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Nice, another good option. Hope you have luck debugging your machine!

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.

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.

Why include an ML accelerator in a microprocessor that runs at 60 kHz? I can’t imagine any ML algorithm is appropriate for something that constrained.

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Nice! That seems like a sweet little server. Direct play is for sure ideal, plus if 720p is good enough quality for you I’m sure it saves a bunch on disk space.

My set up is an A380 passed to an Ubuntu 24.04 VM on a TrueNAS CORE host. It was really simple to set up PCIe pass through, TrueNAS let’s you do everything you need though the web GUI and h.264 and HEVC transcoding worked right out of the box in Jellyfin with the Jellyfin flavored FFMPEG if I recall. It also supports AV1 encoding but I haven’t tried that out. It handles like a dozen 4k transcodes at once, they’re capable little cards. I think ASRock makes a slot powered low profile 1 slot version.

I kinda feel like old server hardware is key here. I have pretty much my whole lab running on an old R730 I put a bunch of ECC RAM, disks, and a transcode GPU into and it’s been essentially flawless for like 2 years. Plus it has an IPMI which I don’t think I could live without now. It replaced a setup that would always give me issues which consisted of a bunch of optiplexes, and white boxes. I still hack on pi’s cuz it’s fun, but all the core stuff is surplus enterprise.