Should You Buy an Intel Arc for Your Media Server?

tldw no Intel Arc does not consume one wat at idol at least in my system thank you for watching and bye you still here and you want to know the long version okay Intel Arc A380 was released on June 14th 2022 to a very lukewarm reception from the media Tech Outlets like Tom's Hardware PC Magazine and Tech PowerUp praise low temperatures support for av1 encoding surprisingly good rate tracing performance and agreed that it's great to finally have a third major player in the GPU space at the same time the reviewers criticize the car for buggy drivers poor stability high idle power consumption and very subpar game support especially for older titles fast forward a year and three things have happened one I came across this R post which claims that as long as you don't actually connect a monitor to your Arc card you can get it down to to one wat power consumption at the idle two since the GPU shortage is over and the Intel Arc A380 is still pretty underwhelming for actual gaming you can find this C for as little as €70 used on websites like eBay and three Intel kind of sort of fix their drivers in Linux to the point where you can actually use the arc cars for Hardware transcoding in gelin and get some pretty impressive results so naturally I decided to pull the trigger and today we're going to see how well this car perform form when it comes to Hardware video transcoding and whether the claims of one what idle actually hold water speaking of water have you ever wondered about how when there's a power outage you still have water in your house how does that work well if you're curious about that and many other things brilliant.org has got you covered with tons of fun and interactive online courses in their course everyday physics for example you learn about how things like water towers toilets and refrigerators actually work and get to know a a lot about physics from the standpoint of seemingly very ordinary everyday life objects and if you'd like to know more about large language models behind things like Chad gbt and Bard I would definitely recommend their new course how llms work it covers a lot of Basics and doesn't require deep knowledge of math computer science or machine learning but if you do also want to get that deep knowledge brillian has got whole learning paths for you computer science advanced math data analysis and so much more with a very clear progression display to keep you motivated in today's world of computers every job is an IT job to some extent so having some knowledge of computer science can go a long way to improve your career prospects so go ahead and invest into your career today by going to brilliant.org Wolfgang and getting your free 30-day trial the first 200 people to sign up will also get a 20% off their annual subscription thank you brilliant for sponsoring today's video and now let's get back to our main topic let's start from the very beginning why would you want to discr GPU for Hardware video ch trans coding if a lot of Intel CPUs already have quick syn built in well because a lot of them also don't a lot of xun CPUs don't come with integrated Graphics at all due to for FS series Intel chips you might have bought one for your gaming rig a few years ago and now that you've upgraded to a newer CPU you might want to use this one in your home server some of you guys also have am4 ryzen chips and why wouldn't you 4, 5000 series ryzen apus can be very power efficient with the right motherboard and if you get a pro variant you also get full support for ECC memory alas video transcoding is the ailles heal of the ryzen apus and it's pretty much the only thing that might keep you from using one in your home server you might also just have an older Intel CPU like this i36100 it does support quick sync technically but as you'll see later in the video trying to transcode a 4K HDR movie using his igpu is an exercise in frustration so if you're in one of those situations you've got two options one buy a new CPU for €150 a new motherboard for around €100 and possibly new RAM for another €100 or two get an Intel Arc card for like €120 and I think that if you're otherwise okay with the way your system performs the second option is a no-brainer So in theory this is a pretty easy plug-and-play solution that should massively improve your Hardware transcoding situation and yes this isn't limited to just Intel Arc cards many people have Nvidia cards from their rig specifically for Hardware video transcoding but even though I have seen claims of one watt idle for the Intel cards I'm yet to see something like that about Nvidia and as someone who's very interested in low power consumption I'm really excited to test that claim before unboxing and installing the card I decided to take some initial measurements without an external GPU to basically see how much the system consumes at idle as well as during video playback and how well it performs when it comes to Hardware transcoding our test system today is awor c236 WSI which is an Intel motherboard that takes Sixth and seven gen CPUs as for the CPU we've got an Intel Core i36100 which is a dual core Sky chip that comes with Intel HD graphics 530 since I don't have any other power supplies lying around with an a pin PCI connector I decided to put the build into my Home Server case I'm also going to plug in all of my usual storage devices so that I have access to my media library one thing that I won't plug in that I usually have in my home server is this 10 gig networking card from Intel since we only have one PCI slot we kind of need to keep it free for a graphics card and yes as you can see cable management is my passion so first off let's talk about the idle power consumption with no trans coding going on the system pulls around 10 1 12 Watts from the wall that's with five ssds and three hard drives in the standby mode and since there's always at least one person in the comments calling me a fraud or claiming that I'm only showing the numbers for the CPU power consumption and not the whole system yes this is how much the entire system consumes from the wall and here's an old school power meter showing that exact same [Music] [Applause] number as for C States the lowest we can see in power top is C7 which is pretty decent but most importantly how does the system do when it comes to video trans coding without the Intel Arc well it doesn't my usual test is playing back this 4K HDR hvbc copy of Dune in gelen I still haven't seen the movie in full and sometimes I'm worried that just by doing those benchmarks I'm going to spoil some major plot point for myself but today I'm not worried because trying to play back this movie using the Intel HD graphics 530 for Hardware transcoding gives us around 9.5 FPS HD 530 doesn't support VPP tone mapping for HDR video so we're stuck with software based tone mapping not that it matters though disabling tone mapping completely doesn't change the FPS figures at all but hey at least the power consumption doesn't increase too much the whole system draws around 19 Watts while transcoding the movie or at least trying to it wouldn't be fair of me not to test other video resolutions so I decided to use a little script made by Alex kretchmar which uses jelin fork with FFM Peg to automatically test hardware transcoding for different video formats and resolutions and here's what the results look like with a 1080p h264 file we get 37.5 FPS with a 4K h264 file we get around 12 FPS with a 1080p hvc 8bit file we get 65 FPS which is pretty good and as for the 10 bit 4K hvc decode the i36100 doesn't support that format so the test didn't run so now that we have a point of comparison let's unbox the Intel Arc A380 and installed into a rig the unboxing experience is pretty typical for an ental level GPU apart from the card itself we've got nothing actually I hope you're hungry for nothing the card itself is an ASR Challenger version dual slot with one fan if your case can only accommodate low profile PCI cards a also makes a low profile dual fan version of this card as far as I know all A380 variants are dual slot though so if you only have one physical slot space to spare you're out of luck Now intel does make a single slot professional version of this card Arc Pro A40 which you guessed it it's impossible to find online and when you do it's prohibitively expensive we're also going to need an additional cable for the pcie power since this GPU takes an a pin power connector which is pretty frustrating since the car is rated for 75 Watts Max couldn't they just cap it to 65 Watts instead and ditch the connector completely um hello everyone editing Wolfgang here and guess what they wouldn't even have to cap it at all the pcie slot can provide 75 Watts why Intel just why using an 8 Pin power connector really limits the use of this card in pre-built and Server Chassis which might might have proprietary power supplies with no PCI power connectors sure you can always use MX adapters but H anyway the GPU fits perfectly into the case and it's also not too long which is great now that we have it installed let's power this baby up and see how much it draws after powering the system on and spinning down the drives we see a power draw of around 15.1 watts compared to 10.5 wat without the GPU which is pretty good but also very far from the claimed 1 watt so I started digging the first thing I wanted to check is whether we have ASM or active state power management enabled for the card ASM lets your PCI devices enter a sleep mode in which they draw very little power and since pretty much every device on your motherboard is connected to the chipset or the CPU via PCI this can have a major impact on your power consumption I already have ASM Force enabled via a bootloader option so let's see if the graphics card supports it I'm going to use a pretty convoluted command to find that out which I'm going to put down in the video description ideally you want to see ASM L1 supported and enabled across the board for all of your devices and as you can see despite having ASM support the Intel Arc GPU doesn't have it enabled so I'm going to use the ASM tuning script made by Luis R Rodriguez which I'll also put down a description this script explicitly enables ASM for the specified PCI devices so let's just copy the pcie addresses for all of our devices that don't have ASM enabled and paste them into descript I also made sure that every device had the appropriate ASM level enabled so for devices that only support L1 we need to switch our mode to two and for devices that support both L1 and l0s we need to switch it to three the script is pretty well documented so go ahead and check it out if you want to know more now let's save and quit and then we're going to run the script and once we're done with that we're actually going to verify that all of our PCI devices now have ASM enabled and they do but the important question is did all of that do anything for a power consumption and the answer is no unfortunately despite my best efforts the power consumption still stayed at around 15 to 16 Watts which is a shame still 4 Watts for a dedicated GPU is also not a bad deal unless it's like a third of your overall power consumption now let's pass the card through to our gelofen container and finally see how Intel Arc performs when it comes to Hardware transcoding I'm running NYX OS which is a bit different when it comes to setting up Docker container ERS But ultimately we just need to find out the render device that's associated with our graphics card I know that render d128 is the integrated Intel card because I've already tested it in jelin so we need to go into our daa container declaration and replace render d128 with render d129 after that I'm going to execute nyos rebuild switch and once that's done we can go into our galopin webui and look at the performance since this movie is HDR we're going to need to use to mapping so that when you play it on an SDR display the image won't look washed out aside from the software toone mapping that runs on the CPU and uses open CL Intel also offers VPP tone mapping which runs on the GPU I've decided to test both this time with VPP tone mapping enabled the Intel Arc unsurprisingly blows the i36100 out of the water with 75 FPS and with the hardware tone mapping disabled we see a figure of around 65 FPS so I guess there's no reason not to use it when it comes to power consumption get a 4 and 1/2 to 5 W increase at idle when compared to the base system with no egpu as already mentioned with Hardware toe mapping enabled we're looking at a total system power consumption of 48 watts during a 4K video transcode and with software toone mapping this goes down by 2 Watts bringing us to 46 Watts I've also run the same gelen FFM Peg script with The Arc GPU and here's what the results look like in the 1080p h264 test we get a whopping 3113 FPS 10 times more than the i3 3 6100 the 4K h264 video gives us 81 FPS which is also quite a jump the 8bit 1080p hvc Test shows an impressive 235 FPS and finally a 4K 10bit hvc file gives us an average speed of 34 FPS it's also worth mentioning that throughout the tests the fan on the rgpu hasn't even budged and the heat scns they pretty cool to a touch that might change once you do multiple trans codes but with only one trans code the GPU state cool as a cucumber so what do we think about the performance well 75 FPS is very impressive definitely an improvement from less than 10 FPS on our integrated GPU and the numbers for other video formats are also a huge leap from the i36100 however if you have a sky chip like this i36100 there's actually a way cheaper fix for video transcoding Wes and it's called Intel i37100 despite being just a generation newer c l chips come with an all new igpu HD 630 and apart from things like HDR to mapping and support for 10bit hvc this igpu features way better performance I've redone the tests with an Intel Pentium g4600 which is a dual core cable L chip and the results are pretty crazy with VPP toone mapping enabled we get around 52 FPS when transcoding the 4K HDR movie while the system draws around 38 Watts from the wall with software tone mapping we get 65 FPS same as in the Intel Arc the power consumption also increases though to around 44 Watts 65 FPS is more than double the speed of the original movie which is 24 FPS so this is definitely going to be enough to play back the movie and not worry about buffering and here what the results look like for other video formats 142 FPS for t0p h264 43 FPS for 4K h264 71 FPS for 8bit 1080P hvc and 18 FPS for 10 bit 4K hvv VC not as good as the Intel Arc but for only a 10th of the price I'd say it's good enough so if you have a sky chip and a motherboard that also supports kbl Lake chips don't buy the arc just get a kbl lake CPU they're like 15 used the only reason you maybe want to get an arc GPU instead is if you somehow need av1 supports and if you have a newer Intel chip there are even less reasons to get one in my last video where I tested a cheap no name laptop with an Intel Core i5 1260p we got as much as a 2 FPS on an integrated GPU with the same video file and starting with the 11th gen Intel CPUs also come with support for av1 decode so there's basically no point in getting an arc card so to sum it up the only people I can recommend this card to when it comes to video trans coding are those of you who run systems without an integrated GPU and are not interested in a complete system upgrade or maybe if you have a system based on an am4 Pro Apu like the one I covered in one of my earlier videos in this case getting an R GPU will basically cover you old fronts performance ECC support and media transcoding but if you have a 7 gen or newer Intel chip with integrated Graphics you probably shouldn't buy an external GPU for video transcoding and that's not limited to Intel Arc these days even Nidia gpus provide very little performance compared to Quicks sync so there you have it guys I hope this video was helpful for you and as usual i' would like to thank my patrons James upington Kevin wear Alexandra Kori Carlos Billa David love jastia Robo dream of cryp and everyone else supports this channel thank you guys for watching and I'll see you in the next one goodbye

Channel: Wolfgang's Channel

Views: 155,777

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Id: uShvhV2ZZCA

Length: 16min 35sec (995 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 27 2023