Building a new server for the first time in a while, whats a good gpu for transcoding these days?

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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Gonna build a new server (probably unraid, its what ive used in the past but its not set in stone.) and one of my primary uses will be plex. For the CPU i was thinking the I5-14500 which has the Intel® UHD Graphics 770 iGPU. Is that a solid choice by itself? I think i had heard some of intels dedicated gpus were pretty good too?

I dont mind running plex in windows, linux or docker. I remember at least in the past there were some differences in gpu transcoding so whichever is the best

Mostly just for me and my wife using Nvidia shields as the client but might also have a few friends on it as well

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Any details on your use case (e.g. expected number of concurrent/parallel transcodes)?
Most of the time, a decent Intel CPU with QuickSync capable iGPU will do the job.

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I try to at home direct play but, lets say 6-8 max.

Are we at a point where I can just have a 4k copy of the file and transcode? (In the past i had to have a 1080p and 4k file as transcoding 4k was impractical)

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Note that a Plex Pass is required for hardware accelerated transcoding.

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Thanks for the reminder, Yeah i let it lapse when i got rid of my server a while back. ill probably just grab a lifetime if they still offer it

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Might wait until Black Friday / Cyber Monday. In the past Plex Passes have been on sale that weekend.

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Intel Quicksync on modern iGPUs generally handles multiple transcoding tasks with ease and will be the lowest cost and power consumption.

This link gives you an overview of what each Intel iGPU will handle.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/docs/onevpl/developer-reference-media-intel-hardware/1-1/overview.html

A UHD Graphics 770 iGPU will decode everything including AV1, and encode to everything except AV1. This will pretty much cover all media you’re likely to encounter on your Plex server for quite a while unless you have a specific and unique use case.

nVidia NVENC requires Ada Lovelace GPUs for AV1. 7th Gen Turing and Ampere will do everything except AV1.

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