I posted a question a week or so ago that got no responses, so I’m going to ask a slightly different question.
I have an aging HP workstation with a pretty beefy i7 CPU in it that runs Windows and is being used as a Plex server among other things.
I want to upgrade this box to something more capable not just for Plex but for a variety of other tasks in the house… where possible I want to eliminate the use of Windows, because I hate it.
I have about 10TB of media, mostly BD rips, stored on a Synology NAS that the server will be accessing, so no local storage is required.
I want to move into 4K video as I’m splurging later this year on a new 4K TV and expect I will slowly start to purchase 4K BDs and rip those for storage… possibly also I will want to re-encode some of my oldest MPEG-2 and VC1 BD rips to H.265.
I’m normally streaming to only a couple of clients, and the max # of concurrent clients I could expect to stream to any time in the next few years is 3-5.
My 1st choice is to buy an off the shelf Dell R440 server (can get a pretty good deal right now) and run ESXi 6.7 on it… but it looks like if I do that then using a separate GPU for transcoding would be spotty at best.
So what recommendations can I get for option #2? Do I just replace my server and then repurpose that existing HP i7 based workstation as a dedicated Linux Plex server by adding a GPU to it?
Would I be better off building a new AMD set up? What’s possible for around $800 for a dedicated transcode rig?
Have you tried enabling HW transcoding on your i7? you may be able to buy yourself some time. Plex is actively improving hw transcoding in the background, plus 4k transcoding sucks in every case now (tonemapping is missing) Also Nvidia vastly improved their NVENC transcoding engine in RTX series cards, but have not yet released any of the affordable quadro models yet.
adds up to a bad time to build something that will be significantly better than what you have in my opinion.
that being said, I just bought a couple systems for my “lab” with enhancing plex being a priority.
I use Xpenology (my real synology is for backup only now) An i3-8100 CPU (newer CPU’s dont do hw transcoding in xpenology yet), a decent systemboard with PCIE slots, an HBA card, and a 10Gig NIC gets me top notch hardware transcoding and 4 modern cores for the stuff that must be software. This is all I would invest in for now. I don’t run white box esxi for a while, so can’t help you there. I did run plain ubuntu on this same hardware for a while, and it also worked very well, I just really liked the synology storage management, including SSD caching.
I would wait till NVENC is implemented and stable, then consider adding a current RTX era quadro, or GTX with modified drivers. whatever you do, there is no tone mapping today, so ALL 4k transcoding looks like crap.
I haven’t even tried transcoding on the old i7, wasn’t aware it was supported on CPUs without integrated video.
I will look into it.
Really want to get on an ESXi setup for my home lab since it will greatly simplify backups, upgrades, etc. plus it would let me split apart a bunch of hacked together crap running on a single Windows box.
I didn’t realize now was such a bad time to plan an upgrade so perhaps I will have to wait awhile.
Okay thanks for the info. I was feeling like AMd was a better option here but if the NUc isn’t too spendy and can handle multiple streams it’s a good option since it’s compact, fairly quiet and won’t use much power when it is idling.
Intel is also adding tone mapping to their next round of igpu. That’s worth waiting for if you are gonna spend any real money.
Just seems to be the edge of so much stuff coming out.
I moved to the i3-8100 system because I got all the parts used/refurb, cheap or already owned them, and it’s shocking capable. Otherwise I would still be running my haswell era system.
I love nucs as well but it’s too much in my opinion for something that will do very little more than what you have.
You can do 4K direct now, you can do a few 1080p even w transcoding now.
Maybe add a gtx1660 to what you have now, rebuild it under Linux add a few docker containers and or kvm Virtualisation. If your not happy you can always grab a dell on a deal :).
