Plex Server Upgrade Recommendations (6 transcoded steams)

[camcamfresh]

I’m currently thinking about upgrading my system and would like other user’s thoughts on my idea.

My current system is a tower with 24 TB of storage and a passmark score of 10,000. I have gigabit upload speeds, so the only bottleneck I run into is transcoding. I’m also thinking about RAIDing my media, but would need more drive bays to do so.

My current upgrade idea is a rack mount server, the PowerEdge R720. It features eight 3.5" drive bays with RAID support and has two E5-2680, 16 core Xeon processors. The passmark score on the system is 18,000.

I know that this would be overkill, but I have a few reasons I want to do it, mainly because: it’s temporary, I’m currently studying servers (and will be for the next few years), and I would like to host my own cloud server. I want to be able to transcode at least six 1080p 15Mb/s streams at a time.

The main concern that I have is how well Plex will be able to utilize the hardware. I’ve read that there were some problems associated with using servers with large core counts for Plex. This and the fact that the processors don’t support Quick Sync.

Any thoughts on my idea?

[NIronwolf]

I don’t have info on the limitations you brought up, but you may want to look into hardware transcoding. Search on Plex + P100 or P106.

[camcamfresh]

Oh sorry I forgot to mention that I currently have the NVIDIA 1050 GeForce GPU on my computer with hardware transcoding enabled on Plex.

I saw that the P100 increased the maximum streams to 3 instead of 2. I’m not sure if the P106 is the same. It seems like upgrading the GPU would only add an additional transcoded stream.

[NIronwolf]

Depending on OS, you may be able to get some unlocked drivers to allow more transcodes even on the 1050. But if you want buy a new server that’s up to you and your bank acct.