Im using an upgraded 2006 mac pro 1,1 with a bios update to run os 10.11
here are the specs:
2x 2.66ghz dual core xeon
32gb ram
Radeon HD 5770
128 GB SSD boot drive
[The computer + ram, SSD, and video card on ebay totalled about 500$ CAD including shipping]
im still testing it out but it seems for streaming over the internet it can handle 2-3 transcodes at a time (or more… not sure yet). My questions are:
what is my bottleneck when streaming over the internet? CPU, RAM, or internet connection? istat menus shows the CPU is maxing out with 2 encodes but i can do a 3rd without any issues it seems. the video card also appears maxed out all the time when encoding for plex. I do not have a plex pass so no hardware video encoding (?)
Has anyone had experience doing multiple simultaneous encodes over the internet with those Seagate archive drives? [model# st8000dm004] apparently they have very slow write speeds but ok reads.
I guess Im wondering if i want to stream more/faster, should I upgrade the CPUs, try a plex pass for HW encoding, or upgrade the video card first? also need to upgrade the storage soon but feel like a NAS drive might be kind of overkill if the data isnt valuable.
Your main bottleneck will likely be OS / software support as this machine is 10+ years old.
For 500 Canadian Dollars you should be able to get a decent micro server (e.g. a NUC based machine) that has a decent / current hardware which will support HW transcoding.
The HDD shouldn’t be a bottleneck for 2-3 transcodes.
im sorry m8 can you be more specific? are you saying it is the CPU architecture as opposed to the clocks / cores?
my first assumption was that upgrading to the CPU could make it run a bit smoother if going from 4 cores to 8. For the record though, its running 100% smoothly and I dont yet know how many transcodes it can handle at a time.
I chose this computer because I like how easy it is to add / swap HDs. I also needed it to be a mac or hackintosh for other reasons. May have been a mistake to get one that is so aged, but it runs very well with the upgraded specs. Any thoughts on how future proof it really is if it can only go up to el capitan?
I’m referring to the Operating System…
The newest/latest OS supporting your Mac Pro 1.1 will be OS X 10.7 Lion (latest public release of macOS is 10.14 and 10.15 is just a few months away). OS X 10.7 only support Plex Media Server versions 0.9.16 or below… those releases are 3+ years old!
Server versions that old won’t run with current versions of Plex clients (e.g. on Android / iOS).
As I said in the OP, the system is running 10.11. I stream to my ios device all the time.
The plex server is already working
Istat is telling me that everything but the ram is maxed out with 2 devices streaming but when I add a third it still works fine.
Again My question is, what is my real bottleneck in terms of hardware?
i am guessing that getting a plex pass for hardware encode would do no good since the video card is so old right?
can I really trust Istat when it says everything is maxed out since I can then start streaming from another device and it keeps on going with no problems?
I assume this has something to do with the plex software just trying to max out the system resources as much as possible but if so how would i know what my hardware bottleneck is?
