Looking for advice on the best GPU I can install on my new QNAP TS-H1290FX.
Thanks
Define ‘best’, best for ? Video transcoding, AI,Crypto ?
Mostly video and AI
All cards in the compatibility list seem to be LP variants (the brackets look full height, so not sure why)
My vote would be for a RTX A2000 or A4000
From what I can tell on the QNAP machines, the AI functions are not really handled by the video card. QNAP AI Core runs solely on the main CPU from what I can tell. I bought an NVIDIA GPU because I thought it would help with some of the stuff. It didn’t. All it was really good for was allowing me to have a video output on my TS-873A and allowed faster real time video transcoding. I don’t really have a need to do too much video transcoding on my unit in reality. I thought maybe I would use some of the HDMI Desktop applications, but frankly they suck. The KODI media player interface is absolutely awful and everything else in the HD Desktop forces you to use an outdated version of Chrome, etc. I decided that there are far better applications for media that don’t need to use an HDMI output on the NAS.
I ended up taking out the GPU and putting my 10 GB fiber NIC back in place instead. I could run fiber with the GPU since it takes up both PCI slots.
The only other place where I have seen where a GPU might help is with some of the object recognition or people recognition features in QVR Pro but you have to buy a license for that.
Now, QNAP has come out with M.2 AI accelerators and one that plugs in via USB. That may actually be more useful for you than a GPU.
Fair, that NAS seems to be geared towards containers/VM’s so those could be using the GPU much more versatile
I don’t know if the TS-873A is really geared towards VMs. The Risen V1500 is still an embedded processor. The i3 in my TVS-672XT is faster and it’s an older processor. Only advantage the Ryzen has is it is 4 cores with 2 threads per core while the i3 is 4 cores and 1 thread per core.
But yes, VMs can utilize the GPU if you have one there. I just didn’t find that much use from it. Was hoping the QNAP AI Core would use it for things like QuMagie but no such luck. And aps like Plex don’t use it for hardware transcoding either.
Wasn’t OP asking about a TS-H1290FX ?
I thought you were responding to my post! 
I was just replying that the NAS from the initial post would be geared for containers/VMs and a GPU could very well be useful for that (compared to QNAP native apps that max use these m2 accelerators for image processing)
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Well, other than using the GPU card output for the VM, how else does Virtualization Station or Container Station take advantage of the GPU? I wasn’t aware that Container station itself could even access the card…
The GPU can be handed through to VM or containers for all sorts of graphics (e.g. video de/encoding) or compute (cuda/opencl) stuff.
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