I’ve been fighting with some issues on my unraid server recently and I’m at a point where I need a graphics card to see the actual video out as the machine boots. The psu in the chassis has no additional connectors that I could use for additional power to a graphics card.
Can someone point me in the direction of a super cheap graphics card that will be used for console only and not 3d graphics or gaming.
The nVidia GT series are cheap, the 710 series are the cheapest new cards that I have found.
Check your local Craigslist or other classifieds for cheap old GPUs. Or if you have another PC, borrow the GPU and power supply just to get it to boot.
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.
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.
I was very close to doing this as I could repurpose it for video transcoding but ended up going with the Nvidia GT 710.
If the motherboard has any available pcie slots (and the chassis has space for it), minimal graphics cards with HDMI or VGA or whatever else can be had for really cheap. That’s what I use to troubleshoot my truenas box.
eBay, Craigslist, Goodwill, Facebook marketplace, or whatever your local equivalent is. Most basic graphics cards don’t need additional power.
There exist USB graphics adapters, too. But they can be janky and may not show the boot process.
