I need an upgrade. Do you have suggestions?

General Discussions Hardware
1

I’m on windows. I can’t change that for the wife acceptance factor. Please don’t suggest moving off of windows for this solution.

I’m looking to replace my (aging) plex server with something new. I currently run Windows 10 (can’t upgrade to 11 on this box),

  • 3 internal 2.5 SATA drives (OS is on an SSD, which is one of the SATA drives)
  • 2 external USB connected drives.

Current box is an old HP Proliant M10 v2

  • Intel Xeon E3-1220
  • 16 GB RAM
  • GeForce GTX 1650
  • Ethernet

Ideally I’m looking to go to win 11 with a faster processor (intel preferred), 32 GB RAM. I don’t mind off the shelf or build it myself. In a perfect world it would support light VR Gaming on a Quest through a link cable, but that could pass if it needs to for budget. Wife approved budget is $300-$500 but I can probably still sleep in the house going up to $800-$1k.

Most of the content is HD, but not 4K because current box doesn’t do 4K well. Normal simultaneous is 2-3, max 5 simultaneous. 75% of the time I’m 1 stream or under. I’d day 90% of the time I’m 2 streams or under. Looking to build the capacity simply to support friends or neighbors if they use it more.

I have a lot of staples credit building up thanks to their generous ink recycle program, and I get a lot of amazon gift cards at work (at least $100 quarterly) so prefer to buy components or off–the-shelf from those vendors when I can, as the “free money” is how my budet has such a range. – I’m looking to make the change in the next year or so.

Where should I look for advice? Is this even the place? I thought there was a plex builds reddit channel but can’t find it.

This box would also run various things from time to time as my general home-use workstation if that matters. It also runs media acquisition tools. Literally anything can get this done, the ProLiant doesn’t need replaced for that, it handles it fine. I’m looking to replace since I’m on Win 10 and it’s going EOL or I’d limp this along longer.

THANKS FOR YOUR ADVICE!!

2

If your goal is to serve up to 5 streams, possibly with some being transcoded, possibly with room to grow further, while playing VR games, I am not sure a single Windows system is the best way to do that.

The way you have described your requirements, maintaining a separate Windows box and Plex server would be much nicer. You could even keep the storage on Windows and let the Plex server get the files over the network. And a Plex server does not have to be a big, expensive machine.

In any case if you just buy the Windows system you want for doing Windows things, it will run Plex. I would make sure it has an Intel CPU with iGPU, or an Nvidia GPU, so you can do hardware accelerated transcoding/tone mapping. If you run into performance problems combining VR and Plex you can then consider adding a second inexpensive machine just for a Plex server.

3

You might want to explain that a little bit further, because
WAF only comes into play if

  • wife also want to supply content for the Plex server or wants to curate content.
  • you have the fixed idea to do everything with one device, which wife also needs to use. Which is not necessarily the best strategy, as already mentioned by @BanzaiInstitute