Which is better for PLEX Intel i5-7600K or AMD Ryzan 1600 ?? (With RX 550)

General Discussions
1

Hi all,

Making a new PLEX server to support the upcoming transcoding abilities PLEX will shortly have,

But which one is better:

Intel i5-7600K @ OC 5GHZ
or
AMD Ryzan 1600 @ OC 3.9GHZ

I will probably pair either with an AMD RX 550 or something similar (due to nvidia 2 stream policy on consumer cards)

Also, there is the power considerations to consider, Intel is 95w and 1600 is just 65w so should save power in long run.

Price is the same so don’t worry about cost.

Thanks!

2

Ryzen has no integrated graphics, the i5 has (HD Graphics 630, and it supports quicksync). So if you get the Ryzen you`ll need the RX550.
Judging from the hardware based transcoding preview topic; Quicksync-transcoding seems to work pretty well with the Intel chips. Not sure what your requirements are but if the system only has to run Plex you might fullfill your needs with just the i5.
(also, not sure if overclocking will help regarding hardware based transcoding).

To be honest; until Plex officially releases hardware transcoding functionality I would just wait it out a bit. If you’re patient, you might want to wait for AMDs Raven Ridge APUs (zen/vega based), but they`ll probably launch somewhere in late 2017/early 2018 I guess, hehe. But they should have a really good power/performance ratio.

3

Thanks for the reply,

I need this to be able to do at the minimum one 4k transcode, whilst doing another 1080p as I have 20 ish people using my PLEX server currently buy only 1 or 2 concurrent users at any given time,

Do you think the upcoming AMD APU will be able to do this?

4

judging from the specs; they -should- be able to, but we won’t know until proper benchmarks hit… And not to mention the fact that we don’t know how well Plex will support hardware transcoding in the future; it’s kind of hard to recommend anything at the moment. But maybe someone in the transcoding preview topic might be able to confirm if that i5 is up to scratch for your requirements; it might be a proper solution for your needs.

5

@ash3000k said:
Thanks for the reply,

I need this to be able to do at the minimum one 4k transcode, whilst doing another 1080p as I have 20 ish people using my PLEX server currently buy only 1 or 2 concurrent users at any given time,

Do you think the upcoming AMD APU will be able to do this?

I do that with an i5-7500 right now. HW tranwcoding not used.

6

If you are not at all concerned with price then I guess the power of Ryzen + the power of the AMD card should outperform the i5, but the i5 comes with its integrated graphics which has Quicksync, and that generation has HEVC 10 bit support in hardware… That was easily my choice, I think $/performance ratio is much higher in this use case. Might depend where you live, though.

7

I’d go the Kaby Lake route, w/ integrated graphics. You could easily meet your requirements w/ that.