Hey!
So ive been running Plex since a little while before it was made available on Nvidia Shield TV.
I Used to have it running off my Synology NAS, then moved to my Nvidia Shield when that was made available. I haven’t really had many problems with this setup, occasionally if three or so people were streaming it would lock up, and if i tried to transcode any 4K content to 1080P it would crash but nothing major.
Recently the fan in my shield has failed, and made it crazy unstable, i’m trying to find a replacement (will take any idea on that here too) in the mean time i decided it was time to upgrade the server. As i live in Canberra, australias capital city, we have a lot of ex-gov hardware for sale reguarly, so i found one of these:
Dell Poweredge R415 Dual 6-Core AMD Opteron 4184 2.8GHz 1 RU Server
RAM: 64Gb
Hard Drives: 250Gb
Hard Drive Interface: SATA Interface
CD Drive: No CD Drive
Onboard Network: Onboard Dual Gigabit Network
Power Supplies: 1 x Power Supply
Power Cables: Uses Standard 10 Amp IEC Power Cable(s)
License Sticker: No License Sticker Attached
Operating System: Operating System NOT Installed - Install Disc(s) NOT Included
As you can see it comes with no OS and i was looking for recommendations on what i should use, i’m assuming linux would be the way to go just not sure what one.
Ive read about people using the RAM (of which i have alot) as a temp directory for transcoding, which resulted in a great speed boost. I’d like to do that, just not sure if its an OS thing or just available through plex.
I’d take any insights, recoomendations or articles you guys might have that would help me out here. cheers!
I can’t recommend this for a Plex Server. It may perform worse than your Shield, while drawing a multitude of the power.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=AMD+Opteron+4184&id=278&cpuCount=2
I read somewhere that its about 2000 points per stream, can;t seem to find what the Tegra X1 in the shield has but surely this should be good for 4 streams?
@Spicypeanut said:
I read somewhere that its about 2000 points per stream, can;t seem to find what the Tegra X1 in the shield has but surely this should be good for 4 streams?
The Shield can use its graphics hardware to accelerate transcoding. It is one of the very few machines where this is already possible.
And it is not that easy with those passmark numbers.
You have about 4000 passmark points per cpu. You can consider this to be what’s max. available for a single transcoding operation. The second cpu will only be used if a second transcoded stream is started.
Now 4000 sounds about enough - but:
If you are using RAW BluRay rips with their PGS subtitles and the occasional VC-1 video codec, you will still get stuttering and buffering. Why?
Because the performance of a single core is only 932 points. (indicated as “Single Thread Rating”)
Some transcoding operations are not multi-threaded, so they run (almost) on one cpu core only. The above mentioned PGS subtitles and the VC-1 video codec are the most notorious examples of this.
(You will need about 1350 points from a single core to handle those satisfyingly.)
And I am pretty sure you can forget about using files encoded in the H.265/HEVC video codec.
If you however only have files with H.264 video in 4 - 6 mbps bitrate and only SRT subtitles (if any), then this machine might be sufficient.
well crap… ha ha looks like i messed up here!
i’ll give it a go, the Shield is in no state to carry on holding up the load… not without a new fan.
there is a regular stream of server grade PCs available in my area, if i was to keep an eye out what sort of thing should i be looking for, would something similar to this be ok, just with a better CPU or should i just find the beefyest i7 i can and run that instead?
thanks for all your help so far tho!
One of the bigger i7s won’t be a bad choice.
Particularly with the coming support for GPU-assisted transcoding.
Look up the particular i7 model and look for the ‘model year’.
You want newer models with their more advanced integrated GPU generation.
The more modern a GPU, the more able it is for transcoding video + the better visual quality it produces when transcoding.
