Suggestions for a new PC build for PMS

Plex Media Server Desktops & Laptops
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First time poster, I currently run PMS on my personal computer mostly to just play my TV shows/movies locally to myself. I intend on building a new PC to run the server so that family members can start watching stuff remotely but I’m not sure what kind of specs I should be going for. I’m taking all recommendations for any hardware because I’m just not sure what I should be looking for.

Not sure if it matters, but the players everyone will be using to watch remotely are the Fire TV Cubes, they were on sale on Amazon so I figured it was a good preemptive Christmas gift to my family members for once the new server is set up.

Are most people just going Intel for CPU’s on Plex machines, are the AMD Threadripper’s any good?

I also bought the lifetime pass recently so I don’t know if it would be more beneficial to grab a good GPU and do the hardware acceleration or just purchasing a CPU.

I’m not sure how much ram would be sufficient, but I’m definitely looking for a case and mobo that can fit as many sata drives as possible. I’m currently running my server off 3x 8TB WD My Books that I plan on just turning into backup drives once I start purchasing new internal drives.

For internal drives, would having drives all at 7200rpm/256mb cache make a big difference opposed to 5400rpm/64mb or 128mb cache? I was looking at either the WD Black 6TB or Seagate Barracuda 8TB drives but I’ll gladly take any suggestions. I also plan on just grabbing a Samsung Evo M.2 either 250GB or 500GB for Windows and PMS to run on.

If I forgot something, or if you need some more information please don’t hesitate to ask.

Thanks in advance!

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Go with a 7th or 8th gen Intel CPU. They support h/w accelerated transcoding for H264 & H265 video on the internal GPU.

Do not add a discrete GPU unless you need it for something else. Nvidia consumer GPUs are limited to two simultaneous transcodes. Subsequent transcodes will hit the CPU, not the internal GPU. Here’s some info on using AMD GPUs from SlothTech: YouTube, Website

You don’t mention how many concurrent streams or transcodes. If the media direct plays, then you do not need much CPU. By using an Intel CPU, you can take advantage of h/w acceleration when transcoding H264/H265 media.

The Celeron in my Synology 918+ can easily direct play multiple streams. With h/w acceleration it can transcode 2 or 3 1080p streams. The i7-4790K in my desktop can handle at least six 1080p H264 transcodes using h/w acceleration (it does not have H265 capability).

The basic message is you don’t need an i9 or big Xeon server to run Plex. You might be able to get by with a current i5/i7, since the internal GPU is handling the video transcodes. Audio transcode will still be performed on the CPU, but the impact in minimal compared to video. Also, a few movies are in VC1 video, which is not h/w accelerated with Plex. A speedier CPU will help if you will be using the system for Handbrake, etc.

See Using Hardware-Accelerated Streaming for additional info.

8GB minimum. 16GB is nice.

Plex does not use that much RAM. Each instance of Plex Transcoder uses ~300MB on my Win10 system. The PMS process takes about 64MB RAM.

Having 16GB RAM gives you some extra headroom if you’ll be using the system for other things at the same time (ex: using Handbrake to process a video file while still serving up movies with PMS). Some people run related apps such as sonarr & radarr. You’ll need to take that into account if you plan to run such apps.

5400 will work. 7200 is better. See this post for more info. You can search the forum for “5400 7200” or similar and find many discussions.

I keep my media on a Synology 918+. It has a mix of HGST & Seagate IronWolf, both 7200 RPM. No problems with either. The HGST 10TBs are a bit noisy compared to the Seagate 12TB when moving a lot of data to/from the drives. I previously had HGST 4TB drives and they are very quiet. Rarely heard them during heavy read/write periods.

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Really appreciate the response, I would imagine at most there would be 4-5 simultaneous streams. All of my media is in x264, and for the most part on my own Fire TV Cube most of what I’ve played to it has been direct which was why I purchased Cubes for my other family members while I’ll probably switch over to a Shield at some point.

If you don’t mind me asking, do you backup your media and if so, what do you back the drives onto?

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I backup to USB drives and online to Google Drive.

I use Synology’s Hyper Backup application. It provides for versioning and error-checking, so more thorough than just a straight file copy/mirror. The error checking is nice. It caught a USB drive failure before the drive completely crashed.

Synology also has Cloud Sync, which is like using Google Drive, DropBox, etc on your PC. It mirrors selected folders on the NAS to various cloud providers. Not a true backup, but a nice way to put data in the cloud.

Online:
I backup to Google Drive via a G-Suite account. Google currently isn’t enforcing the 5-person minimum, so it makes for a very economical backup. :crossed_fingers: it stays this way. This works well. Only issue is I have a 10 Mbps uplink, so the initial upload can take some time, ~10-12 days / TB.

External Drives:
I backup to two USB hard drives and a Synology DS414 NAS. At one time, the DS414 was my only NAS. I upgraded to the 918+ about a year ago. I kept the 414 and repurposed it as a backup for the 918+. Between the 414 & the two USB drives I have enough space to backup all my data on the 918+. It is a bit of a hodge-podge, but it works and I could use items on-hand, so I don’t worry about it.

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That makes alot of sense, I don’t think Ill go the cloud route however. I recently just went on a huge downloading spree and made everything a 1080p minimum so I purchased a couple My Books for the time being. I was looking at the WD Red 7200 NAS drives, I’m pretty sure I could use those NAS drives in a desktop PC. I kind of wanted to start purchasing drives that are at least 8tb minimum from the get-go so I don’t run into a situation where I start with smaller drives since they’re cheaper to start than need to repurchase drives later down the line. It just seems like most desktop HDD’s I’ve been looking at online seem to go upto like 6-8tb, while the NAS drives go upto around 10-12tb.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but would it be wiser to stick with x264 content opposed to x265 unless everyone was using NVIDIA Shields to playback my media?

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This!

You want the CPU feature called Intel Quick Video Sync which is what Plex transcoder uses for hardware acceleration. you may not need it today but it’s nice to have to future proof your setup. I messed up and got Xeon CPU to help run virtual machines (my PMS is a VM), but it doesn’t support QVS.

+1 on the 8GB of RAM as well. My Plex server was struggling during transcoding when it had 3GB of RAM. The memory monitor app I use showed that it was using all of the physical memory. I upped it to 8GB, and its doing fine now.

I use a Synology 1817+ NAS for media storage only. I tried running Plex on it but the CPU could not handle the load.

You can save money on components Plex doesn’t use, like the sound card and video card. I’m not an expert on storage but I use Western Digital Red drives and they seem fine.

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True, I’m definitely sold on getting one of the newer i7’s. I can probably find some 2x4gb ram sticks pretty cheap to total 16gb.

I believe a 250gb m.2 would be sufficient for Windows/PMS/FTP client, I think that’s all I’ll really be using the machine for since I just FTP any media from my seedbox. I’m hoping I can just use Teamviewer to remote into the machine without actually leaving a monitor plugged into it, dunno if it’ll just work by itself or if I need one of those display emulators.

But you’re right, other than that if I’m just going to use the quick sync on the Intel CPU I don’t think I really need a GPU since at most I’m expecting 4-5 simultaneous streams if everyone who has access was watching stuff.

Now I just need to find a full tower case that can cage like 10+ 3.5" bays, and I’m not sure how big of a PSU I would need if I were to have that many drives going at one time.

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WRT Drives: NAS drives will work just fine in a desktop computer. NAS drives handle vibration better than desktop drives (so says the datasheet anyway…). Many times they’ll have longer warranties. Reds have a good reputation. Don’t think anybody will argue with you for using them.

Generic Answer: Look at your current and possible future Plex clients and pick the one that is most compatible.

Not so generic answer:
I stay with x264 for compatibility. A family member still uses iTunes & an AppleTV v3, which does not support x265. Also, one TV still has a FireStick Gen1, which does not support x265.

If you’re starting fresh and know that all your Plex clients will support x265, then not a problem to go that route.

The AFTV Cube supports x265 up to 4Kp60 and x264 up to 4Kp30, so should not be a problem if you want to go with x265. Reference: FireTV Device Specifications

Might check specifications for phone/tablets if you think anybody will be using those. I’d be surprised if any decent phone or tablet less than two years old did not support x265, at least to 1080p30. For example, the iPhone 7, introduced in late 2016, supports x265.

If anybody is using a PC or Mac for playback, have them use Plex Media Player (PMP) instead of Plex Web. PMP is a much more capable player. You’ll see less transcodes on your server. Plex Web is limited because of the web browser limitations - no x265 support, fewer audio codecs supported.

x265 will give you better compression than x264 for a given quality, so it will stream at a lower bandwidth, which is always nice for supporting remote users.

Note that transcoding to x265 is more computationally intensive than x264, so it will take longer to process files via Handbrake, etc. Look at the CPU reviews on Tom’s Hardware. They perform standard tests on all the CPUs they review, including using Handbrake. You can see the difference between 264 & 265. Not a deal killer, just be aware of it.

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Visit pcpartpicker.com. When you build a system on their site it tracks power for each component. Gives you at least a starting point for PSU size. You can then scale up to allow for future growth.

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