Hey, thinking of upgrading my plex server CPU soon. The CPU i have now is an overclocked dualcore intel g3258 and it struggles with more than 1 simultaneous transcode.
But im wondering what’s most important, amount of cores or threads? i’ve had my eye on a “Intel Core i5-4670” 4cores, 4 threads which i can run at 3,8 ghz turbo… but for a little more cash i can get a “Intel Core i7 4770K” 4cores, 8 threads.
would there be any noticable difference between these two?
You haven’t given any info regarding what is being transcoded so all anyone can do is guess.
The i5 will do 3 transcodes and the i7 will do 5.
x264 mkv and mp4 videos
The i7-4770K is a much more powerful CPU, about 33% more powerful than the i5-4670 (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-4670-vs-Intel-i7-4770K/1933vs1919) and video transcoding (especially multiple transcodes) should lend itself well to more threads, making this difference meaningful. This is a significant upgrade and will certainly allow for more simultaneous transcodes. As far as the difference being noticable, that depends on your transcode settings, how many simultaneous transcodes you are planning on doing, and the quality you are encoding to.
Without getting into the specifics of what quality the source content is and what you are trying to encode it to, you could probably, like @pl_5309 said, get 3 simultaneous transcodes on the i5 with the h.264 fast preset, and maybe 5 transcodes on the i7. If you never have 3 or more simultaneous transcodes, then you will never have a noticable difference between the two as far as plex transcoding goes. If you plan on having 3-5 transcodes frequently (or other “heavy” processes running on the server), then you will definitely notice the difference.
Another case where the i7 will bring a noticeable difference is if you are transcoding higher quality (Blu-Ray) content to HD (DVD) quality, or want to set you h.264 preset to something slower (fast works well for most use cases, but some people feel that a slower preset is worth the extra processing).
All of this is from the view of Plex transcoding only. You don’t notice the fact that i5 is slower in Plex transcoding because all the processor needs to do is keep up with the speed the video is playing at, plus a little bit of a buffer. As a user, you don’t see or care if the processor is working at 30% or 90%, just that the next segment of your movie is being correctly transcoded and delivered before your client device needs to display it. Basically, you only notice the difference when your workload would max out the i5.
If you are running workloads other than just Plex transcoding (I use my server to rip dvds), you will see a difference in the amount of time that it takes to encode video, because the encoder is not just encoding part of a movie, then waiting for the player to catch up, but it is doing the entire file at once as fast as it can.
Being that these are older model processors (so future proofing isn’t really a thing), I would lean towards getting the i5 unless you feel that the price difference between the two is unimportant, or you feel that you need the extra power for more transcodes or your library contains (or will soon contain) a lot of Blu-Ray quality content that will need to be transcoded.
thank you, helped alot, its normally 2 and sometimes 3 transcodes at a time with medium preset, to ps4 and xbox1 consoles. i use this pc both as server and sometimes other stuff so ill go with the i7
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