Plex machine configuration.

[Saladface35421]

Budget (including currency): $1000 (100,000 INR due to taxes)

Country: India

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex 4k Transcoding not more than 1 stream at a time and mostly watching movies in house.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): Currently I have 1 SSD (120GB for boot) and 7 HDDs  (25-30TB of storage almost all in use) and I intend to keep all of those, I am using them as mass storage and would use them as Plex libraries in future as well. My computer is connected to my primary Movie watching display (Samsung 4K LED 65") I want something that is powerful enough to to transcode movies to so that when my home theater (same house but different floor) is complete I can shift the PC there but still be able to enjoy movies in full quality on my TV. Any suggestions are appreciated, LMK if it is possible to stream movies from PC to Android TV without transcoding (in 4K). Might never use the machine for gaming so that is not a focus point.

 

[Pixel5]

as long as your network is fast enough you can still stream to the TV in full quality without transcoding but just to be on the safe side you should just go with an Intel CPU so you have easy access to hardware transcoding.

 

Personally i just put together a NAS for plex with the i3-10100 and its running very well and is using only little power.

Unfortunately there is not a single motherboard for the LGA1200 socket in m-atx form factor that has 7 SATA ports so if space is an issue you may need to install an HBA card for extra SATA ports.

If hardware transcoding is not important for you you could also go for a build using a Ryzen CPU there are some motherboards that come with 8 SATA ports for this platform but its not cheaper overall because motherboards with 8 SATA ports cost almost the same as any cheap motherboard plus an HBA card.