I have used Plex for sometime but by no means an expert on streaming and encoding/decoding (ie complete noob!).
I am looking to replace my Synology NAS with a rented server because it just isn’t up to scratch.
I have 2 options I am looking at 1 being an Intel i7-7700 with 32GB ram and the other being an i7-7700 with 64GB ram but also has a GTX 1080.
I have read the Plex post about streams possibility for CPUs and it seems to me the i7-7700 can handle around 2x1080 streams at the same time but might struggle with 1x 4k.
My question is, is the GTX 1080 any good as I have found some contradicting posts online some people say it is stream locked and might need a custom driver? (Bear in mind I am renting hardware) yet others seems to just it can handle 32x 1080 streams and 11x 4k streams? Is this correct?
I had an i7-7700 for my Plex server recently. If it has an iGPU then it will handle multiple 4K streams with Intel quicksync using HW transcoding. I think I had around 8 running at one point when I was testing it.
The 7700 will decode VP9 10-bit but not HEVC 12-bit 4:2:0, while the GTX1080 is the opposite.
The GTX1080 will use a lot more power as well. The 7700 on its own is a pretty power hungry CPU as well.
For both you will need a Plex pass to enable HW transcoding.
nVidia consumer cards are restricted to a maximum of 8 concurrent transcodes. To get more you need to patch the drivers with instructions available at https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch.
How many concurrent 4K transcodes will you be doing and what OS will you be running?
Are there any other applications that you’re running which need the CPU grunt?
A lot of people just use their NAS or storage and get a cheap low powered NUC style PC to run Plex and use the iGPU for HW transcoding. You could also consider an 11th gen onwards i3 or i5 as they have better codec support if you don’t need the CPU grunt for anything else, although they are starting to get equivalent to an i7 7700 anyway.
I already have Plex Pass and I’m currently running it on my Synology NAS but it’s struggling and doesn’t like all the content. I used to run it from one of my servers hosted in a data center and I think I might be going back to that.
I just want to make sure I spec it up correctly. I think it’s going to be unlikely I will be streaming more than 1 or 2 4k streams at the same time however if it does happen say 4 or 5 I want it to be able to handle it.
I’m not worried to much about power consumption at it will be in a data center other than obviously being green to the environment but I’m already running the server.
It will be Linux and it is running a few other bits of software but all of them are pretty lightweight. I do have a few other media related pieces of software running in it to sort out my library and fill in missing data etc
