Before asking pointed questions about the above quote. Thank you. I always appreciate it when someone takes the time to educate me on one of the innumerable topics I know little or nothing about.
The questions: What is the fastest, highest thread count CPU you have seen attempt that workload? Do you have a good resource that is fairly fast to search for info on the topic? Because wading through A/V forums and such, can be ponderous.
EDIT: Top hit on my first search -
https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/g...uad-channel-dedicated-transcoding-monster/133
Seems like an old 16 thread Xeon made a "monster" Plex transcoder a couple of years ago. "This is an 8 Core CPU with Hyperthreading, which gives it 16 threads total. Plex Transcoder has true multi-threaded support and will take advantage of all 16 threads. So while this CPU might not be clocked as fast as what most of you are used to, the sheer amount of cores/threads will more than make up for it."
Unless something has changed, seems like a 5700G is up to the task. The 11600K would be capable even without the iGPU, according to that guide.
Oh, it’s not that it can’t do it, especially for one session at a time. You’ve got to realize that saying it will be a “Plex server” means the same thing as if you said “you can play BF2042 on it”. Well yeah, except some people only play at 4K ultimate crazy town settings and a minimum 60 fps.
If your “into” the Plex scene the first question is “can it hardware transcode” followed by “how many streams” and that’s how you add inches to your Plex peen. There is still the issue of start up and the initial buffer, and hardware blocks dedicated to the purpose win.
I know folks who host Plex servers with many tens of TB of storage and many connected remote clients (maybe also in the tens) and for those applications you’ve got to have a Quadro. It (what ever p series that everyone agreed was the best in terms of power consumption and abilities, it had a weird 5GB frame buffer iirc) used to pop up in Slickdeals just for that reason, but then you already know what happened to GPUs, even middling P series Quadros
I’ve had poor performance experiences with older CPUs and even though my personal server is an 8600K with a hefty all core clock (which should give it some non trivial abilities) I’ve got the 1650 Super in there, and even if I didn’t I’d still enable it via the QuickSync hardware on the CPU, even though I think that restricts my codex options. I wasn’t going to pay for Plex Premium and then not be able to check the box!
The Intel 11600K CPU has vastly superior encode and decode abilities compared to the 5700G and might even make the Quadros obsolete in that vein, even if both of them can handle it via brute force.
OP didn’t say he was hosting a Plex server for all his friends and relatives for all the pirates netflix content he torrents, but maybe that’s a normal workload for him 😂
I don’t have a link to a benchmark of Plex transcoding, but that build you linked to doesn’t either. Without dedicated hardware I had older quad core CPUs tap out midstream when they couldn’t squash a UHD file into something my playback device (usually xbox, which iirc always requires transcoding) could handle.
Moving to Roku with better direct play and Android on the Sony TV which has some of the best native playback abilities of them all also mitigated all this.
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