Intel Arc A310 - Sparkle Elf and Eco variety
One of the major functions of my home server is to act as a media server. With two kids and a few other family member I have many TB of content which I store and space was starting to be a premium. Then I stumbled across a Youtube video which described a self hosted application called Tdarr.
Tdarr allows for the transcoding of media in libraries and is incredibly flexible. It was a no brainer that in order to save space I needed to transcode all my media into one of the newer space saving formats. After much research and procrastination I settled on AV1 as my format of choice.
At the time my home server was AMD Ryzen based and the iGPU was incapable of AV1 encoding or decoding so I needed an alternative which didn't cost the earth (which ruled out Nvidia). On the Unraid forum users were suggesting the Intel Arc cards with their Quick Sync functionality. Unraid 6 didn't support the Intel cards unfortunately but with a quick kernel update problem solved... or so I thought. Note than Unraid 7 supports the Arc A series cards now without needing a custom kernel.
I opted for the Sparkle ELF A310 as it was cheap (sub £100 at the time) and could encode and decode multiple AV1 streams. Ideal. Plugged it in and a little bit of config in docker and the card was visible to Plex and Tdarr excellent and both were able to utilise the card for decoding and encoding AV1 respectively!
End of story you may think....alas no. My server sits beside my desk and I began to notice a fan spinning up and down repeatedly.... now I am fairly tolerant of such things but this quickly became annoying. Upon opening the case I quickly narrowed it down to the A310. A little research and it became clear this was a known issue in Linux with this particular vendors cards.
In the end I decided to bite the bullet and ended up driving the GPU fan from the motherboard using an adapter and a Noctua fan speed controller (namely the Noctua NA-FC1). Set the fan speed to 100% in the bios and use the fan controller to set the GPU fan to a constant speed (around 2000 rpm) which is inaudible amongst the other noises in my home office.
Around 6 months later I purchased a used single slot Sparkle A310 ECO for £50 as occasionally when both Tdarr and Plex were both running the A310 would struggle. Again disappointingly the fan spun up and down constantly (despite Sparkle claiming the issue is resolved). So I used the same solution and now have an almost silent server.
As it turns out I swapped over from an AMD Ryzen based system to Intel shortly after getting the second A310 so in hindsight I probably didn't need to purchase it but there you go... No one said running a home lab would be straight forward (or cheap).