Now my question is, will the GPU provide much more benefit staying in this setup? I am thinking of dropping it out, because I’m not sure I am necessarily going to be utilizing the potential. I run 2 streams max, usually only 1080p. Would it be beneficial to performance by keeping the 1070 in, or is the 5930k more than capable of handling multiple streams if necessary?
The other option would be to drop the 1070 and eventually replace it with a Quadro P2000. I am not sure if there is a performance increase doing this, or even decrease, however I’d assume it would be negligible and running the P2000 over the 1070 would save on energy costs.
I can’t tell you much about the GPU, but the CPU is IMHO too old. It’s a Haswell, and the Quicksync unit in it has only barebone support for modern video codecs:
Whether you’ll be able to fully utilize the 1070 under your chosen OS, is mainly dependent on driver support.
I cannot help you further with this, because I don’t know anything else about Unraid, apart from that it exists.
So, my streams have run pretty flawlessly with that current setup on Windows 10, so maybe I will just keep it as is hardware wise, and see how it goes on unRaid…
Do you know of any decent priced motherboard/CPU combos that would perform substantially better in my case? Or any recommendations on what to go for should I upgrade.
Sorry, I’ve been out of the hardware hunting game for a longer time. So no idea about the current developments. If I had to build a server for 2 streams right now, I’d still go for a top-range Intel Core i5 and no external GPU. (Make sure it is a recent model, to get a newer generation of Quicksync).
If you have several CPU candidates, compare their ‘single thread rating’ and prefer those with the higher numbers. PassMark - Intel Core i5-9600 @ 3.10GHz - Price performance comparison
Personal opinion: Going with Intel will ensure a better likelihood to get hardware transcoding working on more obscure OS’s.
Unraid has good support for nvidia drivers via a docker image supplied by linuxserver.io. With the driver hack, you can even lift that two stream limit.
In my opinion there is no need to get another GPU, the 1070 will work just fine.
As Otto already said, that’s an older i7, so you may be better off keeping it, and while you are currently ever only going to need 2 transcode streams, if you want to sort of build for the future (cause you never know, your needs may change over time), keeping the GPU is a good idea. I know on Linux and Windows you can unlock the 1070 to do unlimited transcodes (I am on windows and have mine unlocked following these directions: https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch/blob/master/win/README.md). There may also be a way to do it in the UnRAID environment, you just gotta search.
