Been using PMS for a very long time and have a nice, powerful server to handle all of my simultaneous streaming/transcoding and on-the-fly transcoding of Live TV DVR. However, my current server is aging quickly, is a full tower, and is the loudest of all of my servers. So I’m looking to replace it with a Mini-ITX variety (like my other servers) and have narrowed it down to two models. I would appreciate anyone’s expertise in establishing which is the best replacement. Note that both of the new models below are around the same price range; so it’s all about which one is going to provide the biggest PMS bang for the buck.
Current, Legacy Server:
Motherboard: Supermicro X9SRL-F
Processor: Intel Xeon CPU E5-2630 v2 (Passmark: 10390)
Memory: 32GB (though haven’t seen it go over 11GB usage)
NICs: 4x1Gbps (two teams; one for clients and one for storage network where media is located)
2019 AMD EPYC 3251. Unfortunately, this model isn’t in the Passmark table yet.
The only other difference is that the Intel system has “Intel Iris Pro Graphics P580 with 128MB of on-Package cache” and the processor supports Intel Quick Sync Video hardware accelerated transcoding; though I don’t currently use this. I don’t think PMS cares about or can use the Intel GPU for anything since all PMS transcoding seems to be CPU bound.
So with all of the information above, are there any qualified folks out there who have an objective opinion one way or the other?
Thanks for taking the time to read this. I know it was long.
A smaller form factor is actually harder to cool silently.
If there is plenty of room in a case for big heat sinks and big but slow-rotating fans, you can achieve silence easier. (With enough cooling capability so that the cpu is not throttling itself due to overheating.)
Plex can use Quicksync. But you have to have a generation of Quicksync which can handle HEVC, 10 bit, if you have such material. I am not sure that the Quicksync chip in this Xeon is recent enough for that.
So for Plex use, you may actually be getting better performance from a desktop CPU. (Make sure to get the best single-task performance. Many operations in ffmpeg are not optimally running multi-threaded.) https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
There is nothing this setup will not do currently with the way I have laid it out for you. You will get full HW acceleration and it will outperform what you have now at lower power consumption, heat generation and noise pollution.
lscpu
Architecture: x86_64
CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
Byte Order: Little Endian
CPU(s): 8
On-line CPU(s) list: 0-7
Thread(s) per core: 2
Core(s) per socket: 4
Socket(s): 1
NUMA node(s): 1
Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
CPU family: 6
Model: 158
Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8809G CPU @ 3.10GHz
Stepping: 9
CPU MHz: 1600.141
CPU max MHz: 4200.0000
CPU min MHz: 800.0000
BogoMIPS: 6192.00
Virtualization: VT-x
L1d cache: 32K
L1i cache: 32K
L2 cache: 256K
L3 cache: 8192K
NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-7
Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx pdpe1gb rdtscp lm constant_tsc art arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf tsc_known_freq pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 sdbg fma cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic movbe popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx f16c rdrand lahf_lm abm 3dnowprefetch cpuid_fault epb invpcid_single pti ssbd ibrs ibpb stibp tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid fsgsbase tsc_adjust bmi1 avx2 smep bmi2 erms invpcid mpx rdseed adx smap clflushopt intel_pt xsaveopt xsavec xgetbv1 xsaves dtherm ida arat pln pts hwp hwp_notify hwp_act_window hwp_epp md_clear flush_l1d
I prefer Supermicro servers because of the dedicated IPMI interface. I travel a lot and it gives me the ability to control the system console remotely regardless of a software failure, or power it back on in the event of a power outage. This also allows me to use the same server management software for all of my systems.
With regards to cooling, I have several other Supermicro Mini-ITX systems that are constantly under heavy CPU load (virtualization) and they are quite silent compared to the PMS tower with all of its 120mm fans.
I use the NIC teaming as I have multiple devices streaming at the same time, and without it I’ve found bandwidth to be an issue (between PMS and storage and between PMS and clients). Also note that the client team is also used for connectivity to my HDHomeRun quad tuner. I’m out of 10Gbps ports on my switch, and this is why I’m looking at systems with four NICs (like the legacy PMS).
See the above post. Neither one of the systems you have selected are ideal candidates for PMS today if HEVC HDR10 content is considered. Otherwise it will be fine. I would not use SSD for transcoding. Buy more RAM and set the transcoder directory to /dev/shm–that is of course if you are not running Windows…
Let me ask this instead: How does the NUC8i7BEH compare to the NUC8i7HVK as far as HW acceleration is concerned. Would it be able to transcode 4k? Planning to run Ubuntu.
