Xeon vs i7

[DaButterGamer]

Hi All,

 

As stated in a previous post of mine, I am currently building my first home sever.

 

I'm planning to to use my home server;

- as a NAS

- to run virtual machines (Maybe even a Minecraft server on a VM)

- to run a plex server

 

On my previous post when asking what CPU would be recommended to us, I was told to look at Xeon E CPUs.

 

Having spent hours researching into Xeon E's and looking what's available, I'm contemplating getting an Intel® Xeon® E-2176G.

 

The price of which would cost me circa £400.

 

I was just wondering what the difference was between a Xeon E-2176G and a i7 9700k and if I would benefit opting to use one over another ?

 

Any advice would be welcomed.

 

Many thanks,

 

DaButterGamer

 

[Jae Tee]

Any particular reson why your not going AMD? just curios.

[DaButterGamer]

1 minute ago, Jae Tee said:

Any particular reson why your not going AMD? just curios.

I maybe wrong on this but after reading some forums, plex only supports transcoding on Intel CPUs, hence why im opting for intel.

 

 

[Jae Tee]

1 minute ago, DaButterGamer said:

I maybe wrong on this but after reading some forums, plex only supports transcoding on Intel CPUs, hence why im opting for intel.

 

 

Hmmm.. didn't know that, and honestly I hope your wrong. Hope someone else can confirm.

[Jurrunio]

Bad choice. It's pretty much just an 8700k with multiplier locked but needs a more expensive C chipset board. Just take the 9700k among these two

 

as for transcoding, you could add in an Nvidia GPU for that so you could get a CPU with stronger performance.

[Boomwebsearch]

20 minutes ago, DaButterGamer said:

Hi All,

 

As stated in a previous post of mine, I am currently building my first home sever.

 

I'm planning to to use my home server;

- as a NAS

- to run virtual machines (Maybe even a Minecraft server on a VM)

- to run a plex server

 

On my previous post when asking what CPU would be recommended to us, I was told to look at Xeon E CPUs.

 

Having spent hours researching into Xeon E's and looking what's available, I'm contemplating getting an Intel® Xeon® E-2176G.

 

The price of which would cost me circa £400.

 

I was just wondering what the difference was between a Xeon E-2176G and a i7 9700k and if I would benefit opting to use one over another ?

 

Any advice would be welcomed.

 

Many thanks,

 

DaButterGamer

 

What is your budget for the CPU and what country are you shopping from?

 

I would recommend having a graphics card for GPU acceleration/transcoding, even something like an old GTX 660.

[DaButterGamer]

4 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

Bad choice. It's pretty much just an 8700k with multiplier locked but needs a more expensive C chipset board. Just take the 9700k among these two

 

as for transcoding, you could add in an Nvidia GPU for that so you could get a CPU with stronger performance.

Okay, thanks for the advice. Any recommendation on GPU ?

[DaButterGamer]

6 minutes ago, Boomwebsearch said:

 

What is your budget for the CPU and what country are you shopping from?

 

I would recommend having a graphics card for GPU acceleration/transcoding, even something like an old GTX 660.

Don't really have a budget ... maybe £600 on a cpu.

 

In the UK, used market is full of overpriced gpus at the moment so it might have to be a modern gpu

[Slayer3032]

I would wait for 10th gen Intel stuff to start rolling out in higher capacity and look at a 10700k, I think one of the larger improvements Skylake++++ and it's lesser pluses is in their iGPU which is why you're buying them. Skip the non-hyperthreaded 9th gen trash, especially when it's for a home server.

 

Even the 10600k and pretty much the entire 10th gen line up should be pretty appealing over what you're looking at.

 

I'm not entirely convinced though that you need nearly as much cpu power as you think, my stock X5660 which doesn't even have AVX can handle up to a few HEVC 4K transcodes adequately with no gpu acceleration. You'd likely be fine with a standard 10600 or maybe even a quad core even. Unless you're planning on constant concurrent users even with a couple minecraft servers I doubt you'd even encounter a hiccup.

 

I'd save money for storage, maybe a higher quality psu since those are insanely expensive at least in the US right now.

 

I'm also pretty sure Geforce GPUs are limited to one decode and one encode session, you have to buy a Quadro if you want to run simultaneous hardware transcodes if I recall.

[Windows7ge]

Benefit depends on the use case. The Xeons are more fit for server applications where you need ECC RAM, support for higher density modules, many but not all desktop CPUs support VT-d which is for hardware pass-through for virtualization, the Xeons often come with certificates and certifications as being "the way to go" for most server applications. They're typically optimized for running parallel workloads such as web hosting, business level file shares, virtualization, or otherwise serving many simultaneous clients.

 

For a DIY at home server though unless you need more RAM than the 9700K can handle for your VMs. A brand new Xeon isn't worth the investment. Better off looking into the used market. You can find great deals there.

[Jurrunio]

19 minutes ago, DaButterGamer said:

Okay, thanks for the advice. Any recommendation on GPU ?

Depends on budget, if you want the full NVDEC support then the cheapest (since you wont be gaming on it directly) is the GTX 1650. If you're more mainstream (so no need for standards still rarely used today, a GTX 1050 (especially a used one) is all you need. Of course you could go with higher end models, just make sure it's a GTX card and 10, 16 or 20 series.

[DaButterGamer]

5 minutes ago, Slayer3032 said:

I would wait for 10th gen Intel stuff to start rolling out in higher capacity and look at a 10700k, I think one of the larger improvements Skylake++++ and it's lesser pluses is in their iGPU which is why you're buying them. Skip the non-hyperthreaded 9th gen trash, especially when it's for a home server.

 

Even the 10600k and pretty much the entire 10th gen line up should be pretty appealing over what you're looking at.

 

I'm not entirely convinced though that you need nearly as much cpu power as you think, my stock X5660 which doesn't even have AVX can handle up to a few HEVC 4K transcodes adequately with no gpu acceleration. You'd likely be fine with a standard 10600 or maybe even a quad core even. Unless you're planning on constant concurrent users even with a couple minecraft servers I doubt you'd even encounter a hiccup.

 

I'd save money for storage, maybe a higher quality psu since those are insanely expensive at least in the US right now.

 

I'm also pretty sure Geforce GPUs are limited to one decode and one encode session, you have to buy a Quadro if you want to run simultaneous hardware transcodes if I recall.

Thanks for your advice.

 

One of the reasons I wanted to go fairly high end with the CPU is so that I could run multiple VMs concurrently.

 

For NAS Storage, I've ordered 4 x 4TB WD red's for bulk storage (which one of the drives will be used for redundancy) and have a 500gb NVME drive for caching. I'm also planning on using 2x 1TB SSD and partioning the raid for the VM's. I've got an 850w 80+ Plat PSU I had spare from a previous build which I know is a bit overkill but I didn't wanted to buy another PSU if I had one spare.

[Boomwebsearch]

45 minutes ago, DaButterGamer said:

One of the reasons I wanted to go fairly high end with the CPU is so that I could run multiple VMs concurrently.

1 hour ago, DaButterGamer said:

Don't really have a budget ... maybe £600 on a cpu.

 

In the UK, used market is full of overpriced gpus at the moment so it might have to be a modern gpu

 

I would recommend a Ryzen 9 3950X at the moment, it is a high-end CPU with 16 cores and 32 threads, going for a server/workstation grade CPU such as a Xeon is not going to be worth the additional expense for a home server unless you need some of the other features including ECC RAM. I would say to get a Radeon graphics card for better price to performance, although since you need the hardware transcoding with Plex, it's not an option since Plex does not have support for it.

 

1 hour ago, Slayer3032 said:

I'm also pretty sure Geforce GPUs are limited to one decode and one encode session, you have to buy a Quadro if you want to run simultaneous hardware transcodes if I recall.

 

Nvidia limits the hardware transcoding on consumer-grade graphics cards to two, you need at least a Quadro P2000 to remove this limit (they cost $400 to $450).

 

If you can, wait for 10th gen Intel desktop chips to be released before you get your CPU (something like the I7 10700K) for significantly better performance with graphics workloads especially, then you may not need to have a dedicated graphics card.

[AbsoluteFool]

10 hours ago, DaButterGamer said:

I maybe wrong on this but after reading some forums, plex only supports transcoding on Intel CPUs, hence why im opting for intel.

 

 

I got no idea where you read this, but this is completely wrong. Plex uses FFmpeg for transcoding, and FFmpeg have support for ALL CPUs. I literally know of no CPU FFMpeg will not work on, or any transcoding for that matter.

[Donut417]

On 5/19/2020 at 6:11 PM, Jae Tee said:

Hmmm.. didn't know that, and honestly I hope your wrong. Hope someone else can confirm.

Only Nvidia GPUs or Intel iGPUs can do hardware transcoding. While you can transcode with an AMD CPU it’s just software transcoding , basically using raw CPU horsepower to get the job done. 
 

Should also mention you have to buy the Plex pass to unlock hardware transcoding. 

[yourwhiteshadow]

You could get away with a Sandy Bridge or Haswell Xeon (E3 or similar) depending on how many transcodes you need and whether they are 1080p or 4k. Its true that if you have an Intel CPU w/ integrated graphics you could do hardware transcoding, but you need a plex pass. You could also just skip the hardware transcoding and go with a Emby or Jellyfin (Jellyfin is FOSS).

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, yourwhiteshadow said:

Sandy Bridge

I read you need Haswell or above. Because I have an Ivy Bridge chip and was told that its iGPU wont do anything for me. 

[yourwhiteshadow]

Just now, Donut417 said:

I read you need Haswell or above. Because I have an Ivy Bridge chip and was told that its iGPU wont do anything for me. 

I'm not 100% sure, just certain that it requires quicksync which Sandy Bridge does have, but there have been numerous iterations of QSV. The most recent apparently does 265 and Hi10p, but all of them should do x264. 

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, yourwhiteshadow said:

I'm not 100% sure, just certain that it requires quicksync which Sandy Bridge does have, but there have been numerous iterations of QSV. The most recent apparently does 265 and Hi10p, but all of them should do x264. 

Well according to the guys on the Plex fourm, you need a 4th gen or above. 

[yourwhiteshadow]

3 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

Well according to the guys on the Plex fourm, you need a 4th gen or above. 

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

 

take a look at "1. Check the system requirements"

 

you specifically need a CPU that has QuickSync.

 

FYI. Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding:

 

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.html

[Donut417]

19 minutes ago, yourwhiteshadow said:

https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/

 

take a look at "1. Check the system requirements"

 

you specifically need a CPU that has QuickSync.

 

FYI. Jellyfin supports hardware transcoding:

 

https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.html

5th-gen Broadwell or newer for the best experience; Thats Plex's recommendation. So....... Plus and old ass Sandy Bridge CPU wont work for the OP. He wants to do 9 streams with possiblity of 6 transcodes at a time. 

 

That being said, I might flip on hardware transcoding on my Plex box and see what happens. Though I was specifically told on the Plex forum that Intel didnt get their shit together until the 4th gen CPU. Id have to say Id trust those guys on the fourm first before trusting Plex's min system requirments statements. As I was told that Transocding on the iGPU became worlds better on 4th gen and continues to become better. 

[yourwhiteshadow]

4 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

5th-gen Broadwell or newer for the best experience; Thats Plex's recommendation. So....... Plus and old ass Sandy Bridge CPU wont work for the OP. He wants to do 9 streams with possiblity of 6 transcodes at a time. 

 

That being said, I might flip on hardware transcoding on my Plex box and see what happens. Though I was specifically told on the Plex forum that Intel didnt get their shit together until the 4th gen CPU. Id have to say Id trust those guys on the fourm first before trusting Plex's min system requirments statements. As I was told that Transocding on the iGPU became worlds better on 4th gen and continues to become better. 

Yeah, you're absolutely right that its gotten better with every generation, look at this table:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video#Hardware_decoding_and_encoding

 

I personally wouldn't use QSV though, I hated the quality coming from my Kaby lake processor.

[m9x3mos]

Just my two cents as I do similar work on mine. 

Granted I have thread ripper but I would go either 3900x or 3950x

I have one drive for host windows os that runs plex and hyper v

Then one vm with 6 hard drives passed to it for storage. 

That runs iscsi host for further storage for vms and media storage for plex. 

Runs like a beast and can run 10 vms at the same time with no issue. 

[m9x3mos]

Forgot to add it has a 1060 6gb in it for converting video. I don't do more than 2 streams though. 

[Jarsky]

Just to clarify some info here....

 

You can do AMD hardware encoding, however only on WIndows currently as it leverages the Windows dxva2 API. 

There is no support for AMD on Linux until there is support from Plex for the VA API, which the Plex team are working on...

 

Both of those CPU's support Intel 600 Series graphics with QuickSync, so both support HEVC/VP9/VP10/etc...using QSV.

Essentially they can do H265 & 4K (incl 4K HDR) transcoding. 

Basically up until 4th Gen Intel they only support AVC/VP8.

5th - 6th Gen Intel support HEVC/VP8

7th Gen  and up support HEVC 10-bit (HDR) / VP9 / VP9 10-bit (VP10) 

 

I'd consider what VM's you're wanting to run as this will determine how many cores you really need. 

Theres no need at all for a 3900x/3950x if its just Minecraft, Plex and a few small VM's....