I’m eyeing a Sparkle Arc A310 ECO as a second GPU in my workstation. The purpose would just be to drive the display in Linux, a LG C2 at 4k 120Hz. Sadly the iGPU on my 7950x is giving my some annoying issues and critical driver errors, where I’ve had a couple of times pin kernel versions to have it work, deal with GPU reset crashes, etc. Currently I’m having again issues after upgrading to Fedora 41 and can’t find a solution (already tried downgrading amdgpu-firmware and different kernel versions).
The card should be single slot to fit in my case, and hopefully would work in the pcie 4.0x2 slot on my proart x670e motherboard.
This card seems to have only HDMI 2.0, but it has two mDP 2.0 HBR10 ports. Does anyone know if a passive mDP to HDMI cable would work for my purposes? Or would I need an active cable. DP 2.0 HBR10 does offer 40 Gb bandwidth, so theoretically it would work? Does anyone have experience with this?
The alternative would be an nVidia RTX A 400. This one only has mDP 1.4 connectors, so for sure I would need an active (DSC decoding) cable/adapter)
Then AMD has some options (RX 6400 and some single slot professional cards), but AMD does not support HDMI FRL on linux, so I would again need an active cable/adapter. And I’m wary of getting the same driver issues as the iGPU.
Any experiences with these cards, or does anyone know if a passive cable would work for me? A passive cable would definitely be preferred since I needed to try 3 different models to get active conversion to work with my alder lake laptop’s TB4 ports and my 7950x iGPU. These are both USB-c to HDMI so I would need to get a new mDP to HDMI then…
Any chance you’re seeing errors related to the gnome setting daemons power module?
Had an issue occur earlier today which. I haven’t investigated much yet, caused by my 7900X’s iGPU
Is it the ring bus timeout (check journalctl / dmesg)?
Nov 15 23:21:00 annie kernel: amdgpu 0000:6d:00.0: amdgpu: ring gfx_0.0.0 timeout, signaled seq=842, emitted seq=844
After which it resets (killing DE). Logging in again doesn’t work either until I reboot. And the issue happens between 0-5 mins of logging in any way…
I’m getting this both in gnome and hyprland. Basically making the system unusable. I’ve had issues recently on the earlier 6.11 kernels too (gpu crash when using video decode), which I could solve downgrading the kernel. Last year I had again issues with no display immediately on boot, which again I solved downgrading firmware or kernel, don’t remember which.
At this point I’m tired of AMD on linux, between driver issues and lacking HDMI FRL. Really don’t know why they are celebrated so much for having an ‘open’ driver. Nvidia is now moving to the same model any way (open driver – though out of tree) with a binary firmware blob. And Intel has always had the best linux support historically IMO (even though the arc ones needed to mature a bit – both on linux and windows). So I’m thinking a small cheap arc GPU is my best bet. It can encode AV1 too which is a nice bonus. I’m just trying to figure out how to connect my HDMI 2.1 display to it at 4k 120Hz.
Did nvidia add FRL to it’s linux drivers? I know a year ago it wasn’t working. I haven’t tried intel yet. I currently use a DELL RX 6500 with an active DP to HDMI adapter. It was the only way to get 4k/120hz on my C3.
The DELL RX 6500 is low profile and single slot. But it only has 2 DP.
Yes, I’m using it on currently on the display I’m using. VRR 10bit 4k 120Hz, the whole shebang. On an RTX 3060. It worked already 2 years ago when I got it.
On reddit I read that the sparkle card has a very annoying fan so sadly that’s not an option. Would’ve liked the AV1 capabilities.
I’m wary of an AMD single slot card as I fear the same driver issues will pop up. It is RDNA2 just like my iGPU. I’ll probably go for the nvidia A400 then and get an active DP 1.4 to HDMI 2.1 cable/adapter, like I do with the iGPU (though that one is usb-c, not mDP). On the plus side it has ECC VRAM, so it’s got that going for it!