DDA Passthrough for plex

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chris heyworth

Member
Jan 24, 2020
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hi all, i am looking for a low power graphics card to pass through to a windows 10 virtual machine to use as a plex transcoder.

System is windows server 2019- standard, to pass through using dda (lowest power possible or very quiet) won't do more than 5 streams at a time.

Thanks
 
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epicurean

Active Member
Sep 29, 2014
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Quadro P400 and P620 works really well for me. single slot, no additional power connectors needed
 
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Marsh

Moderator
May 12, 2013
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chris heyworth said:
System is windows server 2019- standard, to pass through using dda (lowest power possible or very quiet)
Click to expand...
Lowest model that would worked with Windows 2016/2019 dda is P2000 or m2000 ( older card ).

P2000 in 2019 was about $200 on ebay, now it is about $300.
P400 if not useing DDA , or Linux pass thru.
 
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SIlviu

Member
May 27, 2016
83
8
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Running a VM with P400 and DDA, last time I tried 10 transcodes from 1080p to 720p 2mbps and GPU usage was ~60-70%.
There is a github where you can find how to bypass the 2 transcode limit.
If you want 4K transcode this is not the card for you.
 
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chris heyworth

Member
Jan 24, 2020
69
24
8
hi all,

So i have picked up a Quadro m2000 and installed it into the top slot (slot 6) in the MD70-HB0 gigabyte board. when i run the script to check which devices are DDA capable the M2000 is red with "old style PCI device, switch port, etc. Not assignable.

other devices are assignable (intel network card and others)

What am i doing wrong?

Thanks
 
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Cutha

Member
Sep 24, 2016
75
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A bit late to the party but for the same type of setup I used a GTX 1660 so the quality of the transcodes wouldn't suffer as the NVENC is Turing based which has addressed the quality degradation of previous generations.

It took a bit of messing around but I have it working with the 2 stream cap removed and the Plex VM uses the card without issues.

The links SIlviu provided above look like the same stuff I used but I'll look at my notes today and see if I have anything else to add.

I do have a few dumb questions to ask like is SR-IOV enabled? Is Above 4G Decoding enabled? Is the BIOS set to use the built in VGA (Onboard)?

I took a quick look at your MB manual and the VGA configuration is listed like this:

Miscellaneous Configuration

Active Video

Select active Video type. Options available: Onboard Device/Offboard Device. Default setting is Offboard Device.
 
zer0sum

zer0sum

Well-Known Member
Mar 8, 2013
849
474
63
Cutha said:
A bit late to the party but for the same type of setup I used a GTX 1660 so the quality of the transcodes wouldn't suffer as the NVENC is Turing based which has addressed the quality degradation of previous generations.

It took a bit of messing around but I have it working with the 2 stream cap removed and the Plex VM uses the card without issues.

The links SIlviu provided above look like the same stuff I used but I'll look at my notes today and see if I have anything else to add.

I do have a few dumb questions to ask like is SR-IOV enabled? Is Above 4G Decoding enabled? Is the BIOS set to use the built in VGA (Onboard)?

I took a quick look at your MB manual and the VGA configuration is listed like this:

Miscellaneous Configuration

Active Video

Select active Video type. Options available: Onboard Device/Offboard Device. Default setting is Offboard Device.
Click to expand...
You can also use a 1650 super if you can find it cheaper as it's the lowest end card that uses the Turing NVENC chip :)
But it does have less ram, so ymmv depending on what you need.
 
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