I have an unraid server running plex on an AM2+ mobo with an AMD Athlon II something or other and guess what, it plays 1080p rips fine (tested up to 3 streams so far).
I’m in the market to upgrade this old tech but want approach it with a level of intelligence and a best bang for the buck outlook. I have never owned a dedicated gpu in my life and am trying to figure out if I need one. The plex server is being offered to approx 20 ppl (currently up to 3 streams but expected to be 10-20 streams at any given time).
I’m looking at the Intel quick sync and the NVIDIA decoding and trying to determine the difference and if I need a gpu (or perhaps set myself up in such a way where I can expand the system later by adding a GPU). Can you use the “quick sync” and when that starts to fail switch to NVIDIA decoding - does this make sense?
What mobo, cpu, gpu combo should I be getting? Do I need a GPU if the CPU is good enough? How does the H.A. actually balance the load - does the CPU fill up cycles to the max and then and only then hand off to the GPU?
This topic is a little new and confusing to me and hopefully someone can explain at a high level how this works and what I should be looking for without breaking the bank.
Look at as, I had a crappy personal plex server that worked for me for almost a decade and now I want to fix it up cheap and proper and offer this great service to approx 20 ppl (and hopefully it grows to more)
its the correct sub forum, and there are dozens or hundreds of threads asking the same thing about hardware, you might want to do some further searching for plenty of various opinions.
an intel 7000 series with integrated 600 series gpu is all you really need.
find the best performance per $ going from there.
also, plex gpu transcoding requries plex pass, otherwise you are limited to CPU transcoding only.
if you are not expecting to do any 4k/hevc transcoding, go for the biggest passmark cpu you can afford.
if you want to do 4k transcoding, then you will need a plex pass, or an even bigger cpu.
Upgrading the CPU very often requires upgrading the Mainboard.
Which then often requires upgrading the RAM modules and sometimes the PSU and even the case.
I’m aware that I’m going to go nuts on this upgrade - I’m just looking to ensure I can have at lease 15 streams happening at once @ 1080p (this will require a plex plass).
I’m not the best with hardware tbh and I’m guessing this is sort of a trial and error thing and no one can really say get THIS cpu and THIS gpu and you’ll have 15 streams for sure…
I’ll be going brand new that’s for sure, I’m currently looking at new drives and a new case, next is mobo/cpu/gpu.
But does anyone here know the performance difference between Intel quick sync and the NVIDIA decoding
is it more efficient to get spend extra on a CPU or take that money and buy a GPU?
I should make this less wordy. I’ve been reading the forums now and am still confused on how to approach it.
My Plex server will only be doing Plex hosting, nothing else.
Do I buy a bad ass cpu or get a lower cpu and buy a gpu as well? I don’t understand how the hw transcoding works. Does it use both the cpu and GPU or just GPU. I would suspect if it only uses one or the other then buying a cheaper kick ass cpu (like AMD) would provide much better results than any gpu would, right? Especially if the server is not doing any other processing. Or do I have it backwards… Should get a good GPU with a meh cpu?
Hardware Transcoding is only available with Plex Pass.
All Intel “Core” CPU’s have Quicksync built-in, which is Hardware Transcoding.
AMD CPU’s don’t have that.
If all your media is stored with the H.264 video codec, you can make do without hardware transcoding for a few concurrent streams.
But as soon as you start adding 4K video other FullHD video encoded in HEVC/H.265, then you are in dire need of hardware transcoding. Unless all your devices can play these files as they are (which is only possible with a few, not-so-cheap models).
There is no CPU which can handle more than 1 – 2 concurrent transcodes with HEVC video, completely in software.
Unfortunately ‘h264’ is too ambiguous to be useful in deciding what you need to buy. Even saying “1080p H.264” isn’t enough, because there are a ton of encoder settings which can result in large changes in the resulting bitrate (and file size). In addition the audio track(s) will consume space and add to the bitrate, so those need to be factored in unless they are simple 2-channel PCM audio.
It’s not unreasonable to plan for 10 Mbit/s per 1080p H.264 stream, so if you have 20 clients streaming at once you’ll be pushing 200 Mbit/s. Any decent modern CPU can do that easily on a board that has a Gigabit Ethernet interface (which will also be required of course). If those streams have to be transcoded from some other format into H.264 on the fly, then you’ll need a LOT of CPU power; even a GPU may not be enough to do 20 transcodes in parallel. You’ll be far better off to store the media in the format you want to use for playback, so you only have to transcode it once.
Thanks, that actually helps a lot. So the GPU and CPU don’t work in tandem do they?
can grab a great AMD Ryzen and then if next year I see it starting to struggle due to a handful of transcodes, then go out a buy an NVIDIA gpu to “offload” some of the weight? Or is it simply Plex uses one or the other for transcoding?
If hardware is avaulable, it will be used preferably.
However, hardware can only help for pure video transcoding. If audio has to be transcoded or a subtitle needs to get “burned” into the video, CPU is necessary.
10-20 streams doesn’t come cheap, that’s for sure.
Don’t skimp on the CPU, is all I can say. Even if it is able to do hardware transcoding.
The “consumer” nVidia cards are restricted to 2 concurrent trancode sessions, btw.
