Building Dual Xeon Plex Server

General Discussions
1

Hi all
So I am thinking of building a dual Xeon Plex server. I am looking for general feed back and review of this system.

A few facts

  1. This will be for Plex only
  2. No storage is needed, all media is stored on 2 NAS already.

Hardware
Motherboard: ASUS Z10PE-D8 WS SSI EEB Server Motherboard Dual Intel Socket 2011-3
CPU(s): Intel Xeon E5-2630 V4 Broadwell-EP (2)
RAM: Crucial 64GB (4 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM ECC DDR4 2133 (PC4 17000) Server Memory Model
PSU: EVGA SuperNOVA 1000 P2 220-P2-1000-XR 80+ PLATINUM 1000W
CPU(s) Heatsink: Noctua Dual Tower CPU Cooler for Intel LGA 2011-0/LGA 2011-3 (2)
Hard Drive: SAMSUNG 850 PRO 2.5" 512GB SATA III
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro series PH-ES614PC_BK Black Steel / Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
OS: Not sure yet may use Windows 10 Pro

2

There is no need for 64GB of RAM for just Plex. Save some money there and splash on a 1TB SSD so that it can contain all of your Plex meta data, BIF files etc (I assume you have a large library). Also, keep in mind that Plex will ‘soon’ release Hardware transcoding support. A good GPU could aid you in that need for 25K passmark score.

3

a kilowatt plex server? how…many people use this thing?

4

I have a pretty monstrous server myself, and I have found that you really don’t need a monstrous server to run PLEX.

5

PMS is a 32-bit Windows apps so the max memory it can use is 4GB so no need to overkill - 8GB should be more than enough if you’re really just running Plex on it.

Eight cores can normally support several on-the-fly software 1080p transcodes but you’ll get more benefit from ensuring DirectPlay/DirectStream; especially with 4K/HEVC. GPU transcoding may get us there someday but it’s still variable in it’s quality right now.

A strong second on using SSDs. They improve everything.

6

You certainly don’t need anything that elaborate to run Plex but its nice to have, I started using Plex 4 years ago but instead of a Nas I installed it in a 10 year old server I used for file storage. It only had 4GB ram and and an Opteron 1.8 GHz processor. It had 15 older HDD’s from 500 GB to 2 TB for storage. There where about 2 dozen friends using it at that time and never had any issues. Of course last year I replaced it and built a newer one just for Plex.

My current Home built server is a Gigabyte X99 Motherboard/ i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz 6 Core/ 32.0 GB RAM/ OS Drive Samsung 500GB M.2/ PLEX Database Samsung 500GB SSD / Media storage 9 Seagate 6TB HDD/ Windows 10 pro
USERS: 58 Friends & Family/ Max concurrent streams 17 was on Jan 15 2017