Server advice

General Discussions
1

Hi i want to ask if my system is not setup correctly, I’ve got wrong hardware or any other advice to speed up my system.

My server runs Windows 10 pro, on an ASUS Z9PE-D16 with twin Xeon e5-2630 v2’s & 64gb Ram, NVIDIA GT 730.

Is there any benefit of two Xeon’s or is one more than adequate?
I’d ideally like to build a system that is capable of Plex Server & gaming, it’d never be doing both at the same time.

My Players are two 55" 4k Sony android tv’s.

My network also has two virgin v6 tivo boxes, two XBOX ones, & one now fairly ancient ABIT ab9 quad gt gaming pc.

I often get messages on the android tv’s saying my server is not fast enough… fast forward & rewinds stall, subtitles freeze playback, if they work at all & make playback jerky while rebuffering.

Any advice you have would be appreciated.

2

There is a difference between performance and throughput. Twin xeons are going to be capable of handling many, many simultaneous tasks (throughput) but individually the actual performance of any one of them won’t be as good as, say a desktop i7. For performance you need clock speed and your xeon’s are relatively slow at 2.6Ghz.

For comparison my plex server is a Xeon e3-1241 v3 which has a much higher clock speed. I use plex on Windows server in a hyper-V VM and it will happily handle multiple 1080p transcodes, internally and remote.

You can see the performance difference between the 2 chips here.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Xeon-E3-1241-v3-vs-Intel-Xeon-E5-2630-v2/2341vs2052

Plex performance is a tricky thing to analyse though - it depends on the content you’re playing, the players you’re feeding it to and the network it’s going over as to whether (and how much) the server transcodes. Direct playback needs almost no server power, and the machine that can transcode multiple 4K streams in software hasn’t been invented yet. So sadly “is xyz machine good enough” is almost impossible to answer accurately.

The short answer to your question though, is that I don’t see a benefit in 2 Xeons, but I do see a benefit in a faster machine.

I’d ideally like to build a system that is capable of Plex Server & gaming, it’d never be doing both at the same time.

If you build a gaming PC, it will run plex happily. An i7 (probably even an i5) and a mid range graphics card will do the job nicely.

Also, use a wired network. Get some powerline adapters if you can’t run ethernet around the house, they’ll still be way better than any wifi connection.

3

Your best bet here to improve both environments is to get your video upgraded to a 1070. The dual XEON provides little benefits.

Gaming wise, most games will not utilize the cores outside of one cpu.

Plex has the ability to utilize HW acceleration, if that feature is checked it will find your 1070 and all video processing will be done by the card. Technically you can get away with a GTX 970, 980, 1050 and 1050ti. (If your conscious about price and wattage). A 1070 is over kill for plex but not for gaming.

The advantage of a higher end video card is for gaming but also if you plan to re-encode your video from x.264 to x.265.

I don’t know if you will be doing this but with a dual cpu configuration, you can run your plex box and probably rely on the cpu to do your video transcode processing and with hw acceleration turn off be able to play your game and/or re-sample video from x.264 to x.265 all on the same box at the same time. Don’t leave hw accleration on plex while doing rendering of video or gaming. Probably would work but i dont trust the system sharing the vram cause i run into some issue sometimes.

(i personally run a ASUS 10th anniversary ROG Rampage V, e5-2650l, strix 1070. I have about 50 buddies with 3 to 6 streams going on most of the time. I’ve been re-doing my x.264 archives to x.265. I don’t game on this box. I’m on OW player.)

4

Ok, so a bit more info to my situation.
It only ever feeds one client, ever & most stuff is in x265 already where possible.

In an ideal world i’d have my server ‘sleeping’ until the android Plex client on my TV’s makes a WOL request.

Problem 1, this server motherboard does not like sleeping, also wakes up at random times when no WOL from Plex has been made nor to my knowledge from anything else,
Problem 2, takes almost as long to restore as booting from a shutdown, bit quicker as the POST takes for ever, so sleep would save time as well as wear on hardware & power not leaving on permanently.

If money was no object i’d change hardware majorly, but as my wife is housebound disabled & I’m her carer, our limited funds dictate what can or more importantly cant be done.

My current setup was bought to solve capacity problems as it came with 12TB of hard drives (half of which have since failed now, resulting in the loss of 1.5TB of plex content)
I thought (inaccurately it seems) a proper server with twin CPU’s & 64GB ram would do everything I could ask of it.

Now larger HDDs are available I eventually intend to replace my current setup with 2x10 or 12TB drives & the same as a rarely connected, exact copy of them updated periodically for recent additions. After managing to get the first one I can start retiring my motly collection of secondhand 2, 3 & 4 TB drives, I have had to RAID 1, after my last failure.
This also reduces my power & SATA port requirements.

So best CPU I can run on my current motherboard is,
Intel Xeon 6-Core E5-2643v2 3.50GHz SR19X or
Intel Xeon 4-Core E5-2637v2 3.50GHz SR1B7

Would either of these (in a single CPU situation as two make no difference) be a better a better choice for speeding plex alone?
Or even using this as my gaming pc too?

Changing my motherboard the ASUS 10th anniversary ROG Rampage V, sounds like a good choice of board for me gaming wise & if you run 3 to 5 users from it, sounds good for Plex too!.

e5-2650l 1.8Ghz that’s a bit low isn’t it?

My Palit GTX 750 KALMX will have to keep me going for a while after this, as I need to replace all my HDD’s, before I have another catastrophe!

Network is all wired as follows,
Virgin Superhub 3.0, 4ports
2 to 2 x Xbox ones
1 to Netgear GS108E 8ports
1 to server
1 to gaming PC
1 to Netgear GS105 5ports
1 to SONY android TV
1 to Virgin v6 TIVO box
1 to server (different IP address)
1 to PLP1000 powerline to upstairs
PLW1000 powerline & wifi AC
1 to Netgear GS105E 5ports
1 to SONY android TV
1 to Virgin v6 TIVO box

Anything there that could improve things would be good to know.

5

I originally wrote a long post talking about formats and players but when I re-read your original posts I’m now wondering if it’s all about content.

Are you trying to push 4K content through plex? That can be tricky at the best of times.

Basically 4K needs to be direct played. Transcoding 4K content will choke even the best CPUs without hardware support, it’s far to expensive to do reliably on the fly.

You may need to look at your player - if you want to spend a little bit of money on an experiment, the FireTV 4K is cheap and direct plays most things I throw at it (but I don’t have much 4K content).

If it’s 1080p content, x265 is not a good format for plex as it’s not widely supported by players in hardware. Re-encoding that to x264 might help things along.

Those are the things I’d try first - try encoding to x264 and / or look at a different player. Upgrading your CPU can’t hurt but it sounds like the expensive option to me.

I am a bit confused by your gaming PC comments. The Asus ROG boards are great but you’re looking at a different architecture so buying one of those also means buying a new CPU / RAM / etc - at that point you’re into quite a lot of money, so if you have the funds to do that you might as well go all in on that and ditch the server entirely.

6

I didn’t realise the Plex clients could send WoL requests? Where are the client settings located?

7

This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.