Which fanless GPU is best?

    Quote from Klojum

    Same here... But I'm afraid that ship has sailed for me.
    I'm not an audiophile either. A bit of tinnitus made sure of that.

    there are many open source Linux audio operating systems that these codes could be borrowed... Snakeoil os, daphile, rune audio.. calling on any coders to see if this would be an easy task??

    Quote from Anewmission

    there are many open source Linux audio operating systems that these codes could be borrowed... Snakeoil os, daphile, rune audio.. calling on any coders to see if this would be an easy task??

    Snakeoil os borrowed Kodi's tidal code. So I guess that's allowed? Sorry I am new to this.

    Quote from chewitt

    Practically all 4K content is HEVC (or VP9) encoded and nVidia never added support for either to their Linux drivers, hence the CPU is working overtime to play back 4K content. AMD and Intel have both invested time/effort in their drivers (and both use Kodi as a reference media app) so support is generally good and the main Linux challenge is new chips needing bleeding edge kernels that take a while to stabilise. nVidia continues to be a Linux pariah and future use in LE once we drop X11 support (sooner than later) is not guaranteed. Stats show the number of nVidia users continues to decline and most of them have older cards. These days most people have moved from homebrew boxes to NUC-like devices with a server/NAS for media in the network. Most of those devices are fanless (or quiet enough) and the client/server setup makes it easier and cheaper to upgrade the client device as media tastes evolve over time. Perhaps convert the current box to a server and partner it with an RPi4?

    I got my hands on a free to me digital signage box. Its got an 8 core i7 running at 3.2Ghz. I replaced the video card and put in a Nvidia 1030 low profile fanless card. It working pretty well for playing 4k mkv file. However I noticed that the decode says "ff-hevc (SW)".

    I assume this is not taking advantage of the h265 hardware on the GPU? if it where an 8 bit 4k file, would it then? or did I make a poor choice of video card for 4k playback?

    if so what low profile card should I seek? My i7 averages 40% across all 8 cores. The CPU temp is stable at 120F. The GPU however reports close to 150F. frame rate seems fine so far. This is a HR10/Dolby Atmos test file. I dont need to see or use HDR10, but I would like the Atmos to work and the video to be in 4k SDR which is all the current monitor supports.

    Is there a better choice for video card? or is this gonna be fine?