As part of my Homelab, I have TrueNAS Community Edition running in a big case with a bunch of Frankenstein parts including two GTX 1080s. TrueNAS recently phased out support for these older cards and I’ve been having to go through and manually install working drivers, which seem to have gotten overwritten on the last update anyway. Since I’m not actually using anything for video output (and have onboard HDMI if needed). One of the cards I am passing through to a VM (where it has no problem being recognized and used). The other card was used by Truenas for my apps.

Do you have any recommendations for hardware to accelerate tasks like Immich, Jellfin transcoding, media fingerprinting for metadata, OCR on bulk-uploaded pdfs etc.?

I was never really a hardware guy, especially when it comes to self-hosting and servers.

  • I don’t want to play games on my server.
  • I don’t want to empty my accounts to put a 5090 TI in a server.
  • The above tasks are too slow on CPU alone, so I have to put something in it.
  • I could keep running the 1080s with manually installed drivers, but it’s a PITA and I wouldn’t mind not doing that.

Are there reasonable options that can take up the workload, but come in at a decent price point? I know with a server, I don’t necessarily have to run the same stuff as gamers. Are there options outside of the typical NVIDIA and AMD gaming linups that would work for my purpose, perhaps acquirable via FB marketplace, Craigslist, etc.? Does your server have video acceleration and, if so, what hardware are you using?

I appreciate any guidance the community can give me.

  • accideath@feddit.orgEnglish
    5·
    6 hours ago

    I second (third) an Intel ARC card. For the tasks you’ve named it doesn’t even really matter which one, even the smallest one is a transcoding powerhouse, doing multiple 4K transcodes with HDR tone mapping with ease.
    Additionally, Intel drivers are wayyy better on Linux (TrueNAS) than Nvidia’s. Don’t even need to install them. I would go with any one you can get for a decent price, so probably the small A310. It doesn’t even need extra power. Sips like 30W or so.
    If you want an upgrade still, A750s are also reasonably priced on the used market. Don’t get the A380 over the A310 unless they’re the same price. They perform almost identical and the 380 draws more power. Does also have more vram though, if you need that for immich.

    And stay clear from AMD cards. They’re the goat for linux gaming but their video encoders are notably inferior to the other two. Not what you want for Jellyfin.