Plex Server build

General Discussions
1

I’ve been looking to build a new server, since my aging NUC (D54250WYK - 4th gen i5- 4250U) is struggling to keep running everything that I have. Here’s the things I’m trying to consider

  • All my media is in Google Drive, so being able to use Plex attached to a local mount of my Google Drive is the main requirement
  • Hardware decoding/encoding for HEVC and tone-mapping for HDR when the new Plex Server in testing comes out and is updated to support it.
  • Run VMs, either through something like VMWare Workstation (Windows - prob not doing a Windows build…) or Parallels (for Mac) or by running something like ESXi or Proxmox (though I’ve never used Proxmox I’m interested in trying it) and passing the video card/driver to the VM for Plex for the h/w transcoding support. Right now I have most of my VMs running on an iMac which I guess I’m fine with continuing but it would be nice to have them centrally located and easy to turn on/off whenever I wanted without turning on my iMac.
  • Support on 4-5 people for Plex. I don’t share with anyone except family so the streaming requirements are generally in the house, but then occasionally outside the house to my parents when their TiVo misses something my DVR gets due to power outage or whatnot.

I guess I’ve narrowed it down to a few things:

  • New i5-8500B Mac Mini. I had an old old Mac Mini (2010 or 2011 I believe) I liked that ended up being retired and everything moved to the NUC since it had h/w decoding and the Mac Mini stopped getting updates. Probably the most expensive and less expansive of the options, but it’s an option.
  • Something custom built like this https://pcpartpicker.com/list/wjN9jy) that is expandable if I need to add a graphics card or anything down the line. Either run ESXi or Proxmox on it (or just scrap that altogether and run Ubuntu).
  • Wait for a 10th gen NUC to come out, and then do the same as the custom build and put ESXi or Proxmox on it.

I’ve also read a lot of people getting AMD CPUs since they have a lot of cores but I’m guessing that would all be software transcoding (not against it) or getting an NVIDIA GPU and putting it in. I’m not against that, just don’t have much experience with AMD since my last AMD was a Athlon 64.

Edit to add: I’d like to keep the cost around $1000. I can go over a little but I don’t want to get close to $1500.

2

I laughed a little at the Full Tower sitting next to your NUC and mini.
Maybe HEVC encoding is on the drawing board? I’m pretty sure Plex
transcodes to h264. I think you get a lot from a NUC and linux.

3

Well they use laptop CPU’s so I figured upgrading would help me with extendability and keep it around a little while longer. It’s all in a closet anyways I never have to see how big or small it is.

4

Have you built many comps recently? I stopped after too many builds weren’t stable and switched to an iMac. I think you get a lot of value from Intel, especially hw acceleration for video. NVIDIA is the same way but their locking the number of simultaneous transcodes is comical.

5

The last one I built was about 2 years ago for my son, but I’ve been building computers since I was 12. I’ve never had stability issues so I’m not worried about that.

Yeah I don’t do any PC gaming anymore so I haven’t really messed around with the NVIDIA side of things. My son has a card in his and he has a 6th gen Intel i5 that could handle all of this but I don’t want to use his as an always on Plex server since it’s in his room.

6

I ended up just getting a NUC8i7BEH. My little old NUC couldn’t keep up and I was getting frustrated. Ended up putting 32GB DDR4 and a 1TB M.2 SSD in it, and it’s been pretty fantastic so face.

Testing it today with Plex and it was transcoding a TV Show to 2 Mbps (from 4.254 Mbps), a 4K HEVC HDR movie to 20 Mbps (from 53.9 Mbps) and then direct streamed a 4K HEVC HDR movie (40 Mbps) on my Apple TV. At the same time my brother was watching a football game on Channels (from my HDHomeRun Prime) and was transcoding that to 2 Mbps (from about 4 Mbps if I remember what ESPN’s H264 comes in at on my Comcast) and I was watching a different football game transcoding to 2 Mbps on Channels.

All in all pretty happy so far.

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