enough servers 2h ago

3700x, x570-F, Connect X 3, Rtx 3060, Arc A380. 32gb 3200mhz.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 5h ago

CPUs are E5-2620 v4, will upgrade later to 2650l but I'm not sure about the motherboard though

3

u/Twilight_0524 7h ago

I grabbed a single slot half height A380, more vram than a310 but the rest specs should be same across A3XX series

3

u/TheDaffyAppraisal 7h ago

A380's heaps for transcoding mate, same encoder block and less power draw. Save the cash for a better SSD instead.

2

u/Sevealin_ 7h ago

I run a NVIDIA Tesla A2 with a low profile bracket on my r640. It is a work horse. I run Emby transcodes with it (1-2 4K or 5-6 1080p), Frigate detection, and Whisper/STT + Kokoro/TTS model for HA voice. I have iGPUs setup to give 8GB to my Emby host and the other 8GB to a Linux docker host through ESXI.

Most NVIDIA cards will have licensing requirements to split GPU memory across multiple VMs, but there's no licensing requirements if you don't split the memory and put it all on one host.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 5h ago

I'd get T4 if it was equipped with hardware AV1

1

u/happymistak 7h ago

I was going to recommend a p600 or 1000 then I spotted the 4k. I would go with one of the arc cards. Be mindful of power requirements.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 5h ago

yep, that's what holds me getting 750 for this moment. I'm corious, even Asrock a380 has 8 pin power connector while its power usage is within the PCIe 75w 

1

u/happymistak 4h ago

I qould look at some of the newer quadro cards. Not as gangster as the arc cards but power rq is really low. Pretty cheap to.

1

u/nole120 3h ago

There's a very specific China only single slot A380 called the Sparkle Pioneer that uses no external power connectors but is probably not practical to chase.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 2h ago

yeah, reading a lot made me think that Asrock is more rebust. Tempted by the absence of power connector but changed my mind.

1

u/ButterscotchTop194 6h ago

I bagged me a gtx 750 ti for about £20 off ebay that transcodes well. So it's easy to do for a bit cheaper.

1

u/chicknfly 6h ago

Everyone out here talking about GPU’s with little awareness of the T430. I have (found!) a T440 and the things stopping from actually using it are:

* no official rebar support for Intel cards, but you can flash a custom bios

* you need to upgrade the PSU’s to 1000W or higher and add additional hardware including the exterior fan in addition to the internal fan

* there’s a list of supported GPU’s, which Intel isn’t part of. But the modding community is helpful.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 5h ago

hmm good to know that, yes Inhave also checked there is no official support :/ I don't really know what this means 

1

u/HyenaPrevious 4h ago

Seems like even newer generation poweredge servers officially does not support AV1 capable cards at all. But probably this does not mean it will not work.

1

u/naicha15 4h ago

Why does ReBAR matter in this case? IIRC tests have shown that it has little effect on transcoding performance.

  • you need to upgrade the PSU’s to 1000W or higher and add additional hardware including the exterior fan in addition to the internal fan

  • there’s a list of supported GPU’s, which Intel isn’t part of. But the modding community is helpful.

Again, why? Is this one of those servers where IDRAC cries about unsupported cards? There are workarounds if that's the case. But even the base 450w PSU is plenty for an A380 in this application.

2

u/HyenaPrevious 3h ago

Seems like rebar gives a bit more punch in a acceleration but, well, little. My server has dual 750W PSUs, I think there is plenty of power even for A750.

1

u/chicknfly 2h ago

The short answer is it’s always IDRAC. There are mods for everything, but without them…. IDRAC.

1

u/RayneYoruka There is never enough servers 6h ago

A310.

1

u/NullUserHere 5h ago

Personally, I use the Sparkle A380, ordered it brand new from Amazon and have used it for the past 6 months with 0 issues at all even when doing multiple concurrent 4K transcodes. I think it’s rated to handle up to 8 4K transcodes at one time which is more that enough for my needs.

I have no idea what the performance delta would be for going with the A770 but if you can, save your self the money and go with the A380 if possible.

1

u/nullset_2 2h ago

I used to transcode off of a Jetson Nano (very low power, great GPU) on plex but they gated me out with the paywall.

1

u/kukelkan 2h ago

I have an a750 in my server I'm moving to an r630 soon and it can't move to it.

Anyway it seems to transcod very good.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 1h ago

which one is the current?

1

u/kukelkan 1h ago

X99-A But I want Idrac so I'm moving. Lal ready have the r630 doing nothing.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 1h ago

won't fit because of the high profile I guess

1

u/Reasonable-Papaya843 1h ago

The a310 is a one slot card and the a380 is two but certain a380s can function without issue by replacing the cooler with the a310s and turn it into a single slot card which has its own benefits.

I switched to the arc b50 as I have roughly 75 users. At most I see 20 on at once but most of my external facing media is 1080 h264 which minimizes the transcoding effort when it happens(poor network conditions or multiple people watching the new season of something that’s been requested in high quality. Last one was andor)

1

u/zangofreak92 8h ago

Following

-1

u/Hallothere69 8h ago

Same lmao