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.
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Intel A310 is a good performer for its price. It’s physically fairly small and most don’t have enormous, noisy fans. Really good for transcoding tasks.
The only place they fall short is memory - they’re a bad candidate if you want to locally run an LLM model, for example. If that’s not one of your expected needs, check them out!
My NAS/Jellyfin server runs on a PC with a GTX 1070ti. It used to struggle umder Win10but since I migrated to a minimal Debian 13 + Docker install, it can handle everything I can throw at it without breaking a sweat.
An Intel CPU with quick sync support igpu
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.
What CPU are you running? If you’re running an Intel CPU, most transcoding can be done using Intel QAT. Not sure metadata or OCR, as I’ve never needed large scale for these.
Otherwise, I 2nd what everyone is saying about Intel ARC GPUs. I saw an A750 for sale for $80 refurbished with a 2 year warranty on eBay the other day, so the older first gen ARC cards sometimes pop up for cheap.
I’ve never used TrueNAS and don’t know how your infrastructure is set up, so I have no idea how difficult migration would be, but switching to a different OS that supports your cards would be free.
Could look into Incus or Proxmox.
I’ve considered Proxmox, and know a few people who use it, but I think the added features, complexity, learning something new, might be too much for me right now. There’s a lot going on in my life, in my family and in my country and my human operating system is struggling to free up resources. Long term though, this is the goal. I don’t know if I have the drives lying around to build a new machine and migrate everything at the moment anyway. If I recall correctly, Proxmox doesn’t use ZFS. Migrating truenas is theoretically as easy as backing up my config file and password seeds and reinstalling, it seems to just pick up the hardware on the next boot. I’m just not sure if I have options outside the typical gamer cards like RTX.
Proxmox or Incus can use ZFS, but i doubt you’d be able to directly move your container datasets from TrueNAS. You’d most likely have to rebuild the containers and/or move application configs/dbs. If you keep static data in datasets (your video media for instance), those will transfer over fine.
Proxmox might be overkill especially if you’re not using high availability features. I only use it on one of my machines because switching is too much hassle, but every new system I set up uses Incus on top of regular Debian.
For a big migration, you can use a cheap VPS for compute + Backblaze for a ton of cheap storage to help. For instance you could install TrueNAS on the VPS, move all your stuff over to the cloud temporarily, wipe your local hardware and install Incus, then move your containers back to your hardware. The other option is to do the opposite and set up the new environment in the cloud, then when its setup, wipe your local and move your new OS to on-prem.
But yeah this would be a time/research investment, rather than the monetary investment of just upgrading your cards.
You can lock unsupported drivers from being wiped at each upgrade, but I can highly recommend intel cards if you’re looking to switch to something with less maintenance. Sriov works a charm and they’re decent value for the money.
Rtx3050? Should be supported for a little while, and seems to be around $300AUD. Probably still overkill for a NAS though.
A bit, I would have to weigh the cost of a $100 GTX 1660 vs a $300 GTX 3060 (US, based on my local used prices). $100 might buy me a few years, $300 might buy me a few more years, but could also buy me a dud or a burnout card. I think I might give the weaker card a try and save the money so I can avoid a mortgage the next time I need to upgrade a laptop. :D
I’m not sure about AMD but for Nvidia it can matter which generation of NVENC and NVDEC chips you have, as well as the number of them. Myself, I use the P400 which is pretty much a 1050.
If you don’t need to update the drivers per se for it to work I would suggest freezing updates. Drivers won’t change anything about the raw GPU power anyway. They usually just fix game compatibility.
https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-support-matrix
Thanks for the suggestion. I looked into the P series cards a bit and here is what I found:
The NVIDIA 50-series Blackwell cards require the use of the new open GPU kernel module, but several of NVIDIA’s older generations of GPUs - including the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations - lack the GPU System Processor (GSP) module on their silicon in order to leverage the open kernel module, and thus will no longer function. This includes the GTX 700-series, 900-GTX series, GTX 10-series, the Quadro M-series and P-series, and Tesla M-series and P-series cards.Looks like the 16xx is the lowest cards supported by TrueNAS without extra work. There’s a few used 1660s in my area for ~$100. I might give that a try. If it doesn’t work out, I won’t be despairing for weeks about a $100 card, and if it does work, I’ll replace one of the 1080s with a 1660 for TrueNAS to use as an apps card and leave the other 1080 to pass through to the VM for Home Assistant. That said, I’m still open to options, so if anyone thinks I’m silly for considering this, tell me what you think.
The A2000 came up as an option a few times. It’s more expensive and mildly more capable, though a commenter on that loser Spez’s site said they had stability issues due to it being a workstation card. I’m not playing games, so I may not run into the same issues.
The 16xx (Turing) are the same chips as the 20xx big without Ray Tracing capability. The Quadro T600 may be found cheaper than the 1660Ti since the latter is still is very popular gaming card. I’m still not 100% sure what you really need a GSP for in your setup and I really don’t know why you’d need any gpu to run Home Assistant unless you are running a local LLM as a speech assistant
For best performance vs cost Intel graphics cards are a good deal, specially since Intel is the standard for things like transcoding. But keep in mind that their drivers are not up to the level of the others although they are improving.
But unless you are levering a serious level of cuda processing, honestly any card that is 5 years old will cost just a few hundreds and it will outperform the 2 cards together for transcoding / media processing.
But newer cards will dot it with a fraction of the energy (always keep an eye on that…)
