Will a qnap server support a External GPU Docking Station? In particular the Qnap 873A. I have all slots occupied and the power supply will not support an additional internal video card.
What connection does your TS-873A have, that would support an egpu? Neither Occulink nor Thunderbolt are supported
The TS-873 has USB-3 and USB-C along with dual 2.5 GbE ports. That’s it.
I don’t think you can put in an external GPU docking station.
Do you NEED a GPU? I thought I did and tried to stick an NVIDIA GPU in the upper slot (kinda cockeyed) and my 10 GbE NIC in the lower slot. To make this happen, I literally removed the fan housing from the GPU (and increased the speed of the 873 fans). Long story short, something locked up on my NAS when I was trying to do some transcoding and I burned up the GPU! I then thought I really still needed it, so I got another GPU and removed my 10 GbE NIC and installed the GPU correctly.
I then tried all the different reasons why a GPU would do me good and I found nothing. HD Station just plain sucks. The Chrome version installed is out of date. Even if you disable Chrome and try to use Firefox, whenever you use any of the apps, Chrome is still used. The KODI media player has an ancient interface that has to be one of the worst UIs I have ever seen for multimedia playback, etc. So skip that.
So I could use the GPU for video from VMs. Yeah, but did I really need it? No. I had some issues making it work and decided to scrap it. So I pulled the GPU and put the 10 GbE NIC back in place.
The ONLY thing that the GPU really did for me was give me faster hardware transcoding of videos using the built in Media Player (which is horribly slow). But even so the experience was still bad enough I abandoned it considering that something like Plex works so much better and you can transcode video with Plex natively. Now a GPU would help in some instances but for me, at least, those are rare. And for the most part, I have no reason to transcode anything. It’s not like the old days when my iPod was SD and I had HD videos I wanted to play on it.
What I did do is get one of the QAI-U100 AI accelerators. It really takes a load off the NAS when doing facial recognition, object recognition, etc.
So really - what is your use for a GPU - will it really buy you anything?
Edit: The only thing having that GPU really did for me was allow me to do a memory test of my 3rd party memory when QNAP was telling me it was what was causing performance issues. Well, my memory was fine. You need an HDMI output to run that…
Please be informed that we do not currently support GPU expansion docks.
However, if you don’t mind, could you share with us the specific model you are planning to purchase? Your feedback will serve as a valuable reference for our future product evaluation and development roadmap. Thank you for sharing!