I am preparing to make my first NAS purchase for the purposes of running a Plex Pass Media Server, plus some additional services. I believe I have narrowed down my purchase to either the QNAP TVS-882-i5-16G or TVS-882-i3-8G, and I am leaning towards the first one because it has a i5 processor and more RAM. However, when you look up TVS-882-i5-16G on the Plex NAS Compatibility list it doesn’t seem to support hardware decoding for “HEVC UHD
2160p”, but the perceived less powerful TVS-882-i3-8G does. Can someone explain why this is? One would think an i5 (4 cores) with a PassMark score of 7248 , would be better suited to handle decoding than a i3 (2 cores) with a PassMark score of 5483.
At one point I was looking at picking up a TVS-882, and I learned that with that model you have to be careful, the initial units came with a Skylake, while the later units swapped to a kabylake. That’s a big deal, as Chuck points out. So if you get one, make sure your unit comes with a 7xxx CPU, not a 6xxx CPU. As far as I could tell, QNAP viewed these as so similar they didn’t even change the model number, so its not obvious what you are getting till you have it in your hands.
passmark doesn’t consider the hardware encoding/decoding feature, and from all I have been able to locate, all models within a given series have equal hw encoding / decoding capacity.
That being said, real CPU does count as some tasks are done purely in software. Chuck points out a couple, but there are others like media matching and creation of optimized versions. I run an i3-8350, that is 4 cores, 4 threads, and u630 graphics, so pretty similar to the i5-7xxx that the QNAAP can have. It works spectacular.
I didnt end up buying it (the one I was looking at had a skylake CPU) so I don’t have any QNAP specific usage experience, I will leave that to others.
Thank you! The feedback is very helpful and educational. Interesting the impact of certain functionality between different processor families. With that said, I am now thinking of getting the model TVS-872XT-i5-16G which shows x64 (Core i5-8400T) 1.7 Ghz processor which I believe is CoffeeLake (-8xxx series), so can I assume that it will decode 2160p SDR in hardware like SkyLake since it is on the Plex NAS Compatibility list? The passmark shows 9532, so in mind I am able to get the best of both worlds for only a jump of a couple hundred bucks in cost. I really hate purchasing hardware that will it be outdated in a couple of years.
I would confirm that plex hw decoding is supported on that model (I see no reason it would not be) and then enjoy it! it has an excellent hw transcoder, equal to the best you can buy today without spending a lot of cash on a GPU.
