I’m about to build a new computer to host my plex server and am curious what the best route to go is. I understand what I want will be overkill for most.
I’m trying to decide between picking up a Threadripper or an Intel i9 as my processor. I have around ~60 friends with access to my server currently with anywhere from 10-15 concurrent streams at peak periods. Most of my content is relatively high bitrate movies (10-20k) with DTS audio. 720p/1080p TV shows. I currently have an overclocked 3770k that has been chugging for six years straight. It’s pretty much pegged all the time and hovers around 75-80C. Definitely struggles with live TV as well.
I see the Threadripper for 799 on Amazon right now. Is there any big difference for plex transcoding the i9s bring for the added cost?
Also, is it worth putting in a nice graphics card and turning on hardware acceleration? I haven’t played around with this feature at all and am curious in general what the best potential setup would be going forward.
Really just looking to future proof and get rid of any buffering.
first of all, what is your upload bandwidth? because you can kiss all those config dreams goodbye if you do not at least have gigabit upload for "10-15 concurrent streams at relatively high bitrate of 10-20 mbit/s).
why? simple math: the average bitrate does NOT tell you that a movie can have up to 3 times the average bandwidth in high motion scenes. so 15x20mbit/s would equal 300 mbit/s of AVERAGE bandwidth. to make sure no one gets buffering you would need at least twice that bandwidth.
I highly doubt your ISP can keep up with that.
or tell your friends to get a client that can Direct Play your content so you have no transcoding occurring on your server. If they abuse the server with transcoding I would drop them, not going to have my server being hit with lots of transcoding from friends. I am running an i5-3570K in my Plex Server.
All of my content is HEVC encoded video, including DVR content that I run through Handbrake to convert to HEVC. I can have up to 4 streams going at the same time with different content being viewed between myself, my wife, my son at his apartment, and a friend at her house and my CPU isn’t even touched because all of the clients are Direct Playing the content. I run a Fire TV stick in my home office, Shield TV in my Den, Fire TV downstairs in the Living Room (soon to be switched out with another Shield TV), son and friend both also use a Fire TV Stick. Live TV is only allowed inside my home, son and friend have their own Plex accounts. The Shield, Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick all Direct Play any Live TV so no transcoding with Live TV either. The only time I see transcoding is when I pull out my Roku Stick for testing something.
I currently have a Threadripper 1950x server and it works brilliantly with plex. I really do not have to worry about transcoding at all, even when transcoding a few streams (non 4k) the processor barely feels it. I don’t get as much concurrent streams as you, generally around 7-9, but I am positive you will not have any issues with 10-15 from the server side, network/bandwidth more likely to be a bottleneck.
I cannot speak about hardware acceleration since I have not needed to enable it at all. Both the 1950x and i9 will more than meet your needs.
unless someone really has more than 100 mbits upstream the whole “10+ simultaneous streams” thing is a big dream. of course I am talking about real streams of 1080p 8 mbits and not mobile streams (720p 4 mbits).
Sorry for the late response here. I’ve been a bit busy and then came back to the site update not allowing me to respond.
I have a gigabit connection with ~900 mbps upload/download, so there’s no issue there. I do tell friends to Direct Play where possible but many of them aren’t so tech savvy or willing to go buy a new device. It doesn’t help that I put most of everything up with DTS 5.1-7.1/TRUEHD audio and high bit-rate video. Optimizing everything isn’t really something I want to do as I have over 2600 movies and over 15000 TV episodes. Although I suppose I could optimize more popular content on the server.
I’m not really looking to drop anyone just because they are transcoding. Which is why I’m fine with going overkill for the processing power to compensate for the amount of clients I have and hopefully future-proof it for potentially more clients or higher bitrates.
I think I’m going to go with the Threadripper. It’s now down to $750 and the 16 core Intel comparison is pretty much double that. I’ve always purchased Intel in the past, but price for performance might make me switch in this particular case here.
Thank you for your opinions. Keep them coming if there is anything else to add.
10-15 1080P streams? A newer Intel processor is going to bring the advantage of (usable) dedicated hardware transcode on decode and encode operations. But even so, 10-15 seems like a lot to me if you are trying to maintain a 1080P stream. I’d almost think you’d be better off with multiple lower end CPUs for additional hardware blocks.
I find it somewhat useful to approach resource planning like we do with VMs, and ask how many MHz I think I’ll need(at least if talking just using CPU cycles and not dedicated encoders). So in my case, as I recall, I moved up to putting 6 older Xeon cores on my VM to handle 3 simultaneous 1080P, 8Mbit streams. That equates to roughly 12 Ghz of CPU, in total, so lets call it 4Ghz per stream @1080P.
If you take a 1950X threadripper with 16 cores, using the base clock, this gives you ~54.4 GHz. By my base, that would put you at 13 streams. In practice, you’ll want to leave CPU time for OS overhead and such, so I’d guestimate it without any other solid numbers at 12 streams on that CPU, assuming you can keep it fed and not bottleneck any where else.
I seem to recall that nVidia shields can handle somthing like 3-4 1080P streams, with dedicated silicon. I’m not sure how that compares to quicksync, but it seems like the advantage you’d get in CPU time(which is really what the offload helps you with) isn’t going to be enough to scale to what you want, which is a long way of saying I don’t think QuickSync will help you here.
I should be getting a much lower end setup then you are looking at this weekend, I’m building for max 3 or so 1080P streams, leaning heavily on hardware accelerated functions. I planned to post my results this weekend once it’s going, perhaps that will help you if I can get it all moved and running this weekend.
@JohnAsplundh : did you get your plex server built … share some experience … review … I am also planning to have something like this …hence was interested, hows the performance , how many streams were you able to play … direct and transcoaded … do reply
Fido ~
Interesting statement… Forgive my ignorance but I have a quick question. I am not that hardware savvy when it comes to what happens when where and how.
If you have a IDE card like a Quadro p2000 and you are running a headless standalone plex server does the systems pass the stream through the IDE card or just through the mother motherboard before serving the file to the LAN or WAN Network?
You have me pondering this for my next build. “Comming Soon” but hesitating till the 4K issues have a more of a resolution for streaming.
not sure if it will pass , you can check on youtube or level1techs forums , these guys more oriented towards linux and vm’s and there are many guys who do pass gpu’s around. if you meant if the video goes to the gpu then the IO ( display port for example ) that is not necessarily the case.
how it works as far as I know , it gets transcoded on the gpu and then sent back to cpu to compile all of the stuff together with audio etc… then to the lan. coz audio always gets processed on cpu thats how plex work , it use cpu for audio.
i am in the same boat I am hesistating regarding the gpu, coz so far i discovered that plex have issues with discrete gpu’s I can’t get it to hardware transcoding perfectly yet on the supported formats so maybe the built in gpu’s like intel igpu 630 8th gen is the best option as it is the most compatible without issues but how powerful is it? how many transcoding’s can it do at the same time ? 3 4k’s ? maybe 3x4k + 2x1080p?
for me my gtx 1080 Ti not transcoding some movies but others works flawless even thu both are same specs and formats.
