Single Slot. Single Slot. Single Slot!!!!!! When you're trying to keep from spreading out onto multiple servers, its a killer to buy a GPU that renders 2 or 3 slots on your 7 slot ATX server board unusable. The fact that it is cheap and efficient is huge as well. I hope they sell a million of these.
Yep. Single slot low profile. It'll fit into my 1U server. It's 100% on my list to buy this year. I'll make the money back on my power bill when me Xeon's aren't cranking away.
You forgot to mention a crucial spec for this card. "PCI Express Configurations: PCI Express 4.0 x8" Nice to know we can slap this in a x8 slot if i needed to.
Keep in mind if you want to add this as a second gpu to your machine, then you must keep in mind that some motherboards cut the available lanes between the highest and second to highest x16 slots. Each would get x8 lanes.
4 หลายเดือนก่อน +14
To my knowledge, any GPU currently on the consumer market can run on an 4.0 8x slot. Even with a 4090, you only loose about 0.5 to 1% of performance, if used with an 4.0 8x pcie connection.
I don't do video editing but just for plex i bought a mini computer with a n100 (intel quicksync) & I have been more than impressed. Very small, sips power, & is a powerhouse for transcoding for plex. They are anywhere between $150-$200.
If you got the asrock n100 board. You should combo it with this card. Sure you add another 20-25W on load, but the idle performance is great. Like 1 or 2 watts more.
@@Valthonis because I want to play some video games too. Seeing icebergs tech video on gamming performance on the N100, is lacking. Unless your OK playing pre 2004 games. . Also, i want a gamming/media production computer that uses less than 70w or less in power. (this includes monitor, Blu-ray drive/nas and power inefficiency from power supply) I want to have this computer hooked up to a 80-120w solar panel, and make it my primary computer. Although I may just use a rx6400 if I don't care about gpu transcoding/encoding. Slightly more power inefficient, from what I've seen. But not sure if extra performance is worth it. Tried rx6300 and it would have worked, but it's 32bit bus makes most 3d games I tested get 15-35 fps. Where as a 6400, I can get 45-60fps on 3d games I tried.
Do you have a dual gpu config? I was planning to replace my pcie wifi card with the A310 and wondering if i could stream with A310 while gaming with my 6700xt
I have an A380 in my Dell PowerEdge T330 server that I use for Plex. It's a champ! I want to get the A310 cooler and swap it onto the low profile dual slot Sparkle A380 and life would be perfect.
would've been great to highlight that decoding and encoding are two different beasts. Many GPUs support decoding a variety of codecs, but not necessarily the encoding. Transcoding requires decoding AND encoding, which is what makes the A310 a class act. It's a single slot, 50W GPU that can encode/decode AV1 at will.
Did you do any idle power consumption testing? First gen arc is notorious for high idle consumption, and that really takes away from the $99 price tag in expensive energy regions :(
I have this exact card in my Unraid server. Just waiting for Unraid to update to 6.13 since the current linux kernel doesn't support it. It's coming very soon though so I am excited to use this card for my Plex server!
Thanks for this! I had been eying this for a low power trans-coding solution, but watching ETA prime's videos on it didn't really help for this specific use case. If I'm not mistaken, it uses a 8x PCIE, so hopefully no bi-furcation issues on older boards.
An x8, x4, or even x1 card will work in an x16 slot of the motherboard without bifurcation support. Where you run into trouble without bifurcation support is mostly things like cheap PCIe to quad m.2 adapters. Without bifurcation support, such adapters will only support a single m.2 SSD because the PCIe slot only supports one device regardless of how many lanes that one device is using.
I'm already running one of these in my homeserver to support the aged xeon E5 ivy bridge cpu with some hardware transcoding in jellyfin. It's running in a linux vm on TrueNAS. Works like a charm and i'm verry happy with it. the only negative thing is the fan. it's not loud but a little bit annoying. I wish the card were a little big bigger so it would fit a bigger fan. But it's single slot, low power and supports av1 and therefore it is the best card for my media server.
I also have both these GPUs. Still waiting on unraid to support it!! Also Jellyfin!! I quit running plex when it won't work without Internet for local content.
Asrock has their A310 also at $99. The big issue is that unless you have a quadro, all of the consumer Nvidia cards are limited to the number of streams. The 380 is the sweet spot (IMHO) but more most users the 310 is perfect.
Got one of these in the mail to throw into a truenas build. Though pass through support to plex requires the next version of truenas w/ kernel 6.2+ coming in version 24.10 in Oct / Nov
When it becomes available in Europe i will be getting one. I have no need for anything to do heavy gaming on, but want something low power, and that only occupies a single slot.
Please adjust your completely arbitrary numbers for the HEVC, its 2 or 3 times higher in efficiency even at real time processing if your cpu does it, AV1 is the problem, barely any CPUs or GPUs do encode on a HW level, unless you wanna go Intel ARC
It's a nice little market for them, for sure. They could carve another niche if they managed to get good Tensorflow/PyTorch support and put out 16/24GB mid tier cards at a reasonable price, as high ram mid gpu is a battleground nobody entered yet, and many ML enthusiasts would love to have larger models without the "premium cost" of the high end gpu, and at least Nvidia, doesn't seem to care about "budget users" anymore. How the wheels have turned...
Don't even dare to leave us out from that Arc race project. You'll show it to us in the future and I'll be the best clicker with extensive training since yesterday!
Thanks for showing this! Been thinking of getting an A350 for my server, however, I guess the A310 is absolutely sufficient. As for my main machine, I might pick up one, too. Currently rocking the RTX 3090 (got it right after the crash for a good price) which is definitely not a bad card. The only problem: It can't transcode AV1 which is a shame. I'd probably plug in another 310 for AV1 contents. I just love the efficiency of AV1 and I guess, for most of my recordings and stuff, AV1 will suffice. Definitely an add for me. At least one of them :D Will be used for Jellyfin, immich & automagic timelapses from my terraria. One question, though, have you tried it with some kind of machine learning workloads? Specifically something along the lines of FrigateNVR or plain image recognition? I know, cards like the A770 would be better suited however, I'd also be interested in how this card holds up.
I added an A330 to run the audio raytracing in Sector's Edge not straining the main gpu. Can load a lot more sources with more bounces then just the gpu inside the cpu.
Great video In the beginning you talk about how different codecs effect the transcoding of a video, but I think you should have mentioned something about containers as well (mp4, mkv etc) At 4:56, when you asked us to pause the video, notice that the blue label on the graphs for h264 incorrectly says h254.
I had problems with Resolve on my new rx 7800xt, I got an Arc A310 for 70€ and it's really good. For gaming however, it's on par with my old RX 570 4GB (tested on God Of War: 30-40FPS on lowest settings)
Great video. i believe their new laptop cpus also contain these hardware encoders. Intel gpus are the best bang for the buck right now for these use cases.
I had a long RMA wait, and saw the A770 for $300... I was using it for gaming... It was actually really impressive! Especially for the price. The fact that Intel is more used to making integrated graphics is obvious though, CPU utilization is higher than an AMD or Nvidia card. Paired with a strong CPU, I'm impressed.
legend!! i been looking for something smaller than my RTX3060 i have in there now, i may have found it. I was also considering a nvidia tesla P4 with the fan mod on the end, as it has dual encoders, for simultaneous encoding, is single slot with no power also. decisions decisions.
Heard the sparkle arc cards have issue with fan speed curve. Got me an asrock A380 for that extra quality boost (but still low power). Wish we had more single slot options.
Can confirm. I have this card and the fan cycles on and off every 10-20 seconds when idle. You can clearly hear it if you're in the same room, so it's really annoying. If you're running Windows you should be able to control it in software, but Arc cards don't have temperature or fan monitoring on Linux yet. I ended up soldering a cable from a case fan to it so it could be run off the motherboard instead. Don't have any way of knowing whether it's overheating, but it's been running great for transcoding since.
For jellyfin I got a 12600 i5 for quicksync transcoding using the HD770 iGPU and it's great. 3 watts when transcoding and no need to use up a PCIe slot.
I would love to see the comparison video. I’m rocking my old gtx 970 in my Homelab, and I would love to see how some modern gpus compare for Plex transcoding
If you can spare a tiny bit more space, the a380's actually not too bad at casual gaming. FF7R was running at about 40fps@1080. Or was it 1440p... Can't remember. Anyways, for the price, super good!
What's the idle power consumption of this in a headless server if used just for transcoding? I had old gaming GPUs in my server but they'd be using 20W not connected to anything or doing anything so I eventually ditched them...
Great material ! Thank you. Can you please do tests with mainstream motherboard like intel chipset one with main pcie gpu for example nvidia and this intel as secondary in programs and few monitors? Would be awesome vid also in terms of performance - pcie lanes, frames in games on main gpu meanwhile work in blender on secondary gpu. Thanks!
Question: The a380 by Sparkle is dual slot and also doesnt need external power. Outside of single slot, what would be the advantages of the a310 > a380?
AMD will give you Rebar on PCIe 3 with B450 / x470 and I believe Ryzen 3 3100 was the least to support SAM and Rebar for Ryzen, Intel may not be able to do it on PCIe 3 with Rebar without hacking it. x470 will even support my RTX 3070 with Rebar on in PCIe 3.
My understanding is that you need resizeable bar in order to take advantage of AV1. Did you test that? Since my supermicro board doesn't have it, I can't take full advantage of an Arc card for plex.
I'm not sure how relevant it is, however for 10 bucks more you can get an ARC A380 this allows you to do some more complex tasks if you wanted to. I have a hard time trying to justify an A310 because of that.
my UnRaid box has a Ryzen 9 5950x with Nvidia Quadro P400 for transcoding video in plex found that GPU on ebay new open box it smokes at its duty. nice gpu
I built a video live and editing streaming rig. I built an Intel 12th gen I7k PC with a Arc A770 15g system I think the CPU was good due to the mobo with thunderbolt on it. May be that would have been better combo if I would have used my RTX 3070 and just added a Arc A310 or A380 card which would have still gave awesome streaming and editing power. They say that A770 16gb card os awesome for streaming and editing. I just wanted something new I could afford not to game on but for just streaming and editing.
The question I have is how this gpu would handle transcoding 90mbps+ 4k HDR/DoVi Remux to 1080p with tone mapping. If it can handle at least 3 concurrent transcoding streams like that, sign me up.
Hey @raidowl Do we have a number of 1080p and 4k streams that it can transcode in plex/jellyfin, would be interested in knowing if this would more efficient than a p2000
I was getting into despair with the thought that the ARC380 would not fit into my Dell Optiplex 5090 SFF PC, and then AHHHHHHH!!! here you are with the baby brother. You are a God send! Let me know though, if you think ARC380 would fit into my Dell Optiplex 5090 SFF PC. If it can, make an affiliate link for me to use. Thank you.
If it’s a dual slot then the a380 will fit. Otherwise snag the a310. You can use any affiliate link and then just browse to the item in that same session and I get the kick back. Just fyi haha.
At this price point for transcoding, I still prefer the Tesla P4 with 8GB memory. I have three in my Plex server on Unraid and the entire lot can be seen by docker containers; the nvidia-smi functionality even allows for auto-balancing the load. Each card uses around 60 watts and has dual NVENC units, leading to considerably more overall performance in H264/265
Totally agree, I have both cards and both are great but for only 10-20 bucks more the A380 is just the best value you can get at the moment New Drivers are awesome and work like a charm. One point the A310 gets, low profile AND single slot. I couldn't find a true single slot A380 yet, only 1 1/2 slot designs and that might take the edge in some cases (pun intended)
@Mentheus that's the main problem with the a380 and why I had to go with the a310. No single slot options besides a really expensive version by a company who makes commercial solutions. The asrock low profile is still a two slot card. The sparkle has a single slot.
Anyone who wants to use this card on Unraid: Until 6.13 comes out, you need to use Thor's custom kernel with the drivers added. Easy file swap, plenty of tutorials out there. Once you have that in place you can pass the card through to your media serving container of choice.
This seems to be just what I need for my media server. Wonder how well it works with Truenas Scale and Jellyfin though. I'm currently using a RX 480 since I had that laying around but Jellyfin keeps falling back to CPU encoding.
That is because the encoder/decoder on Polaris cards is objectively not very good. I am not sure about jellyfin, but plex doesn't even support the AMD encoder because of its historical lack of quality/performance. Also, as far as I know, there are some extra steps you have to jump through to get hardware transcoding working on jellyfin. AFAIK what hoops you have to jump through depends on what platform you are installed on.
The Arc A310 is back in stock at Amazon as I write this (6/12/2024), if anyone wants one. I'll be using it in an MS-01 running ESXi and passing it through to a Windows Plex VM.
Now if only one day Power DVD would support AV1 codec play back. Yeah, I know VLC does, but for my home theater surround sound system Power DVD looks a little better and the sound is definitely better.
There is some but mileage may vary. I personally found this card to be slower than my 1060 I wasn’t able to get the AV1 encoder working -yet but maybe when drivers come out as it becomes more poular
Thanks for the info, didn't know this was available.. living under a rock here. So what are the uses for the other Sparkle cards? A310 Elf, A370 Elf, A380 GENIE, A580 Orc, A750 ORC OC, A750 Titan OC & A770 Titan
Great video! I am using this card right now and it is working great for Jellyfin/Plex. Have you tried it with Handbrake/Tdarr? I cant seem to get it working for those containers in my Proxmox LXC.
would be good to know how this compares to a TESLA P4, that is also a single slot low profile card (but you need to add a 3d printed shroud and a fan) and also costs around 80-100$
That GPU would be good for gaming. Quake 1, 2, 3, Doom 1, Doom 2, and other games that aren't modern AAA titles that have ads and micro transactions so it's almost the perfect GPU.
The card is listed as "unavailable" on the Amazon link so I guess we're limited to the ASRock version. If you needed more processing, you could sprinkle a bit more money and go for the most powerful SFF graphics card, which is the RTX 4000 Ada SFF. It has two hardware encoders and decoders (the 4090 only has one encoder).
@@RaidOwlit goes back into stock often. I went to buy mine around 3 months ago at Newegg , it was in stock I waited a day and they ran out. The next week they got more though, then proceeded to run out again within the week.
Looks like you pulled a JayzTwoCents and managed to get the word about it to so many people that it is sold out. Or at least Jay often has that happen when he gets too excited about a hardware product.
Finally! A single slot Intel Arc with AV1! Great video! Also, nice shirt 😜
I rock my dark mode shirt all the time on zoom meetings. 😁😎👕
Single Slot. Single Slot. Single Slot!!!!!! When you're trying to keep from spreading out onto multiple servers, its a killer to buy a GPU that renders 2 or 3 slots on your 7 slot ATX server board unusable. The fact that it is cheap and efficient is huge as well. I hope they sell a million of these.
Yep. Single slot low profile. It'll fit into my 1U server. It's 100% on my list to buy this year. I'll make the money back on my power bill when me Xeon's aren't cranking away.
amen, but need 4 monitor support, that one is insanely pricey
"Transcoding" not allowed in Texas... that was BRILLIANT! 🤣
as a resident of Austin, I lol'd
Inb4 the redblooded “patriots” come in and complain about raid owl getting political 😂
You forgot to mention a crucial spec for this card. "PCI Express Configurations: PCI Express 4.0 x8" Nice to know we can slap this in a x8 slot if i needed to.
Keep in mind if you want to add this as a second gpu to your machine, then you must keep in mind that some motherboards cut the available lanes between the highest and second to highest x16 slots. Each would get x8 lanes.
To my knowledge, any GPU currently on the consumer market can run on an 4.0 8x slot. Even with a 4090, you only loose about 0.5 to 1% of performance, if used with an 4.0 8x pcie connection.
They can probably run in x1 slots if you are so inclined.
Thats's the point. Makes it perfect to split for HBA or ConnectX-5 that also only need x8.
@@Chad_at_Big_CAT_Networking
Yeah!
I only tuned in to up vote comments mentioning Jellyfin
Jellyfin is cool too
jellyfin gang
Jellyfin doesn’t even support MAL Agent and no client app on PS5
Jellyfin for the win
I just switched from Funkwhale and Plex to just Jellyfin last week to test it out and it's been very pleasant so far.
Forgot to mention that both Quicksink can work with ARC with something called Deep Link Hyper Encode.
I don't do video editing but just for plex i bought a mini computer with a n100 (intel quicksync) & I have been more than impressed. Very small, sips power, & is a powerhouse for transcoding for plex. They are anywhere between $150-$200.
If you got the asrock n100 board. You should combo it with this card. Sure you add another 20-25W on load, but the idle performance is great. Like 1 or 2 watts more.
@@Vekstar If the N100 gpu is great at transcoding why would you add this card? Honestly curious.
@@Valthonis because I want to play some video games too. Seeing icebergs tech video on gamming performance on the N100, is lacking. Unless your OK playing pre 2004 games.
. Also, i want a gamming/media production computer that uses less than 70w or less in power. (this includes monitor, Blu-ray drive/nas and power inefficiency from power supply)
I want to have this computer hooked up to a 80-120w solar panel, and make it my primary computer.
Although I may just use a rx6400 if I don't care about gpu transcoding/encoding. Slightly more power inefficient, from what I've seen. But not sure if extra performance is worth it.
Tried rx6300 and it would have worked, but it's 32bit bus makes most 3d games I tested get 15-35 fps. Where as a 6400, I can get 45-60fps on 3d games I tried.
@@Vekstar that makes perfect, sense, I incorrectly assumed it was still in context to transcoding.
@@Vekstar i don't game so i really don't need the card
Thanks. I have been using the NVIDIA T400 for similar purposes for several years but this liiks like a good upgrade path to get AV1. 😊
I love using this for my twitch stream! The AMD encoder on my 6800XT was just super slow.
Do you have a dual gpu config? I was planning to replace my pcie wifi card with the A310 and wondering if i could stream with A310 while gaming with my 6700xt
I have an A380 in my Dell PowerEdge T330 server that I use for Plex. It's a champ! I want to get the A310 cooler and swap it onto the low profile dual slot Sparkle A380 and life would be perfect.
Would you said that the A380 is a little better at transcoding then the A310?
@@2104dougWhy wouldn't it be? It literally has more raw processing power.
For older cpus like haswell, this is the perfect solution for my home media server.
been using an A310 for re encoding for all my downloads for almost a year and love it
Do you have an automated solution?
@@rudysal1429 yes I use Fileflows in Unraid with a custom kernel
Need the link! This is exactly what I was looking for my setup, thanks for this!
Check description. Apparently these all sold out last night somehow? I put links to find other models of the same card.
There is no link in the description
would've been great to highlight that decoding and encoding are two different beasts. Many GPUs support decoding a variety of codecs, but not necessarily the encoding. Transcoding requires decoding AND encoding, which is what makes the A310 a class act. It's a single slot, 50W GPU that can encode/decode AV1 at will.
Wet wipes: "Whoa Brett it's so tiny"
Lazerpig: "Because tiny gun, how can work"
Did you do any idle power consumption testing? First gen arc is notorious for high idle consumption, and that really takes away from the $99 price tag in expensive energy regions :(
Great vid! Of course card is sold out on Amazon. :)
I have this exact card in my Unraid server. Just waiting for Unraid to update to 6.13 since the current linux kernel doesn't support it. It's coming very soon though so I am excited to use this card for my Plex server!
At worst, make a VM and pass the card to it and run plex on it.
I thought Binging with Babish started a tech channel 🤣
Thanks for this! I had been eying this for a low power trans-coding solution, but watching ETA prime's videos on it didn't really help for this specific use case. If I'm not mistaken, it uses a 8x PCIE, so hopefully no bi-furcation issues on older boards.
An x8, x4, or even x1 card will work in an x16 slot of the motherboard without bifurcation support. Where you run into trouble without bifurcation support is mostly things like cheap PCIe to quad m.2 adapters. Without bifurcation support, such adapters will only support a single m.2 SSD because the PCIe slot only supports one device regardless of how many lanes that one device is using.
I've learned well from you, I bought one of these about 45 days ago for my Plex server.
Codec = COder + DECoder
Transcoding = Transform Codec, so Decode Codec/Quality A and then Encode again in Codec/Quality B
I picked up one of these for $87 (open box) to go into the media sever I am building. Really glad I found out about this little card.
I'm already running one of these in my homeserver to support the aged xeon E5 ivy bridge cpu with some hardware transcoding in jellyfin. It's running in a linux vm on TrueNAS. Works like a charm and i'm verry happy with it. the only negative thing is the fan. it's not loud but a little bit annoying. I wish the card were a little big bigger so it would fit a bigger fan. But it's single slot, low power and supports av1 and therefore it is the best card for my media server.
I also have both these GPUs. Still waiting on unraid to support it!!
Also Jellyfin!! I quit running plex when it won't work without Internet for local content.
Shame that these Sparkle GPUs seem to be unobtanium in Europe, you can get the Asrock model but that’s dual slot
Same here in Canada, it's annoying.
It is available but it costs as much as a A380 (138€)
I like Unobtainium and shall use it post haste
Asrock has their A310 also at $99. The big issue is that unless you have a quadro, all of the consumer Nvidia cards are limited to the number of streams. The 380 is the sweet spot (IMHO) but more most users the 310 is perfect.
@@goddessofwar4955 I thought Nvidia lifted those limits a while ago?
Ok I laugh A LOT watching your channel but "I'm pretty sure they don't allow that in Texas" had my crying! Love your content my guy.
Got one of these in the mail to throw into a truenas build. Though pass through support to plex requires the next version of truenas w/ kernel 6.2+ coming in version 24.10 in Oct / Nov
When it becomes available in Europe i will be getting one.
I have no need for anything to do heavy gaming on, but want something low power, and that only occupies a single slot.
Please adjust your completely arbitrary numbers for the HEVC, its 2 or 3 times higher in efficiency even at real time processing if your cpu does it, AV1 is the problem, barely any CPUs or GPUs do encode on a HW level, unless you wanna go Intel ARC
😆 i like the "thats all i have for you today" sign-off. Reminds me of the Lockpicking Lawyer. 😁👍
Binding on 2…
@@RaidOwl 🤣🤣🤣 sometimes you just need a little counter-rotation.
"That's what she said!" 😁
i absolutely love the arc architecture for that, can't wait to see NUCs using meteor lake CPUs to get all these advantages in an iGPU
It's a nice little market for them, for sure. They could carve another niche if they managed to get good Tensorflow/PyTorch support and put out 16/24GB mid tier cards at a reasonable price, as high ram mid gpu is a battleground nobody entered yet, and many ML enthusiasts would love to have larger models without the "premium cost" of the high end gpu, and at least Nvidia, doesn't seem to care about "budget users" anymore. How the wheels have turned...
Hoping for Unraid to quickly support ARC in the next major release. I know there are kernel workarounds but I would rather wait for the official one.
Don't even dare to leave us out from that Arc race project. You'll show it to us in the future and I'll be the best clicker with extensive training since yesterday!
Sibling competition video yes! Always wanted to see how the Arc gpus compare on both transcode and 3d.
Great Testing, all i wanted to know about the Arc A310 in 8Minutes- keen on trying out a 310 myself
card is back in stock on amazon
Thanks for showing this!
Been thinking of getting an A350 for my server, however, I guess the A310 is absolutely sufficient. As for my main machine, I might pick up one, too. Currently rocking the RTX 3090 (got it right after the crash for a good price) which is definitely not a bad card. The only problem: It can't transcode AV1 which is a shame.
I'd probably plug in another 310 for AV1 contents. I just love the efficiency of AV1 and I guess, for most of my recordings and stuff, AV1 will suffice.
Definitely an add for me. At least one of them :D
Will be used for Jellyfin, immich & automagic timelapses from my terraria. One question, though, have you tried it with some kind of machine learning workloads?
Specifically something along the lines of FrigateNVR or plain image recognition?
I know, cards like the A770 would be better suited however, I'd also be interested in how this card holds up.
I added an A330 to run the audio raytracing in Sector's Edge not straining the main gpu. Can load a lot more sources with more bounces then just the gpu inside the cpu.
Brilliant vid, I shall keep an eye out for this GPU!
During this past Cyber Monday the low-profile A380 was the same price ($99.99) on NewEgg as the A310 was, so i grabbed the former
Great video
In the beginning you talk about how different codecs effect the transcoding of a video, but I think you should have mentioned something about containers as well (mp4, mkv etc)
At 4:56, when you asked us to pause the video, notice that the blue label on the graphs for h264 incorrectly says h254.
What about the blue label saying h264 seems incorrect?
@@RaidOwl The blue label says "h254" but it should say "h264"
Containers doesn’t affect transcoding, that’s what direct stream is for
@@moonimmondal ohhhhhhhhh lol yeah
1. Nice Merch!
2. I love the squinchy faced troll guy in every video! Every time! 10 seconds in this time!
I had problems with Resolve on my new rx 7800xt, I got an Arc A310 for 70€ and it's really good. For gaming however, it's on par with my old RX 570 4GB (tested on God Of War: 30-40FPS on lowest settings)
Great video. i believe their new laptop cpus also contain these hardware encoders. Intel gpus are the best bang for the buck right now for these use cases.
I had a long RMA wait, and saw the A770 for $300... I was using it for gaming... It was actually really impressive! Especially for the price. The fact that Intel is more used to making integrated graphics is obvious though, CPU utilization is higher than an AMD or Nvidia card. Paired with a strong CPU, I'm impressed.
legend!! i been looking for something smaller than my RTX3060 i have in there now, i may have found it. I was also considering a nvidia tesla P4 with the fan mod on the end, as it has dual encoders, for simultaneous encoding, is single slot with no power also. decisions decisions.
6:30, funny you mentioned that, I didn't buy a 4090 until after I divorced XD
Heard the sparkle arc cards have issue with fan speed curve. Got me an asrock A380 for that extra quality boost (but still low power). Wish we had more single slot options.
Can confirm. I have this card and the fan cycles on and off every 10-20 seconds when idle. You can clearly hear it if you're in the same room, so it's really annoying. If you're running Windows you should be able to control it in software, but Arc cards don't have temperature or fan monitoring on Linux yet. I ended up soldering a cable from a case fan to it so it could be run off the motherboard instead. Don't have any way of knowing whether it's overheating, but it's been running great for transcoding since.
For jellyfin I got a 12600 i5 for quicksync transcoding using the HD770 iGPU and it's great. 3 watts when transcoding and no need to use up a PCIe slot.
I would love to see the comparison video. I’m rocking my old gtx 970 in my
Homelab, and I would love to see how some modern gpus compare for Plex transcoding
I had a 1060 and then upgraded to a 1650 and it seemed so much better. So I could imagine you wouldn't be disappointed with a Intel GPU
If you can spare a tiny bit more space, the a380's actually not too bad at casual gaming. FF7R was running at about 40fps@1080. Or was it 1440p... Can't remember. Anyways, for the price, super good!
What's the idle power consumption of this in a headless server if used just for transcoding? I had old gaming GPUs in my server but they'd be using 20W not connected to anything or doing anything so I eventually ditched them...
Great material ! Thank you. Can you please do tests with mainstream motherboard like intel chipset one with main pcie gpu for example nvidia and this intel as secondary in programs and few monitors? Would be awesome vid also in terms of performance - pcie lanes, frames in games on main gpu meanwhile work in blender on secondary gpu. Thanks!
Question: The a380 by Sparkle is dual slot and also doesnt need external power. Outside of single slot, what would be the advantages of the a310 > a380?
Cost, 33% lower max power consumption, 1/5th the idle power consumption, size, using less materials to accomplish the same task, etc.
ASRock has been my go to for boards for years. Waiting for the LP A380 to go on sale again.
AMD will give you Rebar on PCIe 3 with B450 / x470 and I believe Ryzen 3 3100 was the least to support SAM and Rebar for Ryzen, Intel may not be able to do it on PCIe 3 with Rebar without hacking it. x470 will even support my RTX 3070 with Rebar on in PCIe 3.
My understanding is that you need resizeable bar in order to take advantage of AV1. Did you test that? Since my supermicro board doesn't have it, I can't take full advantage of an Arc card for plex.
I don't know that you NEED rebar but you will lose about 10% max performance without it. Overall I don't think its a big deal.
planning to get one for my homeserver...
I'm not sure how relevant it is, however for 10 bucks more you can get an ARC A380 this allows you to do some more complex tasks if you wanted to. I have a hard time trying to justify an A310 because of that.
This is exactly what I have been looking for to add to my home lab. Curious how it will handle AI/ML workloads.
my UnRaid box has a Ryzen 9 5950x with Nvidia Quadro P400 for transcoding video in plex found that GPU on ebay new open box it smokes at its duty. nice gpu
I built a video live and editing streaming rig. I built an Intel 12th gen I7k PC with a Arc A770 15g system I think the CPU was good due to the mobo with thunderbolt on it. May be that would have been better combo if I would have used my RTX 3070 and just added a Arc A310 or A380 card which would have still gave awesome streaming and editing power. They say that A770 16gb card os awesome for streaming and editing. I just wanted something new I could afford not to game on but for just streaming and editing.
The question I have is how this gpu would handle transcoding 90mbps+ 4k HDR/DoVi Remux to 1080p with tone mapping. If it can handle at least 3 concurrent transcoding streams like that, sign me up.
Hey @raidowl Do we have a number of 1080p and 4k streams that it can transcode in plex/jellyfin, would be interested in knowing if this would more efficient than a p2000
I was getting into despair with the thought that the ARC380 would not fit into my Dell Optiplex 5090 SFF PC, and then AHHHHHHH!!! here you are with the baby brother. You are a God send! Let me know though, if you think ARC380 would fit into my Dell Optiplex 5090 SFF PC. If it can, make an affiliate link for me to use. Thank you.
If it’s a dual slot then the a380 will fit. Otherwise snag the a310. You can use any affiliate link and then just browse to the item in that same session and I get the kick back. Just fyi haha.
At this price point for transcoding, I still prefer the Tesla P4 with 8GB memory. I have three in my Plex server on Unraid and the entire lot can be seen by docker containers; the nvidia-smi functionality even allows for auto-balancing the load. Each card uses around 60 watts and has dual NVENC units, leading to considerably more overall performance in H264/265
The P4 doesn't have dual NVENC units. It has 2 encoders and 1 decoder.
I just bought a Quadro P2000 for my 11 year old Plex setup. I wonder how this compares to the ARC
I use the AsRock Intel A380 low profile and it's only $109 on Amazon and is more powerful than the A310. Just throwing that out there.
Yep, also a good choice
Totally agree,
I have both cards and both are great but for only 10-20 bucks more the A380 is just the best value you can get at the moment
New Drivers are awesome and work like a charm.
One point the A310 gets, low profile AND single slot. I couldn't find a true single slot A380 yet, only 1 1/2 slot designs and that might take the edge in some cases (pun intended)
@Mentheus that's the main problem with the a380 and why I had to go with the a310. No single slot options besides a really expensive version by a company who makes commercial solutions. The asrock low profile is still a two slot card. The sparkle has a single slot.
I'm upgrading from a 1650 to a 380 . This is good tired of hacked drivers
Anyone who wants to use this card on Unraid: Until 6.13 comes out, you need to use Thor's custom kernel with the drivers added. Easy file swap, plenty of tutorials out there. Once you have that in place you can pass the card through to your media serving container of choice.
This seems to be just what I need for my media server. Wonder how well it works with Truenas Scale and Jellyfin though. I'm currently using a RX 480 since I had that laying around but Jellyfin keeps falling back to CPU encoding.
That is because the encoder/decoder on Polaris cards is objectively not very good. I am not sure about jellyfin, but plex doesn't even support the AMD encoder because of its historical lack of quality/performance.
Also, as far as I know, there are some extra steps you have to jump through to get hardware transcoding working on jellyfin. AFAIK what hoops you have to jump through depends on what platform you are installed on.
That's a misconception. The only limitations in texas are around transcoding in the bathroom.
The Arc A310 is back in stock at Amazon as I write this (6/12/2024), if anyone wants one. I'll be using it in an MS-01 running ESXi and passing it through to a Windows Plex VM.
Neat - maybe this is a candidate for my aging Dell power edge r330 server. Cheap!!
The only problem now, is that these are sold out online most everywhere.
Now if only one day Power DVD would support AV1 codec play back. Yeah, I know VLC does, but for my home theater surround sound system Power DVD looks a little better and the sound is definitely better.
you spelt Jellyfin wrong
😅😅😅
Plex Pass buyers in shambles
But is there Linux support for this GPU, ie., would this be a good choice to put into a Linux DaVinci editing system?
From what I've read it runs pretty well as long as you're on kernel 6.2 or newer
There is some but mileage may vary. I personally found this card to be slower than my 1060 I wasn’t able to get the AV1 encoder working -yet but maybe when drivers come out as it becomes more poular
Might be good for Frigate also.
Intel QuickSnyc is amazing at transcoding.
Can you use Intel gpus in tandem with quicksync on the CPU for transcoding on Plex?
Thanks for the info, didn't know this was available.. living under a rock here.
So what are the uses for the other Sparkle cards? A310 Elf, A370 Elf, A380 GENIE, A580 Orc, A750 ORC OC, A750 Titan OC & A770 Titan
Nice Lil one. Unfortunetly those ones costs around 200 dol at my country.
Quick question, is this a better investment than a elgoto 4k60 pro? Just want to know beforehand. 😅
They’d prob be used for different things so I’m not sure haha.
Great video! I am using this card right now and it is working great for Jellyfin/Plex. Have you tried it with Handbrake/Tdarr? I cant seem to get it working for those containers in my Proxmox LXC.
would be good to know how this compares to a TESLA P4, that is also a single slot low profile card (but you need to add a 3d printed shroud and a fan) and also costs around 80-100$
I am also interested in this since if I got one of these Arcs I would have to convert it to static pressure cooling in my server
The Tesla P4 doesn't seem to have AV1 encoding, but it does have 1 decoder and 2 encoders, which is the opposite of the 4090.
@@BrunodeSouzaLino cheers. I really should have looked it up myself, but I typed it before I thought about what I was doing.
That GPU would be good for gaming. Quake 1, 2, 3, Doom 1, Doom 2, and other games that aren't modern AAA titles that have ads and micro transactions so it's almost the perfect GPU.
as a sucker for small and cheap , I'd buy it for gaming.
Almost picked up this card for My HTPC, but the A380 was the same price so went with it. replacing RX-570.
Thats sweet! I'll stick with my old ass gtx1070 for a while lol
The card is listed as "unavailable" on the Amazon link so I guess we're limited to the ASRock version. If you needed more processing, you could sprinkle a bit more money and go for the most powerful SFF graphics card, which is the RTX 4000 Ada SFF. It has two hardware encoders and decoders (the 4090 only has one encoder).
Yeah idk what happened in the span of one night. It just disappeared from both stores.
@@RaidOwlit goes back into stock often. I went to buy mine around 3 months ago at Newegg , it was in stock I waited a day and they ran out. The next week they got more though, then proceeded to run out again within the week.
Looks like you pulled a JayzTwoCents and managed to get the word about it to so many people that it is sold out. Or at least Jay often has that happen when he gets too excited about a hardware product.
I plan to get a streaming pc with the rx 6600 for the games and arc 310 for the capture. Would that be a great idea? Or just get an rtx gpu?
Interesting, I seem to recall some encoding hardo’s going on about better quality with QSV.
Is this plug and play with the Zimaboard or do you need to set up in the Bios?
Dark Mode Sighted!!!!
Follow-up on adding this card to an UNRAID server and have HDR truetone mapping working? :-D
Intel is naming their graphics cards like they airbus planes
When did they add ARC support? I’ve been waiting for this! (Or what did you do to make it work?)