I run Plex Server on an Intel Celeron Dual Core 1017U 1.60GHz, Windows 10. With direct stream the Plex Media Service uses <5% CPU and the whole machine uses <15% CPU.
The Server is small physically and everything works except transcoding. 8GB of RAM is not fully utilized which is expected. I read somewhere that an external GPU could work. I hooked up a NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 GPU (2GB GDDR5 64bit). My PC detected it and installed the drivers.
The good news is that I see it in task manager with 0% activity. If I start to play a transcoded video, the plex interface shows (hw) by the stream meaning that hardware transcoding is being used and the GPU shows 1-2% activity.
The bad news and the question is that the CPU still shoots up to 100%. Task manager shows 40%+ being taken by Plex Transcoder and 30%+ being taken by Plex Media Server service. As I start to do 2-4 streams they hang and the GPU never goes above 5%.
Any ideas what is wrong with my setup? I was hoping the CPU would stay below 50% and the GPU will up a lot more than 1-5%?
It does show on the Plex interface that multiple streams have (hw) indicator besides them to indicate that hardware acceleration is being used. How can I tell how many sessions it can support?
The concept (of adding a GPU to support multiple transcoding) does not look viable then as most of the chips on that link only support 1. The ones that do 3 are over $3000.
For $300 seems like I can get a PC with Intel Core i3-8100 and in other threads people are saying the integrated GPU will do multiple transcodes easily.
yeah but as far I know AMD gpus have no limitation on HEVC but I think it only works if your server is Windows based (because of the Windows Media Foundation)… maybe building a good machine with a quicksync capable CPU is the best cost/benefit.
You are misunderstanding the chart a little bit. For decoding, there is only one chip but it handles several sessions. Encoding is session limited to 2. Your real problem was the CPU had to keep in audio in sync with the video (probably burning in subtitles) and that took 100%.
The i3-8100 is a good choice, you don’t say home many streams you have going. For a slightly cheaper solution there is a Pentium Silver J5005, downside is that it only has 4 SATA on the motherboard.
Thanks I am building for an average of 3 720p/1080o transcodes. For what it’s worth, the audio did not need transcoding (or if it does that usually takes minimal CPU) and no subtitles burn. Hard to troubleshoot but it is quite possible that the CPU can’t keep up with the GPU.
