So right now my system runs unraid on a Ryzen 2700X and i am considering the Quadro P2000 soon for gpu encoding.
That said, as a platform i am finding myself fairly limited with X470 and want to change it (running out of pcie lanes).
I will need slots for my R5 220, Quadro P2000, LSI SAS card, and 2-3 m.2 nvme drives. I also do want some more cpu grunt for more VM’s beyond plex
I priced out a Threadripper 2950X build as well as a Intel 7940X build and both came out to around $1900 (X299 boards are cheaper)
But i was thinking of my old Dual E5 setup. Right now it has a pair of E5-2670s (and could further be upgraded. The motherboard is an Asus Z9PE-D8 WS so i have a ton of PCIE slots and lanes on it.
I know the GPU will cover most of the transcoding but i think there are a few things it cant do like subtitles and Audio?
How much cpu should i allocate for plex after i put in the gpu? (6-8 streams on average, up to 10 max)
If it is PCIe lanes you want, go with the threadripper.
Regardless of how powerful Threadripper is vs. previous or current generation i9s, it does offer more pcie lanes. Since you intend to use the Quadro for transcoding anyway… it should not matter if each individual threadripper core is more or less powerful than its Intel counterpart.
Having said that… have you considered a high end coffee lake CPU with quicksync?
Who knows… it might make adding the Quadro unnecessary (or any other video card for that matter).
I dont need 64 lanes that Threadripper has per say, but i need more than X470. Either X299, threadripper or my old E5 setup have enough in terms of just lanes.
I thought about quicksync but the cpu itself wouldnt have enough power for the other items i want, also ive heard the quality with quicksync isnt the greatest
The GPU would handle most of the transcoding work but i know it cant do everything so i want to make sure i still have sufficient cpu power for plex (Especially if i go back to my E5 setup since it is a good bit lower passmark per thread)
Actually any kind of hardware transcoding is inferior, image quality wise, to software transcoding.
Of course any transcoding is inferior to the original. But if we are comparing transcoding vs. transcoding for image quality… I’d go with the software transcode option. Actually I did since I have Plex running on an i9. As far as video card I have a measly Nvidia GT 720 for those rare occasions I need to access the console. But other than that I have hardware transcoding disabled.
I too am running other stuff on that machine that is not Plex related.
Not all hardware transcoding is equal, there are many folks running the Quadro P2000 with good luck so id rather not get into a debate on gpu transcoding as this is not what this thread is about
On the cpu front, even a 9900K would not be enough on its own and it only has 16 PCIE lanes total
