I’ve been running Plex on an old 12 year old computer and it’s tired…
Mother board: MSI 870A-G54
CPU: AMD Phenom™ II X2 560 Processor (2 of them)
3 HITACHI 4 TB hard drives
DVD/BluRay internal player
GeoForce GTX 1050
16 GB memory
Full sized tower.
Windows 10
I want to upgrade, but, don’t want to spend a fortune. Budget around $1,100.00 or so.
For an effective system that will be useable for the next 5 years or so, I’m curious as to what YOUR working gear is.
I have about 8 4K movies - none on my system. I do spend half my year on the opposite side of the country and do access my system. Most of my 520 movies and dozen or so TV series are Blu-Ray or standard DVD files. Can’t upgrade to Windows 11 with current gear.
My CPU often is pegged at 100% and some buffering. In addition, I do get a message saying my CPU is not powerful enough and I have to change settings down to 720p.
We do use the computer for some web browsing - so, staying with desktop computer. Motherboard needs 6 SATA III please. IBM or AMD.
Would appreciate it if you could list what your tower is currently using in the format I listed my current gear in. If your system has been reliable and trouble free, that’s what I am looking for.
Here’s what I’ve built last week. It serves mainly as a Plex server, (and as file server with very low usage):
Motherboard: ASRock Z790 Pro RS/D4
(with room for 4 NVMe drives, only one populated, 1 TB for OS and Plex data folder)
CPU: Intel Core i5-13600 w. Noctua D15 cooler
Currently 6 hard drives of various size and age with room [and plug] for one additional drive left (most of them come from my old server, so the expense was not that big)
separate GPU not necessary, since the CPU has the most modern QuickSync in it
32 GB DDR4 RAM (no problem going back to 16 GB – more just adds more comfort when copying large files)
Full sized tower from Fractal Design with decent noise damping
5 large Noctua fans for safe but quiet cooling. (I have to sit in the same room. So I rather spend for quiet cooling, than save a few bucks but getting annoyed constantly.)
Windows 11
no optical drives, because I’m ripping & curating my media on my workstation
A lesser CPU would be fine, but I didn’t want to wait forever for Sonic Analysis. And, I don’t know what else I might want to do with this server, so I got a midrange CPU instead of the very cheapest and slowest thing possible.
It has 16 GB RAM … Plex would be OK with half that but RAM is not expensive.
The boot drive is NVME.
Media storage is on a NAS, connected via gigabit ethernet.
With Plex Pass and Quick Sync the system is able to transcode/tone map more simultaneous streams than I will ever need.
I am 100% satisfied.
But note that this is a dedicated server, I don’t need to do desktop stuff with it.
Similar setup to @BanzaiInstitute. Also 100% satisfied. Have not stress tested the system, but have had three simultaneous remote streams (1080p transcodes) while watching 4K HDR locally (direct play) without any problems. I’m sure it could support several more remote streams if I had the bandwidth to support such.
Lenovo M90q mini-PC with i5-10500T with Intel UHD 630 graphics
1TB SATA SSD (had one spare, or would have used NVME)
32 GB RAM (16 GB would suffice, found on sale at a good price)
Ubuntu 22.04
Media on a Synology NAS.
Everything connected to a gigabit Ethernet switch.
My Plex runs on a Unraid Server within a docker container. My server is as follows:
Micro-Star International Co., Ltd B450 TOMAHAWK Mother Board
AMD Ryzen 5 1600 Six-Core @ 3200 MHz CPU
MEMORY 24 GiB DDR4
1TB NVM Drive for cache and docker data
8 Standard drives that make up 24 TB Data Space
Gone is the occasional buffering and notice from Plex system that the CPU is not powerful enough to continue!