Low power GPU for a FreeNAS server

[zeeshanm]

Hi guys,

I am looking for recommendations on a GPU that is within £20GBP to £50GBP price bracket for use within a FreeNAS machine which will be doing light transcoding. As the FreeNAS server will be on for 24/7 most of the month (as a home server), I need to ensure the idle power consumption is very low for the GPU and that the GPU is fanless.

The machine itself is equipped with a Supermicro X10SLM+-F motherboard, with a Intel Xeon E3-1220v3 3.1GHz and 16GB DDR ECC RAM. The CPU does not have an iGPU.

I have these two GPU cards in mind:

MSI - GeForce GT 710 2 GB Low Profile Video Card -- GT 710 2GD3H LP
Asus - Radeon R5 230 2 GB Video Card -- R5230-SL-2GD3-L

Any other recommendations? Which of the above should I consider? Any pitfalls/negatives I am missing?

[watercooled]

Couldn't you run it headless e.g. over SSH, or do you need a GPU for transcoding or something?

[DanceswithUnix]

Either will do, I would recommend whichever is cheapest.

Note that even big GPUs don't use much power when you are just doing 2D or idle. Heck, my Vega 56 can play Minecraft on maximum settings and it doesn't bother spinning the fans up.

The R5 230 is an old 40nm part, the last server I built had a GT 710 in it and is working very nicely.

[scaryjim]

According to the supermicro specs page for that board (https://www.supermicro.com/products/.../x10slm_-f.cfm) the BMC has integrated graphics, so you shouldn't need an add on card unless you specifically need encoding support or 3D - yo ucan just use the VGA port on the board.

[spacein_vader]

For transcoding it depends what software you're using for it and your use case so some of this might be of no use to you. I use an Emby media server (similar to Plex but open source,) running over Linux and their software (ffmpeg underneath,) works best with 1. Quicksync (Intel) 2. NVENC (Nividia) 3. Everything else for the task. If you're using other software for other use cases that may vary. The quality for all GPU renderers is perceived to be inferior to doing it in software but a lot will depend on your settings.

Nivida GPUs are limited to 2 transcoding streams at once unless you buy one of their Quadro rendering cards, and the GT 710 is a Kepler part, the first gen of NVENC hardware which supports H.264 but will NOT encode H.265.

According to AMDs product page the R5 series doesn't support VCE (Video Coding Engine, their transcoding effort,) at all, so you can discount that.

TL;DR = The AMD one gives you nothing, the Nvidia one is fine as long as you're coding H.264 but be prepared to play around with encoding settings to get a quality you're happy with. Depending on its other workloads that CPU has more than enough grunt to handle some real time transcoding anyway.