I am looking to update my Plex Server hardware from my 6 year old Windows 10 PC to a dedicated server.
I am currently looking into Intel NUCs due to the form factor and being able to hook it up to an external HDD for my current media and hope to move to a NAS by the end of the year for storage.
I am looking to support AT MOST 3 streams at 1080p with DTS/Dolby Digital or 1 4k HDR stream. I currently have no 4K media stored, but will be looking to do so in the future.
I would like for this server to be dedicated to Plex and minor tasks (moving media/renaming media/ etc) and would like to run Ubuntu or another flavor of Linux.
I am currently looking at the following:
I would be adding the 250 GB SSD and would have 16-24 GB RAM.
Would this do the trick? Is there another NUC I should be using or looking for? Any and all help is appreciated.
Yeah, I just looked at that one too. Pretty badass, but currently out of my price range. I was looking around $500 USD or so.
I was looking at this NUC, NUC8i5BEH. I would only stream one 4K stream at the most. Mainly 1080/720p currently and all locally within my house. I haven’t really ever run more than 1 stream concurrently in my house, but may do more in the future as my kids get older.
That NUC i5 will do HEVC HDR (aka UHD) -> 1080p without blinking.
It will easily handle 2 of those and likely handle 2 concurrent subtitle burning subtitle streams as well.
As a comparison, I ran my QNAP TVS-1282-i7-7700 to benchmark transcoding performance. Without doing any subtitle burning, all 6 playback devices in the house were running concurrently and there was room for more. The only appreciable load on it was the CPU converting audio.
If you’re going to build it up, 16GB, 512GB NVME SSD. 1TB will last longer (higher TBW value). I use Samsung.
I went with this one but the “Pro” for the extra TBW. (My big fingers don’t work so well anymore so only wanted to do once)
