The WEIRDEST Video Card We’ve EVER Seen..

[Emily Young]

What do you do if you have a big store and need to drive a bunch of displays in 4K? How about a GPU with nothing but ETHERNET outputs?

 

 

Buy an Advoli TA6 Performance from Advoli: https://lmg.gg/8KV94

 

Buy an LG 43UD79:
On Amazon: https://geni.us/Wf2c
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KV9V

 

Buy an Acer Predator XB271HK:
On Amazon: https://geni.us/D1LL
On Newegg: https://lmg.gg/8KV9q

[DrMacintosh]

would it only work with that GPU that the card comes with? I assume there is a custom driver that they are running. It's just an odd choice for a GPU. 

[Shreyas1]

Lol rip their website 

[soldier_ph]

Advoli Ravioli  

 

@Schnoz @AlexTheGreatish @James@Tech_Dreamer

[CliffEdge]

I'm new here so maybe it was answered already but what is wrong with focus in latest videos? I mean, even with 4K you can clearly see the stuff that should be in focus but they are not, like.. the that videocard's ports in the intro, or Linus' face sometimes... Same thing was with 1660ti review.

[Emily Young]

35 minutes ago, DrMacintosh said:

would it only work with that GPU that the card comes with? I assume there is a custom driver that they are running. It's just an odd choice for a GPU. 

They say that you can swap the MXM module, although it's not officially supported.

[Rafail1911]

Wait that means I can get video out of my ethernet jacks in my walls... Woah that's great... Linus should do something like that in the building. Like to have monitors displaying stuff from an ethernet cable. Do a future project or something with that awesome graphics card.

[wellend]

@GabenJr Can you run multiple cards in one system to get more outputs?

[power666]

It should be emphasized that this IS NOT Ethernet but HDbaseT.  It is a different spec and leverages different signaling over category cable. The two things they have in common is the physical connector and cabling.  (But to make things perfectly confusing, there is a 100 Mbit Ethernet channel encapsulated in the HDbaseT signal.)

 

Cabling matters a lot for HDbaseT.  The Belden cable being used in the video is extremely high quality and necessary to go the 100 m.  It is possible to run short distances (<15 m) using unshielded Cat5E, though for an install of any kind I'd still recommend shielded CAT6A.  Many vendors don't officially support transmission over anything less than that.

 

The power over cable is 802.11at based for up to 30W.  The HDbaseT spec has extensions to go all the way up to 100W over the cable, the goal being one single cable to drive a display.  Various other HDbaseT vendors implement power over cable via PoE pass through meaning if you want power over HDbaseT, you first have to connect a PoE source.  For others, including Advoli but not the model in the video, this is also how 100 Mbit Ethernet is embedded into the cable.  Off hand, I think that this Advoli card only supports two power-over-cable connections.  If they wanted to support more, they'd have to add more 6/8 pin PCIe power headers.

 

Not explored in the video are the RS-232 and USB extension functionality.  Yep, this card will pass USB 2.0 alongside video over the same cable making this a great long distance KVM solution.  The catch is that you have to plug in a USB header from the motherboard to the card for this and it connects to a USB hub on the carrier card itself so total USB bandwidth is limited by that one uplink (you can see this in a picture I've attached).  For keyboard/mouse, this is plenty but I wouldn't expect to be a able to move large files over a thumb drive quickly at the remote end.  One cable can pass video, audio, 100 Mbit Ethernet (not supported on the model shown in the video), RS232, IR, USB and power simultaneously.  There are some command line tools that permit exploring things like signal quality, power-over-cable usage and how RS-232 is forwarded etc.  I wouldn't say they're end user friendly but they're fine for a system administrator.

 

They also make versions with nVida Quadro MXM cards.  These still have six RJ45 connectors but only four outputs.  The other two connectors are for Ethernet pass through.  This is where MXM card swapping and being unsupported comes into play.  The AMD MXM cards have six outputs on the MXM connector where as nVidia only has four outputs.   Putting a nVidia card into the Advoli AMD carrier will only permit four of the six outputs to work.  The other reason why card swapping is unsupported is that high power cards could eliminate the power-over-cable outputs that it supports.  

 

Over all this is a nice but also niche product.  Most of the use cases for multiple long range extenders also incorporate some video switching or can be just as easily accomplished by adding an external extender.  The big use-case for this is digital signage from a central host PC, absolutely the lowest video latency over distances or fixed content displays in an operations center (SOC/NOC/IRC etc.).  It appears to be a good product but you have to weigh the need for specifically this vs. alternatives in your use-case.

 

I've attached some pictures when I visited the Advoli booth at last year's Infocomm trade show.

[Cohacq]

Whats with all the fast cuts while Linus is dragging the cable around? It looks awful and makes everything feel disconnected.

[Luscious]

That's a pretty neat way to make a huge-ass video wall and live stream like a boss - 4 cards x 6 outputs = 24 monitors x 4K. That's 199 million pixels, but who's counting LOL.

 

Linus should plaster the entrance of the Vancouver convention center with 24 80 inch 4K TV's

[Nebari]

23 minutes ago, Luscious said:

That's a pretty neat way to make a huge-ass video wall and live stream like a boss - 4 cards x 6 outputs = 24 monitors x 4K. That's 199 million pixels, but who's counting LOL.

 

Linus should plaster the entrance of the Vancouver convention center with 24 80 inch 4K TV's

 

Dude you read my mind.

 

I can see Linus hauling the roll of cable around the outside of his building... others in the business park look up, see a walking cable monster, and go back to their business without so much as a blink.

 

EDIT : I wonder if you could plug seven of them into 7 Gamers, 1 CPU machine and run without issue... dooooooo iiiiiiiittt...

[DezGalbie]

You can feel the utter contempt that dude at the standing desk has for Linus.

Or maybe he just hates cables, I dunno.

[Tech_Dreamer]

2 hours ago, Pascal... said:

Advoli Ravioli  

 

@Schnoz @AlexTheGreatish @James@Tech_Dreamer

GIVE THE PATTY FORMIOLI !

[Radium_Angel]

2 hours ago, CliffEdge said:

what is wrong with focus in latest videos?

LTT videos are famous for their shyte camera work.

 

[power666]

1 hour ago, Luscious said:

That's a pretty neat way to make a huge-ass video wall and live stream like a boss - 4 cards x 6 outputs = 24 monitors x 4K. That's 199 million pixels, but who's counting LOL.

 

Linus should plaster the entrance of the Vancouver convention center with 24 80 inch 4K TV's

 

Most displays that large don't use ordinary displays because bezels are ugly.  The majority of LED video walls also leverage RJ45 connectors and category (STP CAT6A) cabling but are not HDbaseT either.  Most are based around the NovaStar platform with many simply reselling the design whole sale.  Mixing the NovaStar connections with HDbaseT or Ethernet will cause bad things to happen (TM).  The NovaStar platform relays on HDMI or DVI inputs. and doesn't do any sort of signal cropping (it will do scaling for the oddball LED resolutions).  Chances are that you'd also want a matrix switcher or multi view processor before the NovaStar inputs anyway, so you'd be using more traditional video card outputs anyway.  I've personally built a 2688 x 1536 and a 7680 x 2160 resolution walls based off of NovaStar platforms.

 

The newer LED wall stuff from Barco and Christie oddly enough is IP based using true Ethernet and can leverage PoE to power the LED panel.  Though these installs typically will use data daisy chaining so PoE while nice can only provide power for a handful of panels.  The input side of these is still HDMI, DP, SDI or SDVoE (Ethernet) so the Advoli card would be useless.  These platforms are not as mature as I had hoped as the IP transport is designed to be on its own private 10 Gbit network separate from all other traffic.  I understand why as these design schema relies on active-active multipathing to provide link redundancy which would normally cause havoc on normal tree-leaf corporate network topologies.

 

The exception is Planar which makes a  27", 1280 x 720 resolution bezel-less cabinet with HDbaseT in.  The cabinet has the outputs for eight other cabinets to be chained from it so you can get 3840 x 2160 resolution into 81" from one HDbaseT run.  The neat thing is that the Quadro version of the Advoli carrier card supports gen-lock and the Planar cabinet supports gen-lock and 240 Hz refresh if only driving itself from HDbaseT run (no daisy chaining).  LED walls are pretty crazy and advertise up to 480 Hz refresh rate but are often limited by the source connection.  So it is possible to do a 42" 2560 x 1440 @ 240 Hz logical display from a single card 100m away from the host.  Unfortunately no G-sync support.

 

 

[Emily Young]

3 hours ago, wellend said:

@GabenJr Can you run multiple cards in one system to get more outputs?

Yup. In theory you could also do mGPU with them, but they’re low power MXM cards to keep the power / thermal load down, so you won’t get much gaming perf out of them.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, Pascal... said:

Advoli Ravioli  

 

@Schnoz @AlexTheGreatish @James@Tech_Dreamer

I can assure you it doesn't sound good in Italian but it does in English, I accept that

[Spontaneocus]

Just saw your video on the Advoli TA6 Performance from Advoli. Which begs the question. Could each of the outputs on that card perhaps be assigned to different VM's running on unraid et al? 

 

[Spontaneocus]

Could each of the outputs on this be mapped to a different VM on unraid?

[Spontaneocus]

Also can I just say that the test you guys did with the distance, Linus is aware that if he left it on the drum next to the workstation, it still does the same thing as uncoiling it right? 
It's still 100m. PMSL 

[Luscious]

6 hours ago, Nebari said:

EDIT : I wonder if you could plug seven of them into 7 Gamers, 1 CPU machine and run without issue... dooooooo iiiiiiiittt...

Windows 10 supports a maximum of 32 display heads. You would need to go Server 2016/2019 or Linux for that many cards, assuming the motherboard BIOS allows it as well.

[RasmusDC]

it sucks that the standards war on connectors has been implementing so many new standards, remember in the old days, where i worked a B&O and we worked on Cat6-7 as only carrier of data, Sound/video... (Masterlink solutions)

 

Why we have HDMI, Optical and so on, sucks...

 

a good cat cable, and we could have a one cable setup for most of our hardware.

 

Just so easy to have everyhing in a cat cable, i know that CAT8 is only 40gbit/s  but hdmi 2.0A is only 18gbit/sec...

[Sacredsock]

Other than for comedic effect, what was the reason for uncoiling that full drum of cable? especially since someone now has to re-roll it

 

Also, is it possible to pass other graphics through to this magic card?

[Sacredsock]

54 minutes ago, VegetableStu said:

to put in perspective how long is 100m? o_o

i guess, although a little planning and a phone call or two would of allowed it to be a literal football field