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.

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[–] 5 points 15 hours ago

For best performance vs cost Intel graphics cards are a good deal, specially since Intel is the standard for things like transcoding. But keep in mind that their drivers are not up to the level of the others although they are improving.

But unless you are levering a serious level of cuda processing, honestly any card that is 5 years old will cost just a few hundreds and it will outperform the 2 cards together for transcoding / media processing.

But newer cards will dot it with a fraction of the energy (always keep an eye on that...)

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