3mo ago

Need basic graphics card to troubleshoot headless server

I've been fighting with some issues on my unraid server recently and I'm at a point where I need a graphics card to see the actual video out as the machine boots. The psu in the chassis has no additional connectors that I could use for additional power to a graphics card.

Can someone point me in the direction of a super cheap graphics card that will be used for console only and not 3d graphics or gaming.

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If you don't want to deal with the used market (which might be necessary to get super cheap) the Intel Arc a310 cards have HDMI/Display Port and are slot powered so no PCIe power needed. They're also sought after for their quite good video transcoding performance so reselling it after you're done would be pretty easy.
- Another option is if the machine has a serial port that might be dumping useful info as it boots. A serial to USB cable is really cheap and you can read it with PuTTY.
  
  This is the way.... Setup and then open a terminal and then boot the machine... Helps to have console output logged on the host machine so you can review everything after... Some boot sequences can be tens of thousands of lines long on complex machines.
  
  Would be nice, but the motherboard (GA-X99-UD4) is a desktop board with no serial out.
- I was very close to doing this as I could repurpose it for video transcoding but ended up going with the Nvidia GT 710.
  
  Nice, another good option. Hope you have luck debugging your machine!

Get a used SFF office PC low profile card off Ebay. They often have chipset wattages around 25 or so and easily run on slot power only
Something like this: https://www.ebay.com/p/1958445856 (idea only, not endorsing this seller).
Anything of a semi modern format with a pcie interface thata not an outright scam card will be fine for VGA no-driver video output. IME older AMD/ATI cards seem to boot better than oder NVidia cards...
- I'd love to have gone that route, but was looking for a quick solution which ended up being the Nvidia GT 710
  
  If it works, it works. Really any old cheap pcie card will work, if you just need video out of any kind the card type need not be specific. Glad you got it to work.

The nVidia GT series are cheap, the 710 series are the cheapest new cards that I have found.
- That would be my suggestion. They only take a single slot and some are even passively cooled.
- This is exactly the route I decided to go down. Should be arriving this evening :D Thank you

Alot of servers have at least one built in video output head but if it's an older device you might need to look for an HD15 VGA port... Some servers might have had some sort of micro port or proprietary port/dongle setup as well. Might refer to the documentation for the chassis/motherboard first... It's possible you have what you need already.
- While a great idea, and I would love to do so. This is a desktop motherboard in a server chassis, with no serial/usb output. It is a Gigabyte GA-X99-UD4. I ended up picking up a Nvidia GT 710.
  
  Oh fantastic, sorry if I missed that detail in the original post. Thought you might have had an old eBay blade server or something. Hope you got it working!

eBay, Craigslist, Goodwill, Facebook marketplace, or whatever your local equivalent is. Most basic graphics cards don't need additional power.
There exist USB graphics adapters, too. But they can be janky and may not show the boot process.
- I thought about that, as I have a few spare USB->DVI and USB->VGA adapters but I don't think they are usable during the BIOS post.

Check your local Craigslist or other classifieds for cheap old GPUs. Or if you have another PC, borrow the GPU and power supply just to get it to boot.

If the motherboard has any available pcie slots (and the chassis has space for it), minimal graphics cards with HDMI or VGA or whatever else can be had for really cheap. That's what I use to troubleshoot my truenas box.

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