looking for a simple PCIe video card

[DiTBho]

I don't need a GPU, I only need a framebuffer for Linux, and I am tempted to buy a PCIe to PCI adapter in order to use a simple (PCI/32bit) ATI Rage XL 8MB

The total cost for this will be:
- 40 Euro for the PCIe to PCI adapter
- 20 Euro for the ATI Rage XL 8MB

But seriously, isn't there a simple video card with PCIe bus (even 1X) with 32Mbyte and nothing more than this? VGA or DVI output would be enough for me.

My needs are
- fbcon, video text console
- X11 limited to 1024x768x16
- Linux friendly, I need the kernel module source, I don't want to deal with any binary blobs

For sure I don't want anything that requires a big heatsink over chips.

I know, sometimes it's hard to make me happy 

[magic]

Any low end Radeon - HDx350, HDx400 and similar models. They are often available with passive cooling and take only one slot. Lots of them on used market too, but watch out for low profile variants.

[ve7xen]

Low-end Quadro cards are a decent choice, they are/were widely used in OEM (Dell, HP, etc.) workstations. You can get NVS 290/295/300/310 on eBay all day for < $50. They will mostly require an x16 slot, but there are some x1 ones out there if that matters (though you can mod an x1 to an open slot...). These are all well supported with the open-source nouveau driver. They do have heatsinks though, of course.

But seriously, isn't there a simple video card with PCIe bus (even 1X) with 32Mbyte and nothing more than this? VGA or DVI output would be enough for me.

New, I don't think so. If it is, it'll be niche and probably expensive due to low volume. In 'real' servers these days, this is part of the BMC that also handles IPMI etc.

[Someone]

Low-end Quadro cards are a decent choice, they are/were widely used in OEM (Dell, HP, etc.) workstations. You can get NVS 290/295/300/310 on eBay all day for < $50. They will mostly require an x16 slot, but there are some x1 ones out there if that matters (though you can mod an x1 to an open slot...). These are all well supported with the open-source nouveau driver. They do have heatsinks though, of course.

For those who arent familiar with them, just watch out for the DMS-59 connector. Looks like DVI but needs a breakout adaptor to use it (which like all unattached parts of computers seems to evaporate when the device is taken out of service). But they were made specifically for the case of users who wanted to add more 2D pixels to their computer.

But also consider not having a GPU at all. Either remote sessions, or the cheap USB -> DVI adaptors that do their work in system memory (much confusion with USB-C alternate modes).

[Psi]

I'm not sure of your application, but if you only need something simple that has full source that you can tweak then have you considered using a cheap USB to HDMI adaptor?
I doubt any of those use a binary blob and they work in Linux.

[Berni]

The USB to HDMI adapters are not always all that good. Some of them have true minimal hardware inside, so the PC is actually constructing the video data in software and just DMAing it out live. The result is some CPU load at all times and if the USB bus gets too congested with other traffic you can see visual glitches.

Id say best bet is to get the lowest end AMD card possible, they have passive cooling and good linux drivers.

Tho there are some obscure things such as M.2 graphics cards that really are the bare bones required to get video out on a system with no integrated card.

[Psi]

The USB to HDMI adapters are not always all that good. Some of them have true minimal hardware inside, so the PC is actually constructing the video data in software and just DMAing it out live. The result is some CPU load at all times and if the USB bus gets too congested with other traffic you can see visual glitches.

Id say best bet is to get the lowest end AMD card possible, they have passive cooling and good linux drivers.

Tho there are some obscure things such as M.2 graphics cards that really are the bare bones required to get video out on a system with no integrated card.

I use a USB3 adaptor to LAN+HDMI+VGA to get 4 external 1080P monitors on my laptop at work (2 from laptop itself and 2 over one USB3 adaptor)
I agree about extra CPU usage, I notice the laptop gets hotter if I drag a video or MS Teams window onto one of the monitors running over USB.
But I have never seen any artifacting and the framerate has always been high enough for fluid video.

I guess it depends why the OP needs the monitor for and what they want to do with it.

[DiTBho]

I'm not sure of your application, but if you only need something simple that has full source that you can tweak then have you considered using a cheap USB to HDMI adaptor?
I doubt any of those use a binary blob and they work in Linux.

Which one? Model? Vendor? (guys, I need something to search)
I don't know any USB-to-HDMI or USB-to-VGA with sources for Linux.

p.s.
I don't have USB3, only USB2

[Psi]

I don't have USB3, only USB2

ok that rules out USB to HDMI, anything USB2 would be horrid to use for display due to bandwidth issues.

[mariush]

Lots of video cards on eBay that will do what you want.
Even if the cards have DMS-59 connector, the adapter cable that convert it to 2 DVI-I or 2 vga is usually less than 5$

A "trick" you can use on eBay is to add  "lot" or "bundle" to search results, as cheap ancient video cards are often sold in packs because they're not worth much.

For example,

35$ (~12$ per card)  Lot of 3 Dell NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800 768MB PCI-E Video Card 0P418M : https://www.ebay.com/itm/224586655982

15$ (7.5$ per card) 2 x AMD HD 6450 (DVI+DP low profile) https://www.ebay.com/itm/184836916965

30$ (6$ per card) 5 x AMD HD 6350 but with DMS-59 connector : https://www.ebay.com/itm/274761685185

$88 (4.5$ per card) 20 x AMD HD 3450 256 MB with DMS-59 connector : https://www.ebay.com/itm/143953054477


1$ DMS-59 to DVI-I x 2  adapter cable : https://www.ebay.com/itm/165038146230

13$ for a 6-pack dms-59 to dvi-i x 2  (us seller) : https://www.ebay.com/itm/284338566612

[Psi]

Maybe a pcie Radeon HD6450, you can pick them up for ~USD$30 from aliexpress.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005003098998166.html

But if money is super limited maybe aliexpress isn't the best option for you.
Cheap stuff on aliexpress can be a bit risky.

[DiTBho]

I guess it depends why the OP needs the monitor for and what they want to do with it.

Just a text console, plus limited X11-support to run some simple graphical programs.

Very basic 2D-only primitives to support a fraction of what Openmotif needs; the frame rate is the same as when you use a text console for typing something. I won't for sure run any mplayer on that thing 

[DiTBho]

Maybe a pcie Radeon HD6450

ummm, they are all big-monster-cards, with big heat-sinks and often with a big fan cooler; I'd prefer something small, with PCIe 1x connector, something passive cooled, and possibly without an heat-sink at all.

Isn't possible? ... well, something like the "Gigabyte GC-IVA" (hope this is the correct vendor/model), which seems hard to find, and I don't know anything about its support for Linux. But it's exactly what I'd like to have.

Look at this beauty of simplicity!



As comparison, look at the (old) ATI-Rage-XL8; look how tiny, simple, and beauty it was! It also used SDRAM as video memory (which is hackable, but hey? this is for a crazy idea), and its kernel driver is still very very simple. Unfortunately it's not PCIe. I wonder it will work with a PCIe-to-PCI adapter.



I am also curious about the "Matrox Millennium G550-pcie". Last time I played with an MDA kernel module for the G400 series it took me over 2 years to hack it so that both video channels worked fully on an embedded-SBC, so ... I don't know. MDA1 (for Matrox Millennium I / II) was a great piece of kernel code, MDA2 (for Matrox Millennium G400) ... was a nightmare. But I don't know anything about that G550-pcie. I've never tried myself 




I have ZERO experience with AMD and Radeon video cards.

[mariush]

You can CUT the pci-e x16 down to pci-e x1 or x4, pci-e is designed like that, and video card will work with 1 lane or 4 or 8 or 16, so it's really not a big problem.

Some of the cards I linked to are low profile, just a bit long.  Some of those have small coolers but if you use them for frame buffers, you could just remove the large heatsink that covers the ram as well, and put a basic heatsink with some double sided adhesive tape on the main gpu chip and it would be fine.


The Gigabyte uses an Aspeed chip which I think is often used in dedicated servers for remote management, so they repurposed it.

You could buy one of those M.2  to VGA adapter cards if you want miniature, but you're paying for the shrink and for low volume product. You can also put such m.2 card on one of those m.2 x4 to pci-e x1 / pci-e x4 adapter boards meant for SSDs.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Raspberry Pi or similar and SSH in. Power it from the USB. Turn it off when not using the monitor.

[Ian.M]

I don't have USB3, only USB2

ok that rules out USB to HDMI, anything USB2 would be horrid to use for display due to bandwidth issues.

Not necessarily.  It just means you need to pop a cheap PCIe 1x USB3 card in there to run the USB3 HDMI adapter.

I'm running something similar, an ICZI USB 3 VGA adapter (Fresco Logic chip), running off a generic VIA USB 3 eXtensible Host Controller, which gives me 1280x960 VGA fast enough for Youtube at a total cost of under £25 GBP, including the second hand Dell 1708FP monitor.  Hint: If doing the same under Windows, get the chip's driver from Fresco Logic, and don't install the ICZI crapware!

[DiTBho]

You could buy one of those M.2  to VGA adapter cards if you want miniature, but you're paying for the shrink and for low volume product.

That M2.card costs 180 euro + S/H + customs 

Not acceptable, too expensive, but it's interesting; I sent an email to a Finnish company to be notified when the GC-IVA card will be available. Same chip, different form factor, different price, and their price should be 40-50 euro + S/H, which is ... acceptable, but I guess it will take up to the end of September to know something.

Meanwhile, let's hack big-video cards like you have suggested 

[DiTBho]

Raspberry Pi or similar and SSH in. Power it from the USB. Turn it off when not using the monitor.

if I could always use a netlink to SSH and X11forward, I won't for sure care about adding a video card

[DiTBho]

Not necessarily.  It just means you need to pop a cheap PCIe 1x USB3 card in there to run the USB3 HDMI adapter.

LOL,  clever, original, and inventive, love it 

[magic]

Just go here and make a list of all cards ending with -350, -400 or -450, such as HD5450. Then look on auction sites for units with passive cooling. VGA output option typically guarantees a low profile card with full profile bracket, that's likely the smallest footprint you can get.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_graphics_processing_units

Or mount a PCI card in PCIe bridge, that surely will be more convenient

[ve7xen]

I don't have USB3, only USB2

ok that rules out USB to HDMI, anything USB2 would be horrid to use for display due to bandwidth issues.

I do remember back in the day that USB2 HDMI/VGA video adapters did exist. I recall them doing some kind of software compression (MJPEG maybe?) to be remotely usable over the High Speed bus. The result wasn't pretty, but for a mostly-static low quality display they did work. I would strongly suspect that binary blobs would be required, if they work in Linux at all, though.

Did some poking around and it seems that these may still be produced. See Microchip/SMSC UFX6000/7000. It looks like there is also an in-kernel framebuffer driver for this chip (smscufx). I don't see any obvious finished products based on them, but some more digging may turn them up.

[Ian.M]

Just for sh!ts and giggles, I've just tried my ICZI ‎IZEC-A58 USB 3 VGA adapter, as a second screen (extend, not mirror) on a USB 2 port, and it works reasonably well, certainly good enough for setting up PCs and traditional office tasks. 

 As I mentioned earlier I'm using the Fresco Logic FL2000 IDDCX driver (as the reviews of the ICZI software bundled on its internal flash drive for diskless installation were so horrible  I never let it run!) , which seems to react to the much lower USB 2.0 bandwidth by dropping the color depth while still faking 32 bit color to Win10 to keep windows happy.  At 800x600 and 1024x768, if you do a gradient test, it appears to do RGB554 16384 color, though it seems better than that on a Youtube video (of Dave of course), at 800x800, so maybe its doing 65536 color with two extra luma bits or maybe there's some fancy compression going on.  At 1024x768, Dave is somewhat posterized but is watchable for technical content.

At 1280x960, the display is still stable and reasonable responsive, though if video is playing the color depth may drop as low as 256, (RGB 332)!   On largely static images, it dynamically adjusts all the way back up to RGB554  16384 color. Dave is badly posterized and somewhat jerky, somewhat resembling a very fresh zombie, but with less shambling.

I suspect that any other brand using the same FL2000DX chip is going to have similar USB 2 capabilities.  Its worth noting there is actually an official OEM Linux driver for it, https://github.com/FrescoLogic/FL2000 though if you aren't using Ubuntu 14 LTS, YMMV. 

[NiHaoMike]

The fl2k adapters are unusual in that they can output arbitrary waveforms without regular sync pulses, well worth getting some for that purpose alone.
https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki

Have you considered a Raspberry Pi or similar acting as a VNC client with the target running a VNC server?

[DiTBho]

Have you considered a Raspberry Pi or similar acting as a VNC client with the target running a VNC server?

if someone looks for a PCIe video card it means he/she has already considered he/she cannot use RDP, otherwise I would use my laptop.

[DiTBho]

The fl2k adapters are unusual in that they can output arbitrary waveforms without regular sync pulses, well worth getting some for that purpose alone.
https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki

That's a *GREAT* idea 

[Ian.M]

*Nice*.  Looking at the osmo-fl2k source, it appears there is Win32 and Mac support so it isn't Linux only.   With a bit of work it could probably be turned into a general purpose three channel AWG with 100MHz or better sample rate, and if an external I2C controlled amplifier/attenuator buffer board was designed, that could be integrated,  controlled by the FL2000DX's DDC interface.

Also, I suspect HSYNC could be repurposed as a trigger pulse output. Unfortunately a trigger input or external clock is unlikely to be possible due to hardware limitations.

[DiTBho]

Its worth noting there is actually an official OEM Linux driver for it

it has support for kernel v3.* and v4.*

do you know if there is already around support for kernel v5? I am on an embedded SBC, running kernel 5.4.128...5.12.* ? Otherwise I will try to find the time to port it.

5.12 and 5.14 are experimental and not exactly stable. I am already having a lot of problems; bugs accessing to unaligned memory, and Gcc v11 "alloca" that leaves garbage in the upper 32 bits 

[DiTBho]

OK, just checked, it compiles on K5 

[Berni]

The fl2k adapters are unusual in that they can output arbitrary waveforms without regular sync pulses, well worth getting some for that purpose alone.
https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-fl2k/wiki

Have you considered a Raspberry Pi or similar acting as a VNC client with the target running a VNC server?

Yes these are the kind of minimal hardware USB to HDMI/VGA adapters i talked about. This is the reason why they need a good deal of CPU time to run and require a reliable high bandwith on USB otherwise the video output gets an interruption and you can see the artifact.

This is only the cheap ones. All the proper USB video adapters are much more sophisticated and have a framebuffer inside of it. So those don't need to be constantly spoon fed video data, so this means less CPU load and lack of proper USB bandwith just means the frame rate slows down.

One could indeed make an impressive AWG using this. The proper Keysight AWGs that can be fed data live from PCIe are hugely expensive and require a PXI rack to run. Also a possibility for a SDR radio transmitter here if you add a RF modulator chip onto this.

[Psi]

Yeah, a dual core CPU is kind of a requirement.
Thought it obviously depends what your resolution is.
640x480 text console is quite different to 1080p30

[Ian.M]

A minimum of two cores isn't an arduous requirement nowadays.  Even my decade old PC which has a Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU     E7500  @ 2.93GHz, has no problems running a Fresco Logic FL2000DX adapter, playing video at the  highest resolution my second screen can support (1280x960), and I haven't noticed excessively high CPU loads while the second screen is active.

However I will be bearing in mind the FL2000DX's CPU load and bus bandwidth demands when handling large amounts of data on external USB 3 SSDs, where dropping back to a single display  may be worth it.