I will try and keep this brief, I am building a new 12 bay NAS which will run trueNAS Scale and be used to run VMs and Plex. Due to the lack of PCIe lanes & ECC memory support on almost all desktop motherboards I am looking at a board that supports 4th &5th Gen Xeon CPUs (Require at least 2 x PCIe 4.0 M.2, one PCIe 4.0 x16, 2 x PCIe 4.0 x8 slots & Dual 10GB NICs). While the board and CPU is very well suited for the home lab purpose I am well aware that 4th & 5th Gen Xeons don’t have quick sync so am a little worried about how well they will be able to transcode (I would like to be able to run 2 x 4k streams as a min). I would like to avoid adding a separate GPU for this purpose as build costs are already high and trying to keep power consumption down where possible. Is anyone running Plex on a machine with a current gen Xeon and able to offer any insight?
Modern CPUs with Quick Sync use so little power, and CPUs from a few generations back are cheap and still very good for Plex. You might consider divorcing Plex server duties from the NAS and adding a separate box that supports Quick Sync. There are a lot of affordable options. Then just mount the files from the NAS.
Your Plex server won’t have ECC etc but… Does it really matter for Plex?
Thanks BanzaiInstitute, I could run Plex on a separate machine but just seems a little ridiculous that all needs can’t be met by a single machine
