I very much doubt it. That is a really low powered Xeon & I don’t think that it is going to work fro you at all. More important than looking at the overall CPU mark is to look at the single threaded benchmark which in this case is only 1060.which is just about half the performance of a 5 year old i3-4130.
thank you very much for the reply. I’m so sorry, I don’t know how did I miss your reply.
Do you think single thread pass mark is more important than multi threaded pass mark to perform high in PMS?
I very much doubt it. That is a really low powered Xeon & I don’t think that it is going to work fro you at all. More important than looking at the overall CPU mark is to look at the single threaded benchmark which in this case is only 1060.which is just about half the performance of a 5 year old i3-4130.
thank you very much for the reply. I’m so sorry, I don’t know how did I miss your reply.
Do you think single thread pass mark is more important than multi threaded pass mark to perform high in PMS?
Transcoding can use multithreading but transcoding in some situations is limited to a single thread e.g. VC-1 & burned in subtitles. Just don’t assume that all transcoding will work well with a high core count but low performance CPU as in other areas of computing you are always better off with the fastest possible single threaded performance. Single threaded CPU performance has been pretty much static static for over five years. Adding cores to give better multithreaded performance is a poor substitute for a faster single thread.
Depends very much on your players as well. for 4k you have to direct play, Plex can’t transcode 4k to 4k currently I belive so if say you have a H265 file at level 5.1 and your player only supports 5.0 then your server will have to transcode it…and the stream will end up @ 1080p h.264. Even if your files all support your players then it’s down to your bandwidth and your HDD throughput for multi-streams. Then as you say VM’s limit any sort of hardware acceleration so I would go baremetal if you can (though there are ways to have PLEX in a VM but run the plex transcoder on remote machine/VM host). I currently run a server with 2xXeon e5-2580v2 (10 cores with HT) 96gb Ram with 40tb storage pool and a Quadro P400 (this card only support 2xstream transcodes though). Even this machine will struggle with 4k transcodes (depending on quality settings) when not using the P400 (and the P400 can’t do everything) I also make sure that everything I have in h.265 (4k and 1080p) is the correct max level for my players when I rip it. The way I have my storage pool I have once hit issues where 8 of my players were all pulling from the same HDD and that caused some HDD bandwidth issues but generally this is very rare. I do find that with the p400 my CPU usage is very rarely above idle but again use cases vary and CPU transcodes are generally better quality. And as stated above Direct stream/play uses very little CPU.
If you carefully plan your file types and make sure what all your plays are capable of you really don’t need a huge amount of power…you are then limited by your upload and your clients download bandwidth.
I have been running a Dell T7500 with X5670 (i think) hexa core 3.3. The server works pretty good. I have ran up to 11 streams with that box. I do I have a GTX 960 in it to help with the hw transcoding. I never ran a Xeon straight up with some hw assist.
I am now in the process of doing a upgrade since the box is always on anyway to a more electric friendly server.
The T7500 is a ugly box. I have crammed about 11 drives into this server. Using ICY DOCK 2 3-2 HDD Cages and heat dissipation is not good with those ICY DOCKS in the front bays.
The new XEON I’m running will be a E5-2650l v4 1.7. X99 14cores. The proc only pulls 65W vs the old x5670 pulling 140w? and I have replaced the GTX 960 pulling 120w to a 1050ti pulling only 75w.
I have a intel quad nic add-on card to the onboard 2 nic the mb provides. I enable 8 RSS queues to spread the load across as many cpu’s as I can.
I also run another VM workstation on top the server. A good old download box. Since the plex is up why not the download machine as well since these downloads sometime takes days or weeks…
With the quad nic, I isolate the download traffic to different port while the main plex stream goes out the main port for the box.
I also use other nics to do file transfers and thinking about putting up a 4k vm with another dedicated port that vm for 4k in house streaming. Since the VM cant utilize or see the hw nor can it transcode 4k … i figure a dedicated 4k server is good for internal streams.
lol I have a crazy setup with about 40 users (all friends and family) averaging 3 to 6 streams all the time, hence a dedicated 4k vm just more myself. I hate when the client says my server is not fast enough for the stream …
anyway… Xeons are good but you will need a cheap 1050ti to help it along.
if you plan to do some staxrip and re-encode those huge blu-ray rips down to a managable size… the 1050ti is great too but a 1060 or even 1070 can probably crank those tv series way faster.
