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[Solved] "New" Build Advice - Which GFX Card?


TheBeardedOne

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TheBeardedOne

Hi all,

 

I'd like to start by thanking the Dev's for an amazing product. Truly legendary! 

 

I'm currently working on switching from FreeNAS to a Windows server, running Windows 10. Unfortunately i wont be buying any new parts but reusing some spares that have become available. The question I have is one i have been trying to find a conclusive answer for myself for the past couple of days but i'm having trouble deciding on which way to go and hoping you lot can assist me in making a decision. 

 

For the "New" build i have 2 GFX Cards available, a HD 7970 (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/b247/asus-hd-7970-directcu-ii-top) and a GTX 660 (https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/895/geforce-gtx-660). If this machine was going to be used for gaming it'd be an easy choice but it will be a media server and based on the research i have done there isn't much that sets these 2 cards apart when it comes to transcoding. 

 

I have a few HEVC videos and neither of these cards will be able to decode those videos using hardware acceleration. In fact i have read on the forum that AMD cards cant decode anything using hardware acceleration with Emby, but those posts were a few months old and i'm not sure this is still true. I did read that it may be possible with an alternative version of FFMPEG and some tweaks, paraphrasing... (i have done a lot of reading so the details are getting murky in my melon).

 

The downside to the GTX 660 is the 2 stream limit. I know there will be a limit to the capabilities of the HD 7970 but haven't seen that there is a hard limit.

 

The server will also be headless, not sure if that makes a difference.

 

The other hardware in this build will include:

CPU: AMD FX-8350

RAM: 16-32GB Corsair Vengance

SSD: Samsung EVO 860

MOBO: ASUS Sabertooth 990FX R2.0

RAID: LSI 9211-8i, 4x 4TB HDDs, probably RAID 5.

 

Any advice on which way to go would be welcome, in fact it would be greatly appreciated.

 

@@Waldonnis

@

 

Thanks

Edited by TheBeardedOne
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Guest asrequested

Real world tests are what you need to do. If you already have them, try them. HWA yeilds different results for different builds. You're CPU should be able to handle multiple transcodes, though. How many simultaneous transcodes will be needed?

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Jdiesel

Given your options I'd likely go with the GTX 660 and disable hardware accelerated encoding and rely on the CPU. You should be able to do 4-5 1080p concurrent transcodes with that CPU and not have to deal with any of the downsides to hardware accelerated ed encoding. 

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Waldonnis

I agree with Jdiesel and Doofus here.  It's worth trying both to see what you can do, but software may be the better way to go given the age and capabilities of the GPUs.  Newer ffmpeg builds should include AMF (AMD's encoding scheme) support, but only on the encoding side and I don't know how far back the support goes model-wise.  Last I looked, AMF decoding isn't supported in ffmpeg explicitly and instead relies on dxva2/d3d, so all decoding would likely be done via software when using an AMD card (dxva2/d3d use may not work when initialised by apps that don't start within a desktop context).

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TheBeardedOne

Thanks chaps,

 

I was afraid they'd be too old to be worth using. The Freenas box runs on an FX-6300 with no GPU and i haven't had any problems with it, other than CPU usage, but it has served me well... i was just hoping to reduce CPU usage somewhat to keep the temps down more than anything. Increased quality would have been a nice bonus, but that may have been asking too much.

 

I think i'll do some real world tests as suggested, even if the GTX handles the first 2 streams with any subsequent streams falling back to software, or the Radeon handles all encoding, with decoding done by the CPU, it might help.

 

It's not often the server has more than 2 streams running at any one time anyway. But that could change in the future. I can always fork out for a newer used card if it seems it'll be of benefit.

 

Thanks for your input, much appreciated!!

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