Hey all, I’m looking to upgrade my server as I currently have an i5-4570k. I’m debating on whether I should just on a pair of Xeon E5-2660’s with a passmark of 17k. The dual mobo’s support V2 so there are tons of upgrade options.
My concern is transcoding. After doing a good amount of research, I’ve seen that Single Thread performance is really important, but it seems that only applies to VC-1 encoding. I haven’t seen much mention of how the overall passmark is affected with 264 enconding which over 90% of all my media is encoded with.
One high-end i7 will serve you better than one Xeon in regard to just running PMS. Especially if you can avail yourself of the iGPU hardware transcoding capabilities found in the later Intel Skylake or Kaby Lake processors.
Dual Xeons would allow running PMS and other things efficiently but not individually faster. It’s always best if you can avoid transcoding in the first place but my dual E5-2665 workstation can perform 4-6 1080 transcodes concurrently or just one 4K/HEVC at best.
@dduke2104 said:
One high-end i7 will serve you better than one Xeon in regard to just running PMS. Especially if you can avail yourself of the iGPU hardware transcoding capabilities found in the later Intel Skylake or Kaby Lake processors.
Dual Xeons would allow running PMS and other things efficiently but not individually faster. It’s always best if you can avoid transcoding in the first place but my dual E5-2665 workstation can perform 4-6 1080 transcodes concurrently or just one 4K/HEVC at best.
Yeah I just wish the new i7s were cheaper. I can get a pair of 2660s for $100 on eBay.
You can go a long way with the Xeons or a lesser i-series Intel processor if you use Handbrake or PMS’ Optimize to get your media to a format (probably x264/AAC/MP4) for DirectPlay.
@dduke2104 said:
You can go a long way with the Xeons or a lesser i-series Intel processor if you use Handbrake or PMS’ Optimize to get your media to a format (probably x264/AAC/MP4) for DirectPlay.
See this is what I’m wondering. I have very little media encoded in VC-1. Almost all of my media is in x264. So which is better? Xeon with a very high passmark but low single thread performance or an i7 with lower passmark but higher single thread?
All that becomes irrelevant if you pre-transcode your media to something that is DirectPlay or at least DirectStream. Does it matter if it takes 50% longer to transcode in PMS Optimize? HandBrake would outperform PMS Optimize anyway.
My point was if you transcode in advance as necessary so that your media can DirectPlay then why should you continue to wring your hands over single-thread performance or a particular Passmark rating? It’s when you want to transcode on-the-fly that they become limiting factors.
Windows PMS with a mid-range processor can DirectPlay 3-4 concurrent 1080p streams each having a moderately high bit-rate.
@dduke2104 said:
You can go a long way with the Xeons or a lesser i-series Intel processor if you use Handbrake or PMS’ Optimize to get your media to a format (probably x264/AAC/MP4) for DirectPlay.
See this is what I’m wondering. I have very little media encoded in VC-1. Almost all of my media is in x264. So which is better? Xeon with a very high passmark but low single thread performance or an i7 with lower passmark but higher single thread?
Ain’t that the question of the century… I just recently built a new dual Xeon server. I carefully considered the hardware transcoding option. But after seeing the very mediocre results I decided that software was the way to go for my needs. I went with two ES (engineering samples) of the E5-2658 v3 chips. These each have 12 cores (24 virtual cores) running at 2.0GHz. I get an individual Passmark of 1504 for each core. At only $200 for each chip, it was the best I could afford on my budget. I installed them on a Supermicro MBD-X10DLR motherboard with eight sticks of 8GB DIMM’s. So far? It has performed very nicely.
I have tested it to the fullest extent that I can. With the transcoder set at “Make my CPU hurt”, I found every VC1 title I had and streamed them all simultaneously to 8 different portable devices. It didn’t even break a sweat.
Now… If I could afford them? I would have gone with two E5-2667 v3’s.
So reading up on HEVC. Looks like by this time next year it will be a thing of the past. All the big money is backing the free to use AV1. By then I’ll be able to get different CPU’s.
My PMS is running on an ESXi VM. The host has 12CPU Cores, 2 X5675@3.07Hz. I allocated 8G ram and 8cores. It is fine for 4x1080p, but I have a few 4K files and that hurts when transcoding on the fly to 1080p.
I’m thinking about getting a 4K projector, but then I can’t really play anything 4K on 1080p endpoints (other than the projector) as it gets really choppy.
Long story short it is a big investment, upgrading projector AND the server.
