Intel VCA Card Under $800

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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I probably should have tried going lower than 50% off, but I got this one for under $800 shipped Intel VCA1283LVV Visual Compute Accelerator NEW BULK PACKAGING | eBay

We had a thread on it some time ago https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/intel-vca-card.8498/

Basically, it is 3x Intel Xeon E3-1283L V4 CPUs (they have GPUs) plus I believe 16GB of RAM all on a PCIe card.

I have heard you can install CentOS on each Xeon E3 node. It then uses the host networking interface through the PCIe bus and host drivers.

My idea is to see if I can get it set up as a x86 Kubernetes cluster on a PCIe card. Worst case, I tear it apart for STH YouTube.

235W and passive cooling so you basically need a system capable of cooling GPUs to get these to work. They were discontinued in Q3 2018 I believe so this is certainly a risky purchase. The original market was for video transcoding on the iGPUs for broadcasting.
 

anoother

Member
Dec 2, 2016
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Always wanted one of these. There was a VCA2 based on v5, and now these have been somewhat-relaunched/followed-up as the 'SGX' card.

I don't believe these come populated with memory, but being Broadwell, each CPU supports (2x?) 16GB DDR3 SODIMMs. Crucial and Transcend make them in non-ECC flavour; not sure I've ever seen unbuffered ECC ones.
 

ArthurA

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Sep 26, 2018
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These seem like they'd make a hell of an upgrade from something like an Nvidia Quadro P2000 or better for serving transcoded Plex streams.
 

kapone

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May 23, 2015
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These seem like they'd make a hell of an upgrade from something like an Nvidia Quadro P2000 or better for serving transcoded Plex streams.
Not even close. The Graphics hardware in these Xeons compared to a P2000, is like comparing a Ferrari to a ....I guess, Ford Pinto?
 

William

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May 7, 2015
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That looks pretty darn cool !
3 or 4 of those in a system and watch the power draw ! LOL
 

ArthurA

Member
Sep 26, 2018
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Not even close. The Graphics hardware in these Xeons compared to a P2000, is like comparing a Ferrari to a ....I guess, Ford Pinto?
I don't think you're quite as aware of what I'm talking about as you believe, the Xeon 3D prowess or lack there of isn't what's relevant.
 

Savant

New Member
Mar 15, 2017
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@anoother you were right. No RAM onboard. Now to see if I have any DDR3 SODIMMs left. I think I purged them awhile ago.

Hey Patrick,
I ended up getting one as well. I couldn't find 16gb stick at any kind of reasonable price, but did end up getting 6x8gb micron sticks from the compatibility list from ebay@$170 shipped.

If anyone has a lead on some 16gb unbuffered sodimms I would be interested, but best I could find was 180/stick.
 

arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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There's another up for sale listed by a different vendor for the same $1500 price, no idea if they'll do $800 B/O. This one comes with 48GB RAM installed FWIW.
 
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syscomau

New Member
Sep 7, 2018
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I have heard you can install CentOS on each Xeon E3 node. It then uses the host networking interface through the PCIe bus and host drivers.

My idea is to see if I can get it set up as a x86 Kubernetes cluster on a PCIe card. Worst case, I tear it apart for STH YouTube.

235W and passive cooling so you basically need a system capable of cooling GPUs to get these to work. They were discontinued in Q3 2018 I believe so this is certainly a risky purchase. The original market was for video transcoding on the iGPUs for broadcasting.
Hey Patrick,
Did you end up running Kubernetes or anything on the VCA?
 

Sevriety

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Apr 21, 2018
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Dude, WAT!? Fascinating. How does this work? Is this the physical manifestation of a “VM”? LOL. Curious what the IO subsystems are & caveats. At work but definitely checking that vid out later.