I’m currently running Plex, solely on my Synology DS918+. With multiple simultaneous accesses (3-4) on different devices that require transcoding I’m getting pretty high CPU usage from Plex, even though I’ve enabled hardware support.
Therefore I’m currently thinking about getting an Intel NUC with an NVMe SSD to use that as my Plex Server with my NAS solely as storage, mounted via CIFS/SMB or NFS.
As I’m not sure how Plex scales, I’m currently looking at a NUC with an i5 processor. Namely this one → https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/boards-kits/nuc/kits/nuc8i5bek.html
If there is enough processing power available I’d also like to run a remote access Win10 VM on it, since that is impossible on the NAS alone (just lagging too much on it’s celeron processor ).
Now my question is, is that i5 overpowered for my use case and would an i3 also do a good job or is that a good choice?
The problem is that audio transcoding is still handled by the CPU. An i3 would do it provided HW transcoding always works, the i5 has enough headroom to do the workload even if transcoding falls back to SW. The unknown is the mention of a Win10 VM and how you intend to implement that would greatly impact Plex especially if it grabs the GPU, no more HW transcoding.
Thanks for your answer. The Win10 won’t serve any heavy gpu stuff. It just shall be a VM that i can connect to from remote to access various things on the local lan and so on… just an ordinary “work” machine, no gpu intensive stuff planned.
Maybe I could even use a Ubuntu Linux for this, that should be less cpu intensive I think.
The main purpose of the NUC would be the Plex Server.
I didn’t answer that well. What I was trying to convey was that if the NUC was running Win 10 pro and you had a Win 10 VM via hyper v you would be fine because the GPU could be shared for HW transcoding. If you used another hyper visor and passed the GPU to the Win 10 VM so you could have a GUI, then no HW transcoding.
Previously I had troubles running a Desktop on Ubuntu and still be able to use HW transcoding but I recently saw a video where someone was doing just that. I will have to free up a machine and test.
The original plan was to use a ubuntu server on the nuc for the Plex Server and on the ubuntu server should run a vm (win10 or ubuntu desktop) with qemu or something like it (haven’t put much thought into what hypervisor I should use just now).
Wouldn’t it be possible to just give a virtual graphics card to the win10 vm? Like I said, the vm won’t need much graphics power. Or am I missing something?
And why would the plex server running on the ubuntu server then be unable to use HW transcoding?
Just my lack of current knowledge, haven’t tried what you are thinking of for about 2 years. I see now that there are 3 options for a virtual graphics driver. When I attempted this I passed the gpu to the vm (not virtual) and then Plex couldn’t/wouldn’t use it without releasing it.
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