Ryzen 9 3900 vs i9-9900K - which could handle more transcodes?

Plex Media Server
,
1

Hello

I have a server with the Ryzen 7 3700X CPU running PMS on Debian and the large majority of my users transcode to their devices for various reasons. I’ve had a max 17 simultaneous transcodes at one point and the current server managed ok, most of my content is pretty low bitrate H264 so probably not overly aggressive on the CPU.

I want to upgrade the server to have a bit more headroom… and trying to figure out which would be the better option if I wanted to maximise the number of transcoding streams I could handle without the server falling over.

The Ryzen 9 3900 is a 12 core, 12 thread processor where the i9-9900K is 8 cores and 8 threads… but also has the Quick Sync core on the CPU. Theroitaclly, if PMS was configured to use hardware encoding on the i9, which one would you be able to throw more at it? It’s unclear to me how many transcodes the i9 Quick Sync can do, and if that core is busy, will the rest of the transcodes use the CPU cores?

I have also read that you may need to have an HDMI monitor or dongle plugged into the i9 in order for Quick Sync to be available to the OS… if this is true and Quick Sync/HW transcoding was unavailable to the OS, would the Ryzen 9 3900 beat the i9-9900K?

Thank you for your help :slight_smile:

2

I am a huge Windows fan, running Plex on a Threadripper CPU and Nvidia P2000 for transcoding for a long time. All the power I could wish for but also not an energy efficient setup. Very recently I made the decision to go for intel NUC because I wanted to bring IDLE usage down as much as I could without comprising on the performance.

Got my inspiration from: 25 Simultaneous Hardware Transcodes on the NUC10i7FNH - #3 by ChuckPa

So this will give a rough expectation what you can expect from quick sync, but you dont need an expensive CPU for it. As far as I understand all the recent intel cpu’s with quicksync have the same performance when it comes to video transcoding. Please note that audio transcoding is still being done by the CPU so that may become a limiting factor if going for a weaker cpu.

I am running the NUC headless without any hdmi dongle. It runs like a beast on ubuntu 20.04 server with docker. I already had some docker experience because of my Synology NAS, that helped me alot. As I am Windows orientated it also felt uncomfortable in the beginning setting everything up.