What ever you purchase make sure it has QuickSync on the CPU. HW decoding/encoding makes the CPU seem 5+ times more powerful from Plex’s standpoint.
@cayars said:
What ever you purchase make sure it has QuickSync on the CPU. HW decoding/encoding makes the CPU seem 5+ times more powerful from Plex’s standpoint.
That would have to be intel then, I thought i remembered reading though the HW encoding was at significantly less quality?
People parot what they read years ago regarding HW transcoding. This was probably at least 2 versions back of QuickSync as well. QSV has been getting better with each new release.
First those test are based on things like BluRay rips where “time” doesn’t matter per say. These aren’t “real-time” tests. They use look ahead and all the normal options used to get the best quality possible for the one-time rip. This will almost always look better/favor the CPU over HW. It doesn’t matter if it takes 5 hours to transcode.
Now enter REAL TIME transcoding where Plex needs to be able to transcode at a rate of better then 1X. It has to not use a lot of the optimizations in order to work faster. Now consider what happens when Plex has 4 streams to transcode and you can see Plex needs to achieve 4x rate or you will have buffering since the CPU can’t keep up. This all takes it’s toll on quality of the real-time encodes.
Enter HW transcoding. It probably won’t look quite as good as the first type mentioned above and will produce bigger files or need to use more bitrate then the CPU version to achieve the same quality. HOWEVER compared to the real-time CPU transcode it can definitely look better or be comparable since the CPU version of real-time transcoding is handicapped in it’s optimizations.
I’ve done testing with a room full of users playing back Transformers with forced CPU and HW transcoding and no one could really differentiate which was better.
So it’s all retaliative to what you are doing! You can think of QuickSync on a modern CPU as gaining you 10+K passmark score on top of the normal passmark. On an older computer with an Nvidia consumer GPU added in as gaining another 4 to 5K in passmark (limited to 2 streams).
PS I don’t believe the i9 supports QuickSync so I’d get the best i7 with QuickSync you can.
Plex also doesn’t care much about RAM so 4GB or 32GB won’t make any difference, but as you stated you were running other VMs this is obviously an informed choice.
@cayars said:
People parot what they read years ago regarding HW transcoding. This was probably at least 2 versions back of QuickSync as well. QSV has been getting better with each new release.First those test are based on things like BluRay rips where “time” doesn’t matter per say. These aren’t “real-time” tests. They use look ahead and all the normal options used to get the best quality possible for the one-time rip. This will almost always look better/favor the CPU over HW. It doesn’t matter if it takes 5 hours to transcode.
Now enter REAL TIME transcoding where Plex needs to be able to transcode at a rate of better then 1X. It has to not use a lot of the optimizations in order to work faster. Now consider what happens when Plex has 4 streams to transcode and you can see Plex needs to achieve 4x rate or you will have buffering since the CPU can’t keep up. This all takes it’s toll on quality of the real-time encodes.
Enter HW transcoding. It probably won’t look quite as good as the first type mentioned above and will produce bigger files or need to use more bitrate then the CPU version to achieve the same quality. HOWEVER compared to the real-time CPU transcode it can definitely look better or be comparable since the CPU version of real-time transcoding is handicapped in it’s optimizations.
I’ve done testing with a room full of users playing back Transformers with forced CPU and HW transcoding and no one could really differentiate which was better.
So it’s all retaliative to what you are doing! You can think of QuickSync on a modern CPU as gaining you 10+K passmark score on top of the normal passmark. On an older computer with an Nvidia consumer GPU added in as gaining another 4 to 5K in passmark (limited to 2 streams).
PS I don’t believe the i9 supports QuickSync so I’d get the best i7 with QuickSync you can.
Yeah I forgot the higher end chips do not have an integrated gpu so no quicksync on those.
there is also having to deal with having to pass the igpu through to a vm since i run this on unraid.
These are the two most likely contenders i am looking at cpu wise
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-7820X/3098vs3038
you will want a kaby lake or coffee lake or newer cpu if you want 4k support.
I’d take the 8700 over the 78x0 just for the newer core and gpu
@TeknoJunky said:
you will want a kaby lake or coffee lake or newer cpu if you want 4k support.I’d take the 8700 over the 78x0 just for the newer core and gpu
Yeah its just that it wont only be used for plex so the extra cores/threads would be handy. Also with socket 2066 there is an upgrade path, there is none if i go with the 8700k
the 7820X does have AVX 512, not sure if that helps with plex though?
