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 месяца назад
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 use an Nvidia Quadro P600 for this (bought second hand for about 60 bucks). This looks like a nice way to upgrade to support AV1 when more clients start supporting it.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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
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...
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 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.
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.
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!
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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...
you also forgot to mention, this is the Sparkle a310 ECO. The version that uses less power. Theres the Sparkle a310 ELF which uses 75w instead of 50 (still able to use PCIE power) and costs like 20 bucks more but has double the graphics clock. Then theres the Sparkle a380 which is a another 75w card with more XE and ray tracing cores. at around 30 bucks more than the ELF
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.
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'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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just got this card and the fan noise is driving me mad, constant up and down revving. Is your fan behaving? I’m seeing lots of reports online of similar issues, I haven’t got a full OS install yet, but I’m starting to worry it was a bad investment.
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?
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$
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!
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 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?
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.
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.
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
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.
