Home plex server/HTPC suggestions , mine diedish

Joined
Jun 4, 2008
Messages
2,821
So I currently have a Home Plex server. It's in a hot swap 12 bay rack mount case. 4960k cpu , 8 gigs of ddr3 , 850 watt platinum PSU. This also acts as my HTPC. I bought a 1060gtx to go in it , used here of the for sale. Had it for a few months before getting a chance to put it in as we just bought a new house. So I get it back up and running and put the 1060gtx in. All is good for like a week. Then it locks up and wont boot. I removed the video card and it boots up. So I try the video card in the second PCI-E slot and it works fine. Just to make sure I run 3d mark on it for a few hours and doesn't have one issue. Didn't crash or have any artifacts. I was like ok maybe the motherboard is going out. It runs fine in the second slot for a few days and does the same thing. Computer wont boot with the card in. Take it out and still won't boot all the way. But doesn't just stop as soon as I turn it on like with the card in. So I take everything out and reset the bios and get it to work on the built in GPU. So not it's up and running again on the intel GPU. At this point I don't know what's Borked lol. I'm going to take the Video card and run it in a old Dell it have laying around for a while and see if it comes up with the same issue. Now the point. I have 2 dead PCi-e slots in my current setup and maybe a dying motherboard. So it's time for a rebuild. What direciton should I go ? Should I pick up and a new AMD 8 core 3700x or go with a Some XEON CPU's off ebay for it ? All it does is stream movies and Run Kodi with Madvr for my theater room. I at most have 4-6 people streaming off of it at a time. Thanks for the input.
 
Mostly depends what you want to spend money wise. Even if you were going to go AMD I would pick up a previous ryzen not the newest one since people are selling them off cheap to upgrade. BTW def sounds like the board went.
 
How old is the psu?
Have you checked all the power connectors on the mobo?
What os are you running? If windows have you done a sfc /scannow

Do you have a budget?

I’m a fan of the xeons, especially since you need so little ram. The v2s are really cheap the v3 so-so but more power efficient.

You could definitely grab like 32-64 gigs of ddr3-rdimm for a nice transcode ramdisk cheaply.
 
Last edited:
1E00AA5A-1271-446A-AED8-E8131FD6645D.jpeg
I would like to be in around 500 for cpu, mb. I don’t mind spending the money as I would like to just rebuild it and not touch it for 3-5 years other then adding more hard drive space. It’s a new PSU , Evga 850, I’ll check all the connections again just to make sure. I tried another video card in all the pci-e slots and nothing. Even the 3rd one I hadn’t ever used. I really think it’s the board the more I think about it. I dropped a drive the other day and I moved it to a slot that uses the controller card and not the motherboard and it came back up fine. It’s running windows 10 pro.
 
Last edited:
Honestly, this is not the first time I have heard of those MSI boards having PCIe slots shit the bed.

if your willing to drop 500 you can do a lot. Think about your current load, is it a lot? Do you need more cores than you have? was the ram usage high? Do you need more?

The point I guess im trying to make is you can throw a lot more hardware at it, but if you dont need to then why? keep it simple. Find a reliable board with good reviews.

I run Plex in a VM on my Dell R710 server, its old, but trusty and parts are cheap in case of a failure plus I get redundancy of most things.
 
View attachment 175398 I would like to be in around 500 for cpu, mb. I don’t mind spending the money as I would like to just rebuild it and not touch it for 3-5 years other then adding more hard drive space. It’s a new PSU , Evga 850, I’ll check all the connections again just to make sure. I tried another video card in all the pci-e slots and nothing. Even the 3rd one I hadn’t ever used. I really think it’s the board the more I think about it. I dropped a drive the other day and I moved it to a slot that uses the controller card and not the motherboard and it came back up fine. It’s running windows 10 pro.
PSU sounds fine, reseat the power cables when you can (try a second pci power connector on the GPU maybe?) then run command prompt as admin and run 'sfc /scannow' (this will verify the OS files and try to repair if needed ~ this can be run in the background while the machine is running).
Lastly are you monitoring temps on the CPU? Did you use the stock paste that came with the stock cooler? (whens the last time you replaced it?)

I picked up a supermicro board (X10SRH-CLN4F) that has 10 sata ports and 8 SAS ports combo'ed with a e5-2660 v3 (10c/20t) xeon processor for $475 a couple months ago.
You could have something very comparable at a lower cost if you went with the v1 or v2 processors and boards.
(I'm using unRAID with mine and running Plex as a VM on the equipment)

Additionally those pcie add-ons could be replaced with a single SAS 8i IT-mode card that can handle 8 drives, it would cost you about 50-60$ for the card + cables but clean it up by alot.
I picked up the Dell H310 for $25 and flashed it myself, you can get them for about $40 pre-flashed (this card would be for HDD only, SSD are a bit too fast for it).

I run Plex in a VM on my Dell R710 server, its old, but trusty and parts are cheap in case of a failure plus I get redundancy of most things.
I had one of the R420s for several years and found the rack servers to be very loud, power hungry, and hot unless you do heavy mods or have a basement/separate area to put it in.
 
I had one of the R420s for several years and found the rack servers to be very loud, power hungry, and hot unless you do heavy mods or have a basement/separate area to put it in.[/QUOTE]

Power hungry depends on opinion, and settings, same as loud. I actually have mine here in my office and I cannot hear it at all and I have done no mods.
Yes it does produce some heat, but I have a fan that moves air so it isnt bad.
 
System won't even post so I know it's not a Windows issue. It will do a slow on and off , like breathing thing and nothing else. I have tried other cards. Resting the bios to factory, Had to do that just to get it running again. It's up and running fine at the moment off the on board video card. I'm sure it will crap out at some point again. Also the other video cards I tried do not need an external power source to work. Guy has this posted on Craigslist

Selling an unassembled server with the following parts:
- dual Intel E5-2670 processors (16 threads, 2.6Ghz, 20MB cache each)
- Supermicro X9DAE motherboard (includes three PCI-E x16 slots and SLI support)
- Noctua NH-U14S CPU coolers with extra 150mm fans (all unused)

Says he will take 350 for it. Just not sure I can make it fit in my current case. If not I might go the e5-2660 route as was suggested above. Also the 12 core 1920x is on sale for 269.99 seams like a good deal.
 
Last edited:
Does that come with any ram? Do you need a dual CPU config? If you need something asap, thats an ok option and pricing is about right w/o ram, if he gave you some it'd be a better deal.
For your use case and need for alot of drives, I feel like you can find a better board that fits your needs though, that one only has 8 sata ports (or you could go the add-on card route).
There are many mobo options available in the e-atx format, you only need one 16x slot right?
Check out the socket 2011 list here: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/ (I recommend ignoring the proprietary format and stick to atx/e-atx unless you're buying a supermicro case).
 
Does that come with any ram? Do you need a dual CPU config? If you need something asap, thats an ok option and pricing is about right w/o ram, if he gave you some it'd be a better deal.
For your use case and need for alot of drives, I feel like you can find a better board that fits your needs though, that one only has 8 sata ports (or you could go the add-on card route).
There are many mobo options available in the e-atx format, you only need one 16x slot right?
Check out the socket 2011 list here: https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/archive/ (I recommend ignoring the proprietary format and stick to atx/e-atx unless you're buying a supermicro case).

Yes it does come with some ram. He has 128gig for it if I want to buy that also. I would want at least 16-32gigs so I can run the trans-coding in RAM and not kill my ssd drive. It will fit in my current case also. Your correct I only need 1 16x slot for my 1060 gtx.
 
Make sure you get at least 4 sticks for the 2x cpu to make use of the dd part of ddr :).
 
For plex I would not go with anything other than an Intel CPU with an iGPU on board. Use hardware acceleration to enable QuickSync and it will perform far better than any GPU under $500 and the newer CPUs will look better than other GPU encoding too. Also Nvidia consumer GPUs can only run 2 plex streams due to driver limitations, and for some weird reason AMD cards do not run anything close to what should be their potential. The only thing worth using is QuickSync, or fork out cash for an RTX 4000
I have run 11, 1080p video streams on a 7700K with QS. You cant get that even on a 32 thread CPU doing all the work in CPU cores. If you get an RTX 4000, I wouldnt be surprised to see it capable of 20+ streams.

Plex doesnt use much RAM, so you only need 8GB for a half dozen users. Using a RAMDisk for transcoding directory isnt worth it because performance above a regular SSD is negligible and you need around 128GB of RAM to put into a RAMDIsk if you plan to have people stream 4k movies. Those file sizes are huge even transcoded down to 20-25mbit. It really just isnt worth it at all. You can just grab a 500GB SSD for $80 and it will perform near identical as your scratch disk, cost WAY less money, and it will still last 3+ years (or a lot more if you only have a couple users)
 
Last edited:
Plex doesnt use much RAM, so you only need 8GB for a half dozen users. Using a RAMDisk for transcoding directory isnt worth it because performance above a regular SSD is negligible and you need around 128GB of RAM to put into a RAMDIsk if you plan to have people stream 4k movies. Those file sizes are huge even transcoded down to 20-25mbit. It really just isnt worth it at all. You can just grab a 500GB SSD for $80 and it will perform near identical as your scratch disk, cost WAY less money, and it will still last 3+ years (or a lot more if you only have a couple users)
On the flip side you only need about 20Gb of ramdisk if you're doing 1080p though so in that aspect, why not? 32gb of ram is cheap especially ddr3.
 
Figured I update. I just ordered a ASUS Z10PC-D8 Motherboard with dual E5-2630v3's and 32 gigs of ram (2 sticks of 16gig). I'll probably but the ram up to at least 64 at some point. The Asus can support up to 18 Sata on borad. So I should be good on storage with it. Current case only supports 12 hot swaps. But now I can stick the ssd to the in side of the case and use all the hot swaps for hard drives. Figure 12tbx12 should hold me for a bit. Thanks for every one's input.
 
Just FYI, PLEX is ending HTPC front-end support January 2020.

Many people, myself included are plenty pissed. Many things like proper Atmos support, full harmony support and no-transcode directplay for EVERY codec are gone when they force you to a stick or Roku. The newe PMP will of course work for a while, until they issue a new authentication method that it won’t support or document because the server is closed source. I would switch to Kodi but the KodiPlexConnect hasn’t been updated in a while and won’t because they are dropping HTPC.
 
Yeah I just saw this today. I use the nvidia shield most of the time for plex and all my 4k is played off Kodi with Madvr off my HTPC. If anything, I just go back to using Kodi only in the Theater. So doesn't really affect me to much. My family just uses a roku or a tv so they won't notice anything at all.
 
I have Plex running on top of my Linux-based Media/File Server, which is directly connected to my Surround Receiver. I do not see any mention of a new Linux app, only Windows and Mac. So either Linux remains unaffected, or I am stuck grabbing a Chromecast/other device?
 
I havent really paid much attention to the actual Plex Media Player application since I just use web interface on my desktop, but is it really any different losing that application when they are releasing a new app that replaces it? Wouldnt the new one just be the same thing only if what they say is true it would play media better?

What is so specific about the old player that the new app wont be able to do?
 
I havent really paid much attention to the actual Plex Media Player application since I just use web interface on my desktop, but is it really any different losing that application when they are releasing a new app that replaces it? Wouldnt the new one just be the same thing only if what they say is true it would play media better?

What is so specific about the old player that the new app wont be able to do?
The new one has no “TV” interface. You can’t use a remote control, only works with a mouse now. They took out the key mapping ability that everyone used for programmable remotes, among other “10 Foot Interface” features. They are in bed with the media box companies like roku and tv manufacturers and want to force those ecosystems.
 
I would say... Depends on what your needs are if you are actually transcoding and thinking of picking up a 3700X look at the video below (time-stamped to the results)



Kinda shows you how many streams you can push with a Quadro, 3700x or 3900x.
 
Yeah I didn't know about the p2000 Till the other day. But honestly I always wanted a dual Xeon setup. It will also have a 1060gtx in it but that will be for playing movies in my theater. As this also is my HTPC. This way I should have enough CPU to do a few streams and run Madvr with out having any issues. I mean at most at the moment I have maybe 4-5 people streaming off of me.
 
I will say this, maybe 3 or 4 years ago I picked up dual 2670s with 128Gb of ram when the data center’s were refreshing their hardware. I run Proxmox with a Plex LXC and can either add our remove CPUs from it depending on the workload. I still have tons of processing power left over (can mass convert videos, run services etc...). However, it is a power hungry system. I think I have pulled 600-700 watts when throwing 14 cores to media conversion.

Honestly, workload aside you can mitigate that by converting videos to play natively on hardware, that is how most of our home is setup. When family connects I do not generally see a huge impact, its mostly iOS users that cause transcodes.

I was really excited about ASRocks X470D4U, however, its rarely in stock unless being scalped. I might go this route to replace my 2670s with my 2700X.
 
I will say this, maybe 3 or 4 years ago I picked up dual 2670s with 128Gb of ram when the data center’s were refreshing their hardware. I run Proxmox with a Plex LXC and can either add our remove CPUs from it depending on the workload. I still have tons of processing power left over (can mass convert videos, run services etc...). However, it is a power hungry system. I think I have pulled 600-700 watts when throwing 14 cores to media conversion.

Honestly, workload aside you can mitigate that by converting videos to play natively on hardware, that is how most of our home is setup. When family connects I do not generally see a huge impact, its mostly iOS users that cause transcodes.

I was really excited about ASRocks X470D4U, however, its rarely in stock unless being scalped. I might go this route to replace my 2670s with my 2700X.
Similar to mine, I also run proxmox with Plex on an lxc, I only have 96gb of ram but throw it 24 cores. Plex isn't very memory hungry though and it's not to often I'm transcoding more than a single 1080 3mbs stream.. so, maybe overkill? ;)
 
Got everything installed today.. well almost everything they forgot to put the break out cables in the box so I’m waiting on those so I can clean it up a bit. Also I had to mod the cpu mount just to get them to damn fit. Cpu sockets are way to close lol. The coolers just barely clear in my 4u case , but they seam to be keeping everything cool. Setup a 16gig ram drive till I get more memory. But that really should be enough for all that streams off me.
 

Attachments

  • 40FA3A29-3E9A-4A84-BD1B-29133DE6FD68.jpeg
    40FA3A29-3E9A-4A84-BD1B-29133DE6FD68.jpeg
    634.4 KB · Views: 0
  • EC40013C-8814-4AC7-8801-599551EADCA4.jpeg
    EC40013C-8814-4AC7-8801-599551EADCA4.jpeg
    431.1 KB · Views: 0
  • 2AC6D04A-8134-4E6D-9856-137C1B81BEAA.jpeg
    2AC6D04A-8134-4E6D-9856-137C1B81BEAA.jpeg
    503.5 KB · Views: 0
Back
Top