I’ve converted an old itx sized pc to my local plex server. It works well enough for most things, except if I enable subtitles - it works for a little while, then stutters and eventually stops working. My guess is the poor little computer just can’t handle mixing in the subtitles.
So I was wondering what the best upgrade path would be. I’m not willing to spend tons of money on “get a new motherboard and an i7”; just looking for a potential cheap fix. I only ever have one client connected, so # of concurrent users is of no concern.
My current specs are:
Pentium E6500 @ 3Ghz
8 Gb of ram
512 Gb SSD for systems
2x3Tb HDD in Raid1 for media
The two upgrades I can come up with are:
upgrade to a Core 2 Quad (or equivalent Xeon): would be cheap (+/- € 20), but single core performance is hardly better at all. Would the multi-core even make a difference if there’s only 1 user?
add a gpu that can handle recoding: is this a viable option in my case? What video card would be a good option?
Things that cross my mind:
~ Look for cpu/motherboard combo sales (either at newegg or amazon)
~ for a Plex SERVER (PMS) the most critical component is hard drive space really. So I’d look for an mb that has 4-6 sata cuz if you only get 2 you’ll be sorry.
~ gpu isn’t too critical because PMS is a media spitter primarily, not a client.
~ nice affordable ventilated case, certified power supply (spend the money), and ram (i’m getting away with 4gb currently for HD).
~ 4 core ALL-THE-WAY
~ optional: maybe pull the trigger on a tv tuner card cuz plex offers that DVR ota function and you might getta plexpass laterish.
The hardware I’ve got now I’ve pretty much recycled or gotten for free. It’s an old Shuttle barebones upgraded to the gills, and it fits neatly in a cabinet close to the tv and network switch. There’s no way I can fit more hdd’s in there.
I was wondering about the Gpu in the context of offloading the encoding onto the gpu. Is it easy/feasible to get a cheap gpu that has opencl support to use instead of a faster cpu?
I’ve only got the one pciex slot, so a tv tuner card is out.
I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for a Q9650 (or a Q9650S if I’m lucky) then.
I will say this from my role as “Customer Support” first then as “myself, the Plex user” second. Ok?
If you upgrade to a processor which is already 8 1/2 years old, you’re getting what you pay for. It will be missing certain instruction sets PMS is and will be tuned for as time goes on. At some point, it will fail with “illegal instruction” fault to which there is no recovery other than buy again. How long that will be is unknown. 6 months? 6 years?
Now my personal thoughts
If I’m going to go through the pain of upgrading, I weigh upgrade cost vs time vs lifespan expectancy with what I want to do with it. I opted to go big and be done. You can get an i3 or i5 - 77xx class (KabyLake) and decode HEVC 2160p in the CPU. Clean, simple, and supported now as compared with cobbling old parts with ‘whatever’ and pray it works … but for how long. If I’m going to build something, why not future-proof it as much as I can within my budget knowing video streaming is still a ‘pay to play’ game.
Go with the Q9650 and don’t look back… I have two Intel DG33FB motherboards each with a Q9650 chip… One runs Windows7 with 4G of memory and the other runs FreeBSD 11.2 with 8G of memory… They both run PMS… All media files are stored on a NAS that either system can access… Either system will support three concurrent streams to our three Roku 3s… Nothing special, no SSDs, just a wired gigabit connection though out the house… The trick is to make sure your media files are encoded properly for the Roku to begin with and that your server doesn’t have to transcode anything on the fly…
Even works for doing DVR and Live TV with a HDHomerun Extend… I let the Extend do the transcoding and my servers chug happily along feeding media files to my Rokus…
Don’t let anyone tell you that you have to run the latest and greatest to make it work and have a good experience… I got everything second hand off E-bay except the drives in the NAS, memory, power supplies and the Rokus… All in all, my 2 Plex servers may have cost me $400…
