THIS is a Graphics Card..?

[James]

Check out that ASRock Rack M2_VGA Module at https://lmg.gg/5wcQF

Buy Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/ZAwAeu2

 

The folks over at ASRock RACK have created a graphics card that fits in an M.2 socket. It’s a lot smaller than an Nvidia RTX 3080 - but can it run games?

 

 

[WhitetailAni]

Yes!
They're covering this thing!

[Streetguru]

But this means @anthony needs to run a 32 core threadripper CPU and test a bunch of games running directly on it

[Nystemy]

To be fair, a small graphics card like this could be immensely useful if for a good price.

 

I for an example use an EN210 when I deal with systems that just needs "Graphics", when there simply isn't any onboard graphics on the motherboard.

This used to be a fairly common thing on servers, though a lot of modern servers have integrated graphics in the integrated management adapter, so feels like this M.2 GPU might be a bit too late to the party.

 

Unless it is amazingly cheap, but I somehow feel like it could maybe have had a bit more performance.

I also wonder if it would have been cheaper for them to just skip the 16MB of on chip memory and used just 1 DRAM chip instead...

[HenrySalayne]

@James

 

The monitor might be responsible for the limited colour resolution. VGA has to be converted to a digital signal nowadays - the conversion is probably pretty darn terrible and as cheap as possible (legacy support doesn't need to be good).

[Windows7ge]

I'll take 10. :3

[Nystemy]

1 hour ago, Benji said:

No, it isn't. It's literally a video output with 2D acceleration. "Graphics cards" of any kind can render 2D and 3D and usually have some added compute capabilities, not to mention FFUs for video en/decoding. So this thing doesn't really qualify, I fear.

Is not really true.

A lot of really early Graphics cards were little more than glorified frame buffers. They didn't do any drawing at all, and only handled display scanning for you.
And at the time, that were a lot more dedicated than having the CPU itself draw to the screen in real time while also running the application.

 

Graphics cards in general have obviously gotten more features with time, but to be fair. 3D isn't remotely a requirement, nor is video decoding or even general compute capabilities.

 

Yes, a lot of modern graphics cards have a lot more resources and features than that and tends to practically always support 3D graphics acceleration and video decoding.
But there is plenty of GPUs on the market on the embedded scene that doesn't have 3D support at all, and you can technically still build a graphics card with them, and some companies do. (Like ASRock has done here.)

[Candunc]

Are these available for purchase? Depending on the price I wouldn't mind tossing one in my headless server

[Required]

How about that Mr. Linus?

https://www.delock.de/produkte/S_95253/merkmale.html

[ccl13]

How did you sourced one? I am looking for one of these for quite some time now.

[Required]

I forgott to mention: https://www.delock.de/produkte/S_95256/merkmale.html

 

Well why not buy a "delock" one? The use the same Chip(set).

[plague09]

9 hours ago, James said:

Check out that ASRock Rack M2_VGA Module at https://lmg.gg/5wcQF

Buy Nvidia RTX 2080 Ti (PAID LINK): https://geni.us/ZAwAeu2

 

The folks over at ASRock RACK have created a graphics card that fits in an M.2 socket. It’s a lot smaller than an Nvidia RTX 3080 - but can it run games?

 

 

can you use ssd graphics card in a raspberry pi 4 with de shielboard ssd  and play steam for the artictecture can be  functional  for that hardware

[mariushm]

 

I like the card...  I think they missed a couple of things though. 

 

If the card needs additional power (as the m.2 slot has only 3.3v), then maybe a cable that goes in a fan header would have been better, server boards usually have lots of fan headers and even if the voltage varies, a dc-dc converter on the board could easily produce 5v or whatever the chip needs. 

 

They should have designed a m.2 connector on top of the board and leave room for a screw, and route SATA from m.2 (if any) into that second m.2 connector, to allow someone to install a tiny SATA M.2 2242 over the card. 

The card's M.2 2280, you could stack a tiny 2232 sata ssd to boot the server from 

 

The pin header uses a bunch of valuable space ... they could have repurposed a usb type c connector and cable which has 12 wires (and can be plugged either way), that's enough for vga, as there's multiple ground wires that can be combined together.  The usb cable would have better shielding and use less space inside, compared to a cheap ribbon cable and would add maybe a couple of dollars to the price.

 

 

 

 

[Radium_Angel]

Amusing.

Though I do look forward to a time when these things will be a valid (if low cost) option for people on a serious budget.

Throw some proper GDDR4 on it, say 512MB or if there is space, 1GB, a little bit better of a rendering GPU, and poof, a solid option for the casual crowd.

[kasugatei]

This looks like Matrox g200 which is standard integrated GPU on many servers.

 

For this product one of the use cases that comes to my mind is to use it with eg. manageable switches for troubleshooting when no SSH or serial connection is possible. I know that Mellanox for example has m.2 slot(s) on the x86 board. Other thing that comes to my mind is if you have headless motherboards so you use those things when you are doing initial setup or testing. Some firewall appliances are basically x86 based with ton of NICs and without monitor output. It is quite niche product, but I can see some uses for it.