Some questions on VNC or simliar ways of remote desktop

Hello. In my Corona quarantine, I am redoing some of my computers and network. My main rig is a threadripper, with the heaviest use on it being ripping and transcoding my bluray collection. It is a lot of overkill for when I am not transcoding.

I would like to use a Raspberry pi as my surf the internet computer, and VNC into my threadripper to set up transcoding with handbrake. I am not yet a CLI handbrake guy, so just ssh probably won’t work. I don’t use the GPU for transcode. Just CPU.

If I VNC into the threadripper rig, do I have to have the GPU to be able to render a desktop? Or can I take out the gpu and save a few watts on power? And have less components making heat or potentially failing?

Is there some other program or utility that would be better than VNC (of any of the flavors). I currently use RealVNC to vnc into my raspberry pi, just because that is what it came with.

That sounds like a laudable aim.

For your use case command line transcoding would be far more powerful as you could run it all from SSH. There is a really straight forward guide on the website:

https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/cli/cli-options.html

An alternative that would let you remove your GPU would be to virtualise an OS instance on the threadripper machine using a hypervisor like proxmox. It will install “spice” drivers to give you a virtual GPU. You can connect to that using realVNC and use it like a normal desktop. Give it enough cores and the transcode performance will be equivalent of baremetal.

I don’t understand, you have the relatively expensive threadripper hardware, it’s there, why not use it?

Is it too loud? Does RGB bother you and you can’t turn it off? Do you have it overclocked in such a way that it never really fully ramps down?

Personally I’ve found the Pi slow for desktop use compared to what I’m used to, and so I wonder

No, you won’t need the GPU in the target machine to set up VNC. The VNC server will create a virtual desktop. I do it all the time with headless servers somewhere that have never gotten close to a GPU.

However, are you sure you will be happy with the Pi handling the Internet? In my experience, even a halfway decent i7 with gobs of memory slows to a crawl when a few tabs are open in the browser …

You could also go with something like this
https://hub.docker.com/r/jlesage/handbrake
Gives you a webgui for handbrake without needing a full desktop environment on the machine.

I dont really get the incentive to go from threadripper to daylie driving a raspberry either. But hey, you do you.