Recommendation for single slot graphics card

[dreunion61]

What I need is single slot GPU, there is absolutely no space for more in my case. I wanted to buy an nvidia T400 card but the guide says an Arc is much better and GTX1650 is actually not recommended which has the same NVENC engine as the T400. What is the reason? The alternative would be the newer nvidia A400 but the hardware guide seem to focus entirely on Intel GPUs.

Therefore according to the hardware guide the only option left is the "Sparkle Arc A310 ECO", which is the only single slot Intel Arc GPU I assume? But that seem to have firmware issues with its FAN curves, essentially it is switching only between 0% and 100%.

Or is there any other single slot GPU I'm overseeing.


What my planned system is:

jellyfin server on CentOS Stream inside a VM (with GPU passthrough), the host will be FreeBSD, the hypervisor bhyve.

[TheDreadPirate]

What I need is single slot GPU, there is absolutely no space for more in my case. I wanted to buy an nvidia T400 card but the guide says an Arc is much better and GTX1650 is actually not recommended which has the same NVENC engine as the T400. What is the reason? The alternative would be the newer nvidia A400 but the hardware guide seem to focus entirely on Intel GPUs.

Where do you see that the GTX1650 is not recommended?  It is a perfectly good GPU for encoding.  Having said that, if I were buying a GPU specifically for encoding, I'd get the Arc GPU.  It is cheap, Intel Quick Sync is the gold standard for hardware accelerated encoding, and they support AV1 encoding.

Therefore according to the hardware guide the only option left is the "Sparkle Arc A310 ECO", which is the only single slot Intel Arc GPU I assume? But that seem to have firmware issues with its FAN curves, essentially it is switching only between 0% and 100%.

Or is there any other single slot GPU I'm overseeing.

The fan curve might be an issue for gaming, but should be fine for encoding.  Much much lower power draw.  I can't speak from personal experience, but I haven't heard about issues with the Sparkle A310's fan curve.

What my planned system is:

jellyfin server on CentOS Stream inside a VM (with GPU passthrough), the host will be FreeBSD, the hypervisor bhyve.

......No.  Why this configuration?  We don't support CentOS, or any Redhat based distro.  Nor do we support FreeBSD.  We don't have any guides for this configuration due to the lack of support.

This configuration is asking for a hard time.

[dreunion61]

Where do you see that the GTX1650 is not recommended?  It is a perfectly good GPU for encoding.  Having said that, if I were buying a GPU specifically for encoding, I'd get the Arc GPU.  It is cheap, Intel Quick Sync is the gold standard for hardware accelerated encoding, and they support AV1 encoding.

Here: https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/admini...d-graphics

• Graphics: Intel Arc A series or newer, Nvidia GTX16/RTX20 series or newer (Excluding GTX1650), AMD is NOT recommended.
  

The fan curve might be an issue for gaming, but should be fine for encoding.  Much much lower power draw.  I can't speak from personal experience, but I haven't heard about issues with the Sparkle A310's fan curve.

On the Intel and reddit forums buyers are all enraged at that card it seems. There is still no fix.

......No.  Why this configuration?  We don't support CentOS, or any Redhat based distro.  Nor do we support FreeBSD.  We don't have any guides for this configuration due to the lack of support.

This configuration is asking for a hard time.

CentOS is no problem, I'm already running one server on Fedora including NVENC fully working. Everything needed is provided in the rpmfusion repo.

[TheDreadPirate]

Ok.  I got clarification regarding the GTX1650.  Nvidia has multiple variants of the GTX1650 with the same model number but some variants have different NVENC encoder/decoder generations.  In addition to some models having GDDR5 vs GDDR6 with no way to differentiate for either what kind of GDDR or what NVENC generation a GTX1650 will have. So it isn't that they are unsupported or something. It has to do with the uncertainty of what you will actually get.

   

Do the reddit and Intel forum threads mention whether they upgraded their A310's firmware?  I vaguely recall a firmware update modified fan curves.

The A380 also has a half height model.  But I am not sure if it is a single slot or not.

Regarding the rest of your setup, the only thing I can recommend is to make sure that the version of FreeBSD you are running has drm-62-kmod and newer.  My understanding is that FreeBSD ports Linux kernel drivers and Intel Arc requires Linux kernel 6.2 and newer for kernel driver support.

[dreunion61]

Thanks for the clarification, does that mean NVENC 6th gen and older is not recommended? The T400 is also 6th gen.

Regarding FreeBSD I will probably not run jellyfin bare metal on FreeBSD but in a Fedora Server virtual machine (CentOS doesn't seem to have uptodate jellyfin packages). On FreeBSD the latest available drm drivers seems to be kernel 6.1 based (drm-61-kmod).

[TheDreadPirate]

I have not used VMs with GPU pass-through. I'm am not certain if the host needs to be have the proper GPU drivers to be able to pass through to the VM. Keep that in mind if you have issues.

The difference between 6th and 7th gen NVENC is minor (no HEVC b-frames when encoding). I think the non-recommendation for GTX1650's has to do with not enabling this anti-consumer behavior.