Plex server

[Itspizzaface]

Budget (including currency): 2000

Country: uk 

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Plex 

Other details 

I’m looking at building a Plex server and was wondering about what type

of output I’d be looking at and if someone had similar to this or any general advice towards building it 

 

I'm upgrading from a synology ds223j which I'm aware “struggles”

 

so ideally I would like to have 6-8 4k videos being able to be played at once furthermore would like to have the ability to upgrade and don’t want to cause bottlenecks with any components either 

 

I was looking at rack mounting getting a network switch and a router and hexos separate to the budget 

 

The current component list I’m looking at it 

 

CPU: Intel Core i5-12500 3 GHz 6-Core Processor

 

CPU COOLER:

be quiet! Dark Rock pro 5 CPU Cooler

MOTHERBOARD:

MSI MPG Z690 EDGE WIFI DDR4 ATX LGA1700 Motherboard

 

RAM:

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory

GRAPHICS CARD :

MSI GeForce RTX 3060 Ventus 2X 12G GeForce RTX 3060 12GB 12 GB Video Card

 

CASE:

Phanteks Enthoo Pro 2 Server Edition ATX Full Tower Case
 

or a 4u rack mounted one haven’t completely made my mind up yet 

[ChrisLoudon]

10 minutes ago, Itspizzaface said:

so ideally I would like to have 6-8 4k videos being able to be played at once furthermore would like to have the ability to upgrade and don’t want to cause bottlenecks with any components either 

Hi buddy,

 

Look at the following link for a pretty big list of Nvidia GPUs and their PLEX transcoding capabilities.

 

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

 

I would also factor in how many concurrent streams will be 'direct streams' to local devices that can play the audio and video streams natively and streams that will require transcoding to 'off-site' devices or local devices that lack the necessary codecs.

 

From the looks of things, the 3060 should be more than enough.

 

Have you also factored in a Plex Pass subscription? Unfortunately, their hardware transcoding feature is a premium facility.

[Pan_TorchaYT]

I'm not really sure whats good for plex but I think this pc is good:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/nYJRyW

[Itspizzaface]

38 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

Hi buddy,

 

Look at the following link for a pretty big list of Nvidia GPUs and their PLEX transcoding capabilities.

 

https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding

 

I would also factor in how many concurrent streams will be 'direct streams' to local devices that can play the audio and video streams natively and streams that will require transcoding to 'off-site' devices or local devices that lack the necessary codecs.

 

From the looks of things, the 3060 should be more than enough.

 

Have you also factored in a Plex Pass subscription? Unfortunately, their hardware transcoding feature is a premium facility.

I do currently have the lifetime pass and also 3 of the devices tvs transcode a lot plus 2 iPads but all 5 aren’t used at once but I would like to have something that if it needed it could do more but I’d probably only ever need 4 at once

 

The nas I have now doesn’t do hardware transcode and even 1080p it’s struggles with 

 

but thank you just wanted a few extra opinions 

Edited April 28 by Itspizzaface
Didn’t finsh what I was putting down

[Itspizzaface]

21 minutes ago, Pan_TorchaYT said:

I'm not really sure whats good for plex but I think this pc is good:
https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/nYJRyW

Thank you looking at that might be fairly decent do you have this one or just know from the specs that it’s quite good ? 

[ChrisLoudon]

12 minutes ago, Itspizzaface said:

but thank you just wanted a few extra opinions 

No worries.

 

As a sidenote, if you are offloading all the heavy lifting to a GPU, you don't need much in terms of CPU and mobo to run the Plex server backend!

 

If you look at my sig, you'll see mine is running quite nicely on a 13 year old Intel 3770k with a 1660 Ventus and happily serves my household which will frequently want 2 or 3 concurrent local streams and I have friends and family that access it remotely with no issues reported.

 

The only reason I would need to upgrade the guts of my NAS would be if I needed more than PLEX, Pi-Hole and some downloaders.

[Itspizzaface]

7 minutes ago, ChrisLoudon said:

No worries.

 

As a sidenote, if you are offloading all the heavy lifting to a GPU, you don't need much in terms of CPU and mobo to run the Plex server backend!

 

If you look at my sig, you'll see mine is running quite nicely on a 13 year old Intel 3770k with a 1660 Ventus and happily serves my household which will frequently want 2 or 3 concurrent local streams and I have friends and family that access it remotely with no issues reported.

 

The only reason I would need to upgrade the guts of my NAS would be if I needed more than PLEX, Pi-Hole and some downloaders.

Okay thank you I’ll look in to older cpus 

[Millios]

1 hour ago, Itspizzaface said:

Thank you looking at that might be fairly decent do you have this one or just know from the specs that it’s quite good ? 

Its a good PC in general but not necesserally a good plex or jellyfin server

 

I personally would look at a NAS like smt form synology and turn that into a plex server so say about 300-400 for a 4 to maybe 6 bay NAS and the rest can go for storage on HDDs

 

Or if you feel like you need faster storage a nuc maybe? Not 100% about that but a NAS will do you better or old intel and nvidia to keep costs down while maximizing the space you can buy

[HanZie82]

39 minutes ago, Millios said:

I personally would look at a NAS like smt form synology

Yeah i dont know if thats still gonna be a thing.
If they do this for a part of their line-up.
I'd not put it past them to do it for all their (new) models.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

 

 

Also do you pay for power? 
With a machine thats on 24/7/365 that will matter a lot, i have a 300 Watt server and thats about 140 eurobucks per month for me!!! (0,63384 Eu per kWh)

[Millios]

13 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Yeah i dont know if thats still gonna be a thing.
If they do this for a part of their line-up.
I'd not put it past them to do it for all their (new) models.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

Yeahh it really sucks that they are gonna go ahead with this crappy desicion tho they still have some good older models and there are other brands like Ugreen and Qnap

 

14 minutes ago, HanZie82 said:

Also do you pay for power? 
With a machine thats on 24/7/365 that will matter a lot, i have a 300 Watt server and thats about 140 eurobucks per month for me!!! (0,63384 Eu per kWh)

From what I've seen the NAS doesnt need to be on 24/7

If I am making a mistake on that correct me pls but from I what I've seen you can either shut it off or put it in a stand by mode that draws a negligible amount of power

[HanZie82]

35 minutes ago, Millios said:

From what I've seen the NAS doesnt need to be on 24/7

Very true, also why i specified it being a server. 

If your NAS used up 300 Watts there is something wrong.  (Most pre-built NAS power suplies dont even go that high).

(My server also runs my home assistant, some web-servers, 24/7 live stream etc. So yeah not really just a NAS anymore.  )

[Itspizzaface]

1 hour ago, HanZie82 said:

Yeah i dont know if thats still gonna be a thing.
If they do this for a part of their line-up.
I'd not put it past them to do it for all their (new) models.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/nas/synology-requires-self-branded-drives-for-some-consumer-nas-systems-drops-full-functionality-and-support-for-third-party-hdds

 

 

Also do you pay for power? 
With a machine thats on 24/7/365 that will matter a lot, i have a 300 Watt server and thats about 140 eurobucks per month for me!!! (0,63384 Eu per kWh)

Yeah I pay for power and this was a concern for me I’ll give that website a look

thank you 

[Itspizzaface]

2 hours ago, Millios said:

Its a good PC in general but not necesserally a good plex or jellyfin server

 

I personally would look at a NAS like smt form synology and turn that into a plex server so say about 300-400 for a 4 to maybe 6 bay NAS and the rest can go for storage on HDDs

 

Or if you feel like you need faster storage a nuc maybe? Not 100% about that but a NAS will do you better or old intel and nvidia to keep costs down while maximizing the space you can buy

To be honest I was looking at prebuilts and the QNAP tvs-h674 i5 was probably one of the best I’ve seen I think it does close to 12 4k videos at once but not sure if it was transcoded or not but still pretty decent I think it was around £2000 mark 

[Millios]

8 minutes ago, Itspizzaface said:

To be honest I was looking at prebuilts and the QNAP tvs-h674 i5 was probably one of the best I’ve seen I think it does close to 12 4k videos at once but not sure if it was transcoded or not but still pretty decent I think it was around £2000 mark 

Any i5 6th gen or 7th gen and above/newer will transcode and encode 4K decently well so you dont NEED a newer GPU

Or you can get an older work PC from an office or smt like that and put in a few hard drives and have a ready plex server (after you format it with the proper OS)

Hell you can make a "NAS" out of a Raspberry Pi and a few SSDs (actually an expiriment I wanna do someday)

 

Also I would like at a)more tutorials obviously and b) jellyfin cause unless you wanna cough up a bit on plex it seems like they are gonna limit you HARD

[Itspizzaface]

11 minutes ago, Millios said:

Any i5 6th gen or 7th gen and above/newer will transcode and encode 4K decently well so you dont NEED a newer GPU

Or you can get an older work PC from an office or smt like that and put in a few hard drives and have a ready plex server (after you format it with the proper OS)

Hell you can make a "NAS" out of a Raspberry Pi and a few SSDs (actually an expiriment I wanna do someday)

 

Also I would like at a)more tutorials obviously and b) jellyfin cause unless you wanna cough up a bit on plex it seems like they are gonna limit you HARD

Thank for for these and yeah already have the Plex pass but never a bad idea to see have jellyfin works and all that 

[Millios]

1 minute ago, Itspizzaface said:

Thank for for these and yeah already have the Plex pass but never a bad idea to see have jellyfin works and all that 

Then plex it is at least for you to begin with cause its better to keep it simple at the start

[Pan_TorchaYT]

18 hours ago, Itspizzaface said:

Thank you looking at that might be fairly decent do you have this one or just know from the specs that it’s quite good ? 

Nope, I just think the specs are pretty decent for any task.