4k Transcoding Server Advice

[radarweaver]

Evening, looking for some advice here for my Plex server. I’m upgrading content to all 4k however i would like to stream when I’m on the road or my kids are using mobile devices which means time to transcode. Below is my current setup and I know I’m going to need to build / buy a rig with a nice GPU to do what I’m wanting but i’m looking for some solid advice on it.

Currently:
Dell T620 Dual Xeon 2630’s
128GB RAM
3x 500GB SSDs in a RAID5
10ge ethernet to a QNAP NAS TS873 (iscsi mounting volumes)
vSphere 7

I’m running a Windows 10 Pro VM and have all the logical cores passed through and 16GB of RAM. The volumes my content are on are iSCSI mounted over 10ge.

I can do a single 4k sometimes two 4k streams down to 1080 or 720 but peaks things out.

I’m looking to potentially get a Dell Precision 3600 series with an i7 9700 CPU, 16GB RAM, a Quardro RTX4000 8GB GPU. If i’m looking at all the right data that should allow for up to 7x transcode streams down to 720 and the CPU not be hit.

Any advice or thoughts are more than welcomed.

Thanks in advance everyone!

[tom80H]

Unless you have tons of subtitles to be burned into those videos or you want to use the server to heat your house, you might even work with the iGPU of that i7 (probably even an i5).

[radarweaver]

Yeah I use my T620 for other things work related so it’s not going anywhere.

But as far as the Precision yeah I do have subs enabled most of the time and I’m probably not as familiar as I should be about burning them in. I thought about an i5 as well. I’m just not all up and up on the transcoding requirements to do maybe 2 to 3 streams at a single time from 4k down to say 720 at worse case.

Plus I’m looking at the long term, unless I’m crazy and you can say so, but figure beefy now would hopefully man longer duration between upgrades.