Best setup for a simple plex server

Plex Media Server
1

Hey guys. If this is the wrong forum to post about some guidance, please accept my apologies and welcome to move me to the right place.

I have a few dif hardware parts; right now, my server is running v1 (the image) v1:

v1
v11136Ă—557 43.5 KB

v2:

v2
v21110Ă—541 44.3 KB

if I took some of my parts and put it together as seen on v2, would I feel a bigger boost on my server, or would it just be a waste of time?

2

I wouldn’t spend much money on it, but the second build is definitely better if you need to transcode video.

The AMD CPU has a passmark of 3454. It can transcode one 1080p H.264 streams. Reference: What Kind of CPU do I need for my server?

The Intel CPU has a passmark of 8158. It can transcode three or four 1080p H.264 streams. Since you have a Plex Pass, you can enable hardware accelerated transcoding. You can use the Intel Quick Sync Graphics (GPU) to transcode H.264, MPEG2, & VC-1 video instead of doing it in software on the CPU.

Leave the GT 710 out of the Intel build. It cannot be used for hardware accelerated transcoding. If the GT 710 is designated as the primary graphics processor for the system, it will prevent you from using hardware acceleration with the Intel Quick Sync Graphics.

3

So much great feedback Ford. Thank you.

its really just hardware I have laying around, so if it can be a bit of an upgrade ill just play around with it. A bit surprised over the 4k how much that would req.

Only thing I need the GT for is for hdmi from pc to screen. I don’t take that intel cpu can help me there sadly. so I don’t know how to do that trick your talking about

4

I made a couple of mistakes in my first post: First, I did not realize the motherboard lacked a HDMI output; Second, I did not realize the I7-3930K lacked onboard graphics.

My bad for not checking the details of each, and ignore what I wrote about leaving the GT 710 out of the build.

I found some additional information regarding the GT 710 on Wikipedia:

So, you’ll definitely get an upgrade by using the Intel chip. It also appears you can take partial advantage of hardware accelerated transcoding in Plex, as the GT710 can decode the previously mentioned formats. The encode will still occur via the CPU, but that is still better than the entire transcode happening on the CPU.

Apologies for the mistakes in my first reply.