The Intel Arc A310 is AMAZING - Perfect Plex GPU
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 1. 06. 2024
- It looks like between the time I made the video and now that this model is sold out. I linked similar options below.
a310 Amazon - amzn.to/3wCtRb8
a310 Newegg - howl.me/cmgmVcyizks
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0:00 Intro
0:58 What is transcoding?
2:10 What do I use this GPU for?
2:22 Plex
5:00 Content creation with the a310
6:58 Final thoughts - VÄda a technologie
Finally! A single slot Intel Arc with AV1! Great video! Also, nice shirt đ
"Transcoding" not allowed in Texas... that was BRILLIANT! đ€Ł
as a resident of Austin, I lol'd
Inb4 the redblooded âpatriotsâ come in and complain about raid owl getting political đ
Forgot to mention that both Quicksink can work with ARC with something called Deep Link Hyper Encode.
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.
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 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.
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
Great vid! Of course card is sold out on Amazon. :)
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. đ
I only tuned in to up vote comments mentioning Jellyfin
Jellyfin is cool too
jellyfin gang
Jellyfin doesnât 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.
Brilliant vid, I shall keep an eye out for this GPU!
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
Wet wipes: "Whoa Brett it's so tiny"
Lazerpig: "Because tiny gun, how can work"
I've learned well from you, I bought one of these about 45 days ago for my Plex server.
I love using this for my twitch stream! The AMD encoder on my 6800XT was just super slow.
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?
â@@2104dougWhy wouldn't it be? It literally has more raw processing power.
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.
Sibling competition video yes! Always wanted to see how the Arc gpus compare on both transcode and 3d.
Codec = COder + DECoder
Transcoding = Transform Codec, so Decode Codec/Quality A and then Encode again in Codec/Quality B
For older cpus like haswell, this is the perfect solution for my home media 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.
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.
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
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!
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...
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.
đ i like the "thats all i have for you today" sign-off. Reminds me of the Lockpicking Lawyer. đđ
Binding on 2âŠ
@@RaidOwl đ€Łđ€Łđ€Ł sometimes you just need a little counter-rotation.
"That's what she said!" đ
When did they add ARC support? Iâve been waiting for this! (Or what did you do to make it work?)
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 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
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.
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 :(
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?
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 doesnât affect transcoding, thatâs what direct stream is for
@@moonimmondal ohhhhhhhhh lol yeah
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!
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.
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
1. Nice Merch!
2. I love the squinchy faced troll guy in every video! Every time! 10 seconds in this time!
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.
Hey Brett. I've been looking at this exact A310 (Sparkle Eco) for a while now, but supposedly it has a fan issue, where it ramps up and down constantly. Whats your experience with this problem?
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.
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
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.
Can't wait these be sub 50 on aliexpress. Great video
it's nice and all, PCIe-powered low-profile gpu indeed seems efficient, but what exactly would be a useful rig setup then?
does A310 need resizeable bar support in bios? Linux and Windows drivers good? is it possible to offload/accelerate DaVinci Resolve onto a local server? no bottlenecks running at PCIe x4 or less? silent (0 rpm) mode possible?
- No rebar needed.
- Don't know about drivers.
- Not possible to offload DaVinci Resolve onto the server *but* you can use the server to generate ProRes 422 "proxies" which can be used to speed up the editting flow (effectiveness may vary).
- No real bottlenecks when using PCIe x4.
- No clue about 0 rpm modes.
ReBAR is mostly a thing you need for gaming with Arc. If you aren't hitting the memory that much with the GPU, like with transcoding, you won't need reBAR. Editing will likely require it
though.
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
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.
The only problem now, is that these are sold out online most everywhere.
Shame that these Sparkle GPUs seem to be unobtanium in Europe, you can get the Asrock model but thatâs dual slot
Same here in Canada, it's annoying.
It is available but it costs as much as a A380 (138âŹ)
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.
I use an A380 in my Plex server and I'm happy with it too. Does the A770 make much of a difference when transcoding video?
It would be interesting to see if it's worth getting a higher tier card when Battlemage comes out.
From what I've seen its the same encoder/decoder hardware on the entire ARC line
@@RaidOwl That's good to know, thanks!
I also have this GPU for a few weeks now. I tried using it with Proxmox, but it was crashing my server. So I moved it to an older workstation, and sometimes it has problems with POSTing. Have you experienced similar problems?
I just ran it in Windows but I plan to throw it in my Proxmox server so Iâll see how that goes.
@@RaidOwlNice. I will try it in my desktop then. v3 and v4 xeons arent newest...
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.
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
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
Can you use Intel gpus in tandem with quicksync on the CPU for transcoding on Plex?
I would love to see the comparison video. Iâm 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
Do the Arc cards use quicksync like the integrated intel graphics? Been considering picking up an a770 to do the transcoding on my threadripper build. Would love to see a transcoding chart with the a770 since you have one.
QuickSync requires an Intel CPU with iGPU.
I have a small OptiPlex computer, it's got i7-7700 CPU, do you recommend putting this GPU on it as the primary driver? I want to prepare the PC for my father who only does Office and watches some CZcams and his current PC is really struggling. I put 24GB of DDR4 RAM on the device, and 1TB NVMe SSD and 8TB HDD, the only thing it is missing is a GPU. Is it worth getting this for it?
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.
ASRock has been my go to for boards for years. Waiting for the LP A380 to go on sale again.
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...
Nice Lil one. Unfortunetly those ones costs around 200 dol at my country.
Funny at you mentioned the 770 because I was about to ask how does it compare lol
Quick question, is this a better investment than a elgoto 4k60 pro? Just want to know beforehand. đ
Theyâd prob be used for different things so Iâm not sure haha.
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.
I would be curious how this performs on an older CPU and a motherboard that doesn't support ReBar.
Might be good for Frigate also.
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
Iâve been wanting to add a GPU to my media server. But I have it running in a VM. Iâd lose the ability to live migrate between hosts. I thought about vGPUs but still not sure
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.
Interesting, I seem to recall some encoding hardoâs going on about better quality with QSV.
Oh thatâs a good price wonder if this would fit in the minisforum ms01
Does this card still suffer from fan control problems under linux?
Almost picked up this card for My HTPC, but the A380 was the same price so went with it. replacing RX-570.
Any idea if it is supported in Tdarr? like can you just use the nvidia preset and point it at that card? or is a P400 still a better card for that very small use case?
I don't use Tdarr but I've seen some articles about people using Intel ARC cards with it.
Did you fix the issue with the fan bug that revs 0-100 every sec on Ubuntu and Windows?
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.
Hows the support on Jellyfin?
You should have probably mentioned that hardware transcoding in plex requires Plex Pass which is either a subscription fee or one-time fee
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.
Does it matter if the cpu is older than 10th gen for resizable bar support since this use case isn't for gaming?
can you use 2 or more of this card in your system, to improve video trans-coding
Wait, so would this be good for handbrake? Converting mkv to m4v, h.264?
i'd like to see how it compares to quicksync
my plex server is running on a nuc 13pro (1360p) already
i was tempted to move to the minisforum ms-01 but that also has a quicksync capable CPU
is this just for people who don't already have a quicksync capable server to run plex on?
Yeah this is for the Ryzen/Xeon/EPYC users.
Hey man thank for the video. Can i use it as dual gpu? I have an intel i7 5830k would this work for 10bit 4:2:2 with that older processor? I saw you needed 10th gennir newer for it to work well
Intel GPUs really need resizable BAR to work optimally. But this is a low end part, I don't think it would make a difference in your case.
Neat - maybe this is a candidate for my aging Dell power edge r330 server. Cheap!!
Ok dumb question here. Is intel not limiting the number of transcoding streams on their graphics cards? Because if they aren't I honestly might go buy one. Nvidia used to limit their transcodes to 2 which was frustrating while it looks like they have increased it to 8.
www.reddit.com/r/PleX/comments/1afeno2/nvidia_quietly_increased_nvenc_limit_again_from_5/
@@RaidOwl Yeah I thought it was still 2 until I just looked it up while watching the video. Didn't even know they raised it to 5 and now to 8.
Does CPU encoding still create better quality output than this GPU?
I got an GTX 1650 Super and it's got the same video encoding/decoding as the 30-series. Works great for transcoding multiple HEVC 4K and tonemapping. But Plex chokes the moment someone needs subtitles burned into the video. I wish they could figure out a pipeline that works 100% on the GPU for that instead of shuffling frames back and forth to RAM and applying the subtitles with the CPU.
It has to be possible.
Case in point, I could theoretically play the video file in MPC-HC with subtitles and then capture the screen with OBS without that creating a bottleneck đ€·
I'm really curious to know how the a770 handles CAD autodesk
Or get intel CPU with IGP and quicksync ? Their quicksync part after gen 11 are greatly improved
Agreed, but folks with Ryzen, EPYC, or Xeon chips don't have that luxury.
@@RaidOwl yep, or some storage build which using am4 Ryzen processor and spilt pcie x16 to 4/4/4/4 and we still need a intel arc for transcode = perfect to slap mini gpu on the less important slot which connect to pch
Probably the best value transcode card atm
Waiting for next gen Intel GPUs for video transcoding
as a sucker for small and cheap , I'd buy it for gaming.
Intel the company that brought you Spectre and Meltdown
Will it work in a pcie x1 slot?
Intel please donât fire your GPU division. They are doing a good job!
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.
Intel QuickSnyc is amazing at transcoding.
i have been wondering about this exact thing.. rn i have a gt1030 and thinking i should get something better.