this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2026
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Once they factor in the Time Machine to transport this video card 15 years into the past, it should be quite the deal!
It would be perfect to replace the failing Radeon 6970M video card in my 14 year-old Plex server (3 10 year-old Seagate EXOS dives included)! The only problem is that my entire 14 year-old Plex server is only worth about half the price of this video card, and I already have 8GB of VRAM!
Soooo… why would anyone buy this?
Why does a plex server need a GPU? Couldn’t like the integrated GPU on a raspberry pi so the work for 1/100th the energy?
I’m not asking to be a duck, I don’t know what I’m missing that Plex does.
If your users have multiple different devices which each have different codecs that they support it's easier to transcode the movie in real time into a format that their device supports than to keep multiple different copies of the media with different encodings.
Graphics cards can do this but a Pi can't.
Thanks, that's helpful!
The pi also can't accelerate most video codecs. If you have a HEVC HDR movie good luck getting more than 3fps transcoded if your device isn't capable of direct streaming it.
Transcoding and other sundry tasks. But, not really for much if one is conscientious about downloading files in the proper formats in the first place.
Today? Probably. But a GPU from 14 years ago isn’t remarkably more powerful than a raspberryPi’s integrated GPU from today. Time flies, buddy! 14 years is a very, very long time in terms of silicon.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be too much work for you to look up the specs and shove some more “I told you so” in my face, but I think I’ve made my point
Thanks, I suppose things might change in 14 years... I haven't actually transcoded video since high school, which extends beyond that period.
Sorry if I came up as rude, I know raspi has like 4k decode these days, but that's a different thing.
You can avoid the transcoding entirely on pretty much every platform by targeting main 10 hevc level 5.1 or lower downloads
You didn’t come off rude, but there was a bit of indignance— but I interpreted that as directed towards Apple, not at me.
I grew up with Steve Job’s Apple, not Tim Cook’s Apple. Those two were galaxies apart. While Steve Jones was, perhaps, the biggest asshole in the entire world of computers, he insured that Apple and Apple computers, and Apple operating systems were the best. They were open, they were open source, and they served, before anyone, the user. Under Steve Jobs, Apple computer went up against the goddamn United States, Supreme Court, and won, in the name of user freedom and user privacy, not just for Apple users, but for everyone.
Because of Steve Jobs, we finally got the first and only BSD distro for PCs— the very PCs that Steve Jobs, himself, invented. (By means of an extraordinarily talented team of engineers at the company he created, NeXT). Then, by means of business wizardry, he tricked the idiots remaining at Apple computers to buyout him and the remaining people at NeXT computers back into Apple, and convincing them to adopt NeXTSTEP as the new Mac OS X. The first iteration of BSD as a consumer-faced operating system. A silent revolution for UNIX. And FOSS. hate on Apple all you like, but even to this day, they’re one of the biggest single contributors to the free and open source software movement.
And when he died, that all ended under the leadership of Tim Cook who spent his time rallying stock prices and profits and sucking Donald Trump‘s cock. Not to mention being a huge traitor to the LGBTQ community as a gay man myself, we all fucking hate that Cunt.
Now we have a new CEO, and we’ll see how that goes.
Before Linux was a widespread viable option like it is today, the BSD option offered by Apple and the FOSS contributions they made were a very important manner in this community.
I could go on, covering 40 years of I/O transport technologies that Apple has been crucial in developing or helping to develop, but I’ll save you 20 hours of the lecture. Google it if you’re curious. but, long story short, we wouldn’t have any of that shit without Apple.
And just because Apple, as a corporate entity, has become the unsufferable shit they are today, shouldn’t subtract from the contributions they’ve made in the past, nor the contributions they still make today.
Under their veil of corporate cuntery, Apple still makes massive contributions to the FOSS community. Hopefully, under the leadership of a new CEO, we will see improvement in conduct and culture.
I'm not really sure what your exact point is here, but I genuinely miss the old Apple that made OS X, Keynote, Pages, Aperture, and Final Cut. All of those were excellent software, Quartz was excellent, and Mac OS with OpenGL was pretty good.
Firewire was taken from us too soon. RIP.
My point? I’m old and I’m mad and I’m drunk and I’m stoned. I should probably stop talking.
But I’m also really glad that I’m not the only one who remembers when Apple was a fucking awesome company that was a legitimate public good. Maybe eventually could be again. Tim Cook is gone, thank goodness.
Ah, no worries.
I liked when I bought a computer and I could install my own RAM, it had all the ports, and it had someone who yelled at the designers when they got too giddy, or the engineers made an API too complicated for mortals.
This would be fine for running some lower powered CAD applications.
I’d put this in a work machine that ran survey software like Trimble Business Center or an older version of AutoCAD maybe. Probably run 12d fine.
But yeah probably not a full gaming machine.
From my experience, I think you’re being a little hopeful here. For this machine to transcode even a single video stream is really pushing it. That’s why all video on the server is H265, so it can always direct play to my AppleTVs at the lowest bit rates possible, while still maintaining the highest quality and Atmos surround sound + HDR
During my monthly reboot, even starting it up is a monumental strain. It takes almost 15 minutes for it to fully get its shit together. I’m at the point where I have to stage docker to start up after everything else is already done starting up. I have nine containers in three stacks. no biggie for a modern computer, but I’m not running this on a modern computer.
There’s not an SSD in the machine at all. And not for lack of trying. But that’s a conversation for another time.
Altogether, when treated with a gentle hand, this machine performs as perfectly as when it was new.
When treated with a gentle hand… and I’m sure I can get another 14 years out of it. When treated with a gentle hand…
Oh, before you ask: I’m not cheap. I’m just poor.
Yeah nah, the 8 gig would be fine with lower end applications. I’d be able to calc up a house on a low powered version of AutoCAD or the like, produce a dxf, go set the thing out and spit out the pdf and setout file. I had no dramas dong this on stuff far less powered than this.
I’d actually have no issues drawing up a few things. No, if I was a planner in a consultancy designing estates or high rise or working with stuff that required full capabilities I wouldn’t be running this but it’d be fine for a sole operator surveyor doing small stuff like house set outs and topos et al. It’d even be fine for cadastral work.
I have 8gb VRAM and use local LLM for Ai. xD Thanks to Vulkan it partially runs on GPU and partially on CPU, so its not too slow running "bigger" models.
And no, before anyone downvotes me, I am not an Ai bro. I do not generate everything with Ai (would be difficult with low end hardware anyway).
Yeah it’s certainly not too small for professional applications that don’t require huge amounts of power. If it’s cheap enough at the time I might look at this for my next build.
I can play all kinds of shit with 8GB. I have no clue what people are whining about.
Ah, yes, the halcyon days of the 00s, when nobody knew any better, and when ram and CPU cycles flowed like water from tap
Oh, buddy, 30 seconds in, you’d have a very quick change of attitude. This was an awesome machine back in 2012, but just try to render a few polygons now, and you’d be tearing your hair out.
Like I said, it’s great for some network-based video streaming, but, today, its limits are extremely well-defined, and for good reason.
Yeah okay
There are people in my industry still adequately using Win XP machines running old Sokkia software
I’d be able to use this more than adequately with a number of older softwares still available and more than capable for the tasks I outlined. I’m a surveyor, not a video renderer or gamer. I said if I needed the power you are talking about, I’d not use this card.
Well bless all your fucking hearts.
You’re better people than I am
Hahahaha hey it can be quite frustrating at times, especially working under or with senior blokes whose equipment and software is so old Noah used it to set his wooden ship out
But yes, a lot of us really only need a small card to take on middling tasks to keep the processor clear, so to speak. That’s not the case however for the design people in the industry, they need the cards you’d want.
You know it’s even more frustrating? Hoping you’re almost 15 year-old computer and almost 10 year-old storage array hosting your 20 y/o media library will continue to work because you’re too poor to replace any of that.
Times are tough
Edit: Seagate EXOS— worth every fucking penny. I’ve never had a Drive fail, and I have witnessed many drives work 24/7/365 perfectly well beyond 10 and even 12 years without losing a byte.
Ever seen a drive return a full bank of SMART diagnostics with “OLD AGE”? Yeah, that’s a thing.
Seagate EXOS Enterprise Hard Drives. There are no other others.
That’s impressive. I usually get six, seven years tops. Fuck that’s impressive
I have a Dell Inspiron I bought about eight years ago which I’m still managing to keep going. I’ve replaced the RAM and pulled the old 710 out of it and put in a 1070 I think it is which maxes this thing out. So far I’ve had issues with just the RAM and the SATA cable, which I’ve replaced. When Win10 runs out, if it’s still churning along I’ll install a Linux distro.
I’ve run TBC, AutoCAD LT and 12d Model on it, with no issues and that was on the 710 but as I say, you wouldn’t run these with five windows open and doing heaps of reductions on several models.
My old Win7 laptop is still going…I’m targeting it for a Linux do over soon as well.
Just for the sake of titillation, this is the oldest drive. I still have running on that server:
I’m pretty sure that this drive and the two other drives, which are in similarly terrible condition, could simply just die at any moment
And I am so poor, that I could, of course, not afford to replace any of them, especially considering hard drive prices at the moment.
Edit: if you know how to read Smart status output, you can clearly see that this hard drive is, for all intense and purposes, already quite dead. It’s a fucking miracle. I can read any data off of it at all. But it chugs along, as if it was brand new. Bless fucking Seagate.
That’s really impressive
I hope that drive goes full 2002 Corolla mode and lasts forever.
SEAGATE EXOS ENTERPRISE. SHELL OUT THOSE DOLLARS ON THE FRONT END AND NEVER LOOK BACK.
Not just my server, but I have set up and can attest to the integrity of at least six other Plex servers that are a similar vintage to mine that live on safe and sound
In my 45+ years of computery, i’ve never known a hard drive quite like the Seagate EXOS. Expensive as fuck, but quite invincible.
Edit: *under normal operating conditions. If it gets a little too hot, that shit will melt. Like any enterprise hardware, you gotta keep your eye very carefully on its operating temperature. I have known a situation or two wherein a drivebox overheated, causing drives to fail. But that was a USER error, NOT a hardware failure. But this is 2026, not 1986, so you’re gonna get plenty of system warnings before you get to that point.
But if everything is properly monitored and cared for, it will operate perfectly for an extra extraordinarily long time, and it will do so perfectly.
Its discussions like this one that make me want to pull apart all the old desktops lying around here and seeing if I can build a true old hybrid clunker
This has made my day ay
Time well spent, I say!