Hey, I have a few questions about hardware for my plex media server.
My current server is dying. It’s a very old computer. Can handle a direct stream, but is struggling with transcoding (to computer of chromecast). So I’m building a new server but I have a few questions about hardware (and you need to give me some advice/choose the best option)
I should mention that I will be streaming one 1080p 10bit hevc x265 stream to a chromecast. At max one 1080p and one 720p stream at the same time (one direct, one transcode). Or one 4k stream.
Old hardware and software
The following hardware is at the moment in the old pc:
Pentium® Dual-Core CPU E6700 @ 3.20GHz (cpubenchmark.net score of 1084)
4GiB DIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1066 MHz
Nvidia GT216
WD Elements 10B8 700GB
WD WD10EADX-22T 1TB
It has plexmediaserver, sonarr, radarr, jackett, deluge, pihole, pivpn, guacamole and grafana.
The computer is dying (it’s just too old and slow) and as I’m soon going to have a tv, I’m going to stream alot to the attached chromecast. Which the server can’t handle right now.
Dual cpu’s
One of my options for the new server is buying a server from marktplaats (dutch version of ebay). I found the following server for 200 euros:
Dell PowerEdge R710
2x Intel Xeon X5650 2.67Ghz SixCore (total 12 cores) (cpubenchmark.net score of 5820 per cpu)
48GB DDR3 RAM (6x 8GB)
IDrac6 Enterprise
4x Gigabit LAN
H200 RAID controller
4 caddies for hdd or ssd drives
Redundant (2x) powersupply 870watt
For 200 euros, that’s not much right?
Question about dual-cpu’s:
I searched up about Ubuntu and plex using dual-cpu’s. I found out that Ubuntu supports dual xeons. However I found a forum where someone told him that plex uses one cpu per stream. So the 1st stream goes to cpu1 and only cpu1 handles it. When a second stream comes at the same time, cpu2 handles that. Am I correct with that? Is there any performance loss due to this?
Question about fans and loudness:
The second question/problem is that it’s probably quite loud. And as the server will be laying under my bed, I don’t want to hear an airplane take off when a friend is watching on my server. The seller told me that at idle it sounds like a desktop pc and under load clearly audible.
This is the server he’s selling.
But as I’m not rackmounting it but just laying it on the floor, I could remove the fans and just lay some 120mm fans on it. It cant close the server then but it doesn’t have to. Just lay two 120mm fans on the two cpu’s. Like… laying them on the heatsink. It’ll be silent then, but do you think that that is a good option or a good idea to fix the audio problem? Are there any fan connectors for standard case fans in these kind of servers?
Transcoding
For transcoding, there are a few options. I could the cpu’s just let it do the transcoding, as they’ve got a score of 5820 each. If found the 2000-per-stream rule somewhere, so that would mean that one cpu could handle it easily. As the other stream would go to the second cpu.
I also could get plexpass and a gpu, but that’s going to cost to much, while the cpu’s are probably going to handle it fine.
Question about transcoding:
Do you think the cpu’s will be strong enough to handle the streams and transcodings?
No graphics card or integrated graphics
I could also build a pc in an itx case. If I’m going to that instead of that server, this would be the hardware:
AMD ryzen 5 2600 (cpubenchmark.net score 13215)
Gigabyte B450 I aurus pro wifi
Seagate 2tb hdd (that’s on top of the 1tb that I already have now)
Kingston A2000 1tb m.2 ssd
G.Skill 8gb 3200mhz ram
Fractal Design Node 304 mini itx
Be Quiet 300w psu
587 euros total
It costs quite a bit more than that server, but it’s small, silent and the ryzen 5 is stronger than both xeon’s combined. But I wouldn’t have any video output. There are no integrated graphics and no graphics card. I could put a ryzen 3 2200G in there (that has integrated graphics), but has half the score (6744) for the same price.
Question about graphics:
Is it possible to install Ubuntu and after that ssh server without a display? If I have Ubuntu installed and I can ssh into it, I can install xrdp and have a gui via rdp.
General question about the hardware:
Do you think that I have the correct hardware for my needs? Do you think that I went overkill or not (keep in mind that I have all those other programs running to)?
