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.
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