I am interested in building my own media server but I find the possible combination of parts to be overwhelming. Has anyone written a guide that shows what CPU/GPU/other parts you would want to buy for a certain level of performance?
I don’t know exactly what I am looking for but the table below might clarify what I am asking.
You might want to check out this support article. There’s a list of references as for what performance a CPU will need for certain jobs incl. a link to a page that shows CPUs and their benchmarks.
There’s no yes/no answer to your question as the use cases will highly depend on a number of factors. As an example… many Intel CPUs have a built-in iGPU that’s perfectly capable to hw-transcode a 4K stream without breaking into sweat – so even an i3/i5 will be able to handle your 4K streams. This will however change if your clients depend on burning subtitles into your video – this cannot be handled by the GPU and will therefore place the full load on the CPU (requiring much more than your everyday i3/i5 will deliver).
As for RAM… Plex itself has a relatively low footprint – I’ve seen users happily running it on a setup w/ 2-4 GB of memory. If you want your server to use a RAM disk for transcoding you can easily stuff 32 GB and more in your machine.
The size of the drive to run the server / OS will highly depend on the size of your library. In most environments a 256 GB SSD should be sufficient and leave you a lot of room to grow. Some users with insane libraries are occasionally reporting they have bigger drives to facilitate their server data directory.
For many use cases, some mid-level NUC or comparable mini PC will be perfectly fine… still there’s use cases where you might need a monster machine with tons of CPU power, dedicated GPU and a crazy amount of RAM.
TL;DR: for a qualified response you’ll need to give some more meat to the bone and explain your use case
