There you go. As you can see, the intel graphics is more than capable but the CPU is starting to strugle with the audio. Thats why I recomended getting something better than the i3, because in cses like this, the CPU will be the bottleneck. Throw in a couple of subtitles aswell, even more so.
So is it only using GPU0? Or is it using the 970M also, just wondering as I can see load on that aswell, if its only the Intel then consider me impressed and the 630 must therefore be a beast!
Thanks for the CPU breakdown, was aware that audio transcoding was stuck on CPU so expected load to stack up there 
Combination of Windows + GPU switching. A laptop has the iGPU for low power mode and the discrete GPU of faster 3d graphics but since the display is connected to the 970M they both show activity. Since Plex can only use 1 gpu and it defaults GPU0 it is the HD graphics.
If you want to experiment, you can create a graphics profile for all the Plex exe’s and point it to the 970M.
6 simultaneous 1080p transcodes, using only 70% of a mobile 4 gen old intel quad core CPU. This shows you the power of GPU assisted transcoding. gen 6 CPU QSV is ok for 264 video, but you really want at least gen 7 CPU for the HEVC support. also, an i3-8100 is about 30% faster than this i7-6700HQ mobile CPU when you must do software transcoding.
PS your screen shot clearly shows load on both GPU. thats interesting. I always understood that plex would only use a single one, that being the active GPU on your primary display, GPU0
perhaps the nvidia load can be explained by some other activity? behaps media playback, decoding? the tabs will show more details.
Audio always has to be done in CPU, and is (at least some times) single threaded, so if you have a beast of a codec like atmos/trueHD, it can overwhelm cpus that don’t have good single thread ability.
Any recommendation for a CPU to be able to handle simultaneously say 6 transcodes of lossless audio along with subtitles while also being able to use Handbrake? That would probably be the most CPU stress I could imagine for my server - usually it is more like 1-2 transcodes max simultaneously. The GPU is not an issue, but the CPU is occasionally.
I notice with my current 4790K that I will get buffering if transcoding with a source with lossless audio (like Atmos or FLAC 7.1) if I am using Handbrake on the server as well. Apparently too much for the CPU. Stopping Handbrake allows it to work fine, but I would like to be able to run the server and run Handbrake as needed as well.
on your current system you can likely get by via lowering the priority of the handbrake thread or if needed even by limiting the cpu cores handbrake is aloowed to use via CPU affinity.
I will look into lowering the cores allowed by handbrake. I currently have all plex services on permanent high or realtime priority and handbrake on low, but it was still causing an issue. Thanks.
if you click the gpu section of task manager, you check the graphs for video decode and encode loads.
then you will see exactly which gpu is doing what.
also, the details screen has a column which will tell you which gpu a process is using.
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