So a quick question on CPU, NAS

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jordan12

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I have a 4790K with 32GB of RAM. Would that CPU work well with Plex and streaming, transcoding, etc?
 
Depends on the number of streams but I don't think you should have trouble if it's just a couple.
 
Depends on the number of streams and if you're transcoding or not. I was using a Ivy Bridge generation Xeon (4C - 8T) with 32gb ram for years and never had an issue. It was also being used as a Hyper-V server at the same time. But 99% of my media was direct stream/play. If you're doing direct stream/play or have a Geforce card capable of transcoding you could do more streams. If you're just needing one stream at a time and it's direct stream/play then what you have is actually way overkill.
 
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Also depends on your codec source/destination. I can do h.264 all day long for direct play or transcoding (2080ti), but if I try to do HEVC HDR10 -> anything not direct play, well... the card can't keep up, and neither can the server.
 
We've been running a PLEX server on a laptop with a N3100 series quad core not even an i3 for the last few years and it's been just fine. If you have something slightly better that would be great but you don't need much. I'm retiring my i7 4770K which is what 10X+ faster than the mobile celeron? I've noticed over the last 10-15 years people don't know wtf they are talking about when it comes to required performance required for home HTPC/Media playback. Unless it's going to be a gaming rig as well you can get away with next to nothing which is great for preventing more ewaste.
 
jordan12 said:
I have a 4790K with 32GB of RAM. Would that CPU work well with Plex and streaming, transcoding, etc?
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At least on linux, a Plex server will likely use little ram (8 gig being a lot for it), so 32 is certain to be way more than enough.

For plex streaming/transcoding it really depend if you have 80 mbits 4K movie that you want to transcode to a AmazonFireStick plugged to a 720p TV, it will probably not work on that CPU.

This is the rough guideline for what is required for transcoding with a cpu:

  • 4K HDR (50Mbps, 10-bit HEVC) file: 17000 PassMark score (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 4K SDR (40Mbps, 8-bit HEVC) file: 12000 PassMark score (being transcoded to 10Mbps 1080p)
  • 1080p (10Mbps, H.264) file: 2000 PassMark score
  • 720p (4Mbps, H.264) file: 1500 PassMark score
Your CPU is around 8000, so could expect to do 4 high quality 1080p movie into something that is not transcoded.

Ideally (with conversion if needed) you have played that do not require conversion and Plex become a fancy passive nas for the player that do all the work locally, in that scenario a 4790K will be again way more than enough, an raspberry pie 4 being possibly enough.

So it really depends if your transcoding scenario, for 1080p movie to a couple of device, you will have a really strong 8 threads CPU, for some more fancy 4K going down to 1080/720p you could need a GPU and a plex pass if you do not want to have a lower version of the file (that Plex can do for you during idle times or have a transcoder making them automatically on the server).

Ideally if possible you setup yourself to never transcode and then the server can be literally anything.
 
SpongeBob said:
We've been running a PLEX server on a laptop with a N3100 series quad core not even an i3 for the last few years and it's been just fine. If you have something slightly better that would be great but you don't need much. I'm retiring my i7 4770K which is what 10X+ faster than the mobile celeron? I've noticed over the last 10-15 years people don't know wtf they are talking about when it comes to required performance required for home HTPC/Media playback. Unless it's going to be a gaming rig as well you can get away with next to nothing which is great for preventing more ewaste.
Click to expand...
That because you are setuped in a scenario where you never go from 4K HDR source to client that need the server to transcode, there is absolutely no limit to the power a Plex server can require (imagine someone that have 10-20 person logged on it at the same time with a very different array of players that have many transcoding going, not just streaming). People that got Quadro card and bought a plex pass for their plex server didn't necessarily do it because they didn't know what they were doing, just a different use case than yours
 
Your server/NAS setup can be as important as the clients that are going to use it. Like most have said if you can do direct play with no transcoding then you are going to be just fine. But if you get into a 4K source that needs to play on any non-4K client then you will be transcoding and that is where the CPU is going to become the limiting factor. Plex has done a good job of updating the players on their various devices to get direct play enabled. It wasn't that long ago that the AppleTV app was updated to it's own player rather than relying on the player built into the AppleTV, which would only read specific formats and if it wasn't in that format you would have to transcode.

My current setup is:
- i7 6700K
- 16GB of RAM
Media Pool:
- 2 x 8TB WD Reds
- 1 x 4TB 7200 Hitachi
Data Storage Pool(mirrored)
- 2 x 2TB WD Reds
Camera Pool:
- 1 x 8TB Purple
MetaData Drive:
- Couple of older SSDs to allow artwork to be loaded quicker
Media Clients:
- 2 x 4K AppleTVs
- 2 x 1080p AppleTVs
- Various iPhones and iPads

Server is running BlueIris which records from 8 sources and uses about 20%-24% of the CPU at all times. I am able to get direct play to all my devices as long as I use the right source. For example, if I want to watch a 4K movie it needs to be on the 4K AppleTVs, I can watch the 1080p content on the 4K AppleTVs without the needs to transcode, because of up conversion of content done at the client level. For those movies I really want to watch a 4K file on the 1080p AppleTVs I have another copy of said 4K movie in a 1080p format(handbrake is a good tool for this).

BiteMyBits on Youtube has done quite a few videos and has provided me with a lot of good information about Plex. He's a bit quirky, but the info is there and he tries hard to make it easy to digest.
 
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4K HDR H.265 will be bottlenecked on that system, but you can do as many 1080p streams as you can probably throw at it.

Plex, weirdly enough, doesn't really seem to care about RAM at all.
 
Yeah. And for that matter, 4K hdr in H.265, even with a good gpu, still sucks for transcoding. Mine is Threadripper and 2080ti and fights.
 
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