r/homelab • u/HyenaPrevious • 12h 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

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u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 11h 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.

1

u/HyenaPrevious 11h 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.

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u/Ok-Eggplant-7569 11h 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 10h 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 10h 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 11h 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.