A budget Plex server for $200!? How to right-size your plex server.

today I'm going to walk you through picking the right click server to meet your needs while also getting you the most bang for your buck I will go over three different price ranges and plex server sizes small medium and large I'll tell you what kind of performance you can expect from each of them the power costs you should expect running them and what limitations or caveats I found while making this video when designing and building a plex server you'll need to take a few things into consideration let's start with the logistical issues that you should think about first the physical size noise and heat generated by a standard enterprise-grade server to be a problem for most people running a Plex server in their house if you are looking for recommendations on an enterprise-grade server that will be addressed in a later video for now this video will cover desktop grade hardware that's both practical to run in your home and powerful enough to have the performance you'll want and it won't hurt your wallet too much next you should determine the total number of transcodes you might require if you're running this inside your home and will only have a few devices connecting at any given time and those devices can direct play most of your media you should stick to the small server size recommendations otherwise figure out the number of devices that might be transcoding at any given time and save that number for later well you can run a plex media server on practically any physical device from raspberry PI's to naz's you'll probably grow out of some of the smaller and cheaper options like a raspberry pi fairly quickly I would recommend sizing your first server appropriately to avoid unnecessary costs down the road unless you know for certain that all of your devices can direct play all of your media I would stay away from trying to run a plex server on a Raspberry Pi we will be leveraging Plexus Hardware transcoding capabilities with quick sync heavily in this video when selecting a CPU you should typically avoid anything pre Haswell generation as intel started focusing on quality over speed with quick sync and Haswell CPU architectures and later you will also generally find slightly better integrated graphics processors and Zeon's that have an AI GPU for the small plex server build our recommendation the T 1700 precision from Dell which can be found on eBay for around two to three hundred dollars shipped you can find 80 1700 with an e3 1265 lv3 Xeon for around $230 shipped with Hardware transcoding enabled this configuration will get you around six to seven h.265 transcodes and fifteen to twenty h.264 transcodes if you can find a T 1700 with a 12 26 v3 or a 1245 v3z on those are both very good cpu options but be aware not all III v3z on Intel chips have quick sync support and you'll want one that does if you're wondering which Intel CPUs have quick sync support a link can be found in the description below this video the idle power consumption for these computers is only 25 to 35 watts so at idle it will only cost you 25 to 30 dollars per year to run this as your plex server compare that to the typical dual Westmere server that I see most people running which idles around 250 to 300 watts that's a savings of $260 per year in power alone this doesn't even take into account the difficult job of software transcoding streams on a dual Westmere Xeon server and how that will further increase your power costs I've seen my dual Xeon Westmere server hit 535 watts at full load this t 1700 Dell Precision server will pay for itself in power in the first year of operation even if you just sat at idle with it for a medium sized plex server our recommendation is the Dell Precision 36 20 or T 30 power edge both of these can be found on eBay with an e3 1225 v5 CPU for about 350 to 400 dollars shipped don't let them pass marks core fool you the e3 1225 v5 CPU will outperform its Z on v3 counterpart and this is due to an upgraded AI GPU and something that Pathmark doesn't actually test for this combination should net you around 10 plus h.265 transcodes and easily 25 h.264 Transco or more all while consuming 35 to 40 watts at idle depending on your configuration the final bill that we'll go over today is a custom one from my testing it appears you can get some great performance out in the new coffee lake or cabie Lake Intel CPUs due to their new UHD 630i GPU here is a list of parts and the Associated cost for each of them this bill costs roughly five hundred sixty dollars depending on the parts you use and will net you fourteen to fifteen h.265 transcodes and twenty five-plus h.264 transcodes all while using an extremely small amount of electricity at full load you're looking at around 125 watts and at idle this Plex server will only consume 31 watts of electricity I chose this I 580 600 K for its powerful UHD 630 integrated GPU and it's overclocking capabilities I have tested this machine with just quick sync and with a p2000 GPU with quick sync I was able to hit 15 h.265 transcodes in 25 h.264 transcodes fairly easily with room to go after installing the Quadro p2000 i ended up taking it to 100% utilization at 28 h.265 transcodes all while only using 50% of the CPU I would guess you could add a second p2000 to this system and get over 50 h.265 transcodes should you actually want it you really don't need an i7 here unless you really need the extra couple of transcodes it would net you and you don't see yourself getting a p2000 down the road personally I don't think it's worth it as this build and its stock configuration is fairly powerful with quick sync and hardware transcoding enabled if you want to splurge on an a IO liquid cooler you'll be able to get this CPU to four point eight or five gigahertz where it would actually outperform the i7 8700 K the one thing all of these builds have in common is they all have an upgrade path so long as you purchase a full sized ATX case or the case you purchase is capable of adding a full height PCIe card you can add a Quadro p2000 any of Computers and get more trans codes than you'll ever need this won't require any additional power or upgrading your power supply as I've run the p2000 in computers with 200 watt power supplies 300 watt power supplies and I've had no issues whatsoever with any of these builds you'll see well over 20 plus h.265 trans codes by adding a p2000 that said running any of these systems in the stock configuration still gets you quite a few trans codes without any problems whatsoever all while not adding much to your electricity bill each month not to mention all of these builds run with no noticeable noise and they won't turn your house into a sauna in the summer now let's talk about some issues with quick sync that I found while I was making this video the first is that as of September 2018 it doesn't appear Plex supports running both quick sync and NVIDIA z' NV e NC Hardware transcoding simultaneously what this means is you can install a video card in a PCI Express port and then enable Hardware transcoding in Plex and it'll use the video card only it won't use the CPU to do any Hardware transcoding even if the CPU has quick sync enabled and it could do it this is very disappointing as you can enable onboard graphics on most motherboards while using a P mm and a PCI Express port but Plex simply won't make use of both simultaneously that said from my testing you can run multiple GPUs and PCI Express ports and Plex will use them both I did this with a P 2000 and a gtx 980ti and got an extra two transcodes and windows what this also meant was that when I ran in rx 580 AMD GPU and it maxed out at 7 transcodes the CPU was barely being utilized but I couldn't load any more trans codes because the GPU was fully utilized when I tested the RX 580 I was incredibly disappointed with it I could only ever get 7h 265 transcodes to go before it would hit a wall it didn't matter what host I put the card and they all got about seven h.265 transcodes before they started buffering even my shiny new I 580 600 K so what that means is if you put in rx 580 or an underpowered GPU in a server with a really powerful CPU like the i-580 600k you'll end up bottlenecking the system because the GPU is too slow another thing I found was sometimes Plex would do software transcoding instead of Hardware transcoding with quick sync even though Hardware transcoding was enabled it was fairly consistent and more noticeable on older generation Intel CPUs I'm not sure why it does this but the only way to force Hardware transcoding is to manually stop the playback cross your fingers and start it again this happened in both Ubuntu and Windows 10 Pro this is very disappointing and I hope Plex fixes this down the road please note I have not seen the same behavior while using the p2000 or any GPU for that matter for whatever reason GPU Hardware transcoding works flawlessly one last thing to note and probably the most important there seemed to be an issue while Hardware transcoding with quick sync mostly on older generation processors where the Plex server process would hang the process would be running the transcoder processes would also be running but nothing would work and all sessions would have finnaly buffer with a spinning circle I mostly experienced this issue on older pre Haswell Intel CPUs but I suspect it might plug all quick sync enabled Plex servers maybe just to a lesser degree for newer CPUs I posted a link below in the description to a plex forum post that I wrote and if any of you have experienced this please comment on my post to help make the devs at Plex aware of this bug so they can fix it right now I see this as a huge setback for anybody that wants to enable Hardware transcoding on older Intel Quick Sync capable chips so which of these builds is right for you well here is the too long didn't watch summarization of this video the medium build with an III 12:25 v5z on would actually be my personal choice especially if you wanted to add the p2000 to it down the road the only reason I went with an i-5 86 NRK was because I wanted to be able to turn it into a gaming computer down the road while I could do that with the e3 the i-5 will ultimately do much better in video games I also had unique space requirements I ended up building a custom machine so that I could find a case that was the right form factor to fit in a small server cabinet that I built at home to reduce sound from my servers that said I think the e3 v3 or III v5z on is the right choice for both power consumption and performance if you want to put together your own server like me and you like the built in m2 capabilities of the z3 70 motherboards coupled with the ability to pick out your own case fans cooler then you should go with the i-5 large build if you want something cheap and decently fast but you don't have demanding simultaneous transcoding requirements the small build will likely work great for most if not all of you I think the small build is perfect for most households who also share with a few others the best part is that it can be had for between two to three hundred dollars on eBay I don't think you'll regret any of the builds I put together today but please leave comments and let me know what you think if you really want to lab things up and run VMs on your plex server I'll be making a follow-up video with enterprise-grade one you to you and for you servers in a future video please let me know of any other topics you'd like me to cover in the comments below and I'll try to get to them in future videos thanks for watching please remember to Like and subscribe you can find us on our website at sloth tech tv.com where I will post a complete write-up of this video today with much more technical details oh and one more thing I'm going to be doing a brief video in the coming days where we will announce our 8 terabyte Western Digital giveaway instructions please subscribe so you don't miss that

Channel: Sloth Tech TV

Views: 69,800

Rating: 4.8273973 out of 5

Keywords: how does quicksync perform in plex, cheap plex server, plex server, plex, plex server on a budget, hardware transcoding with quicksync, building a plex server on a budget, budget plex server, plex transcoding 4k, p2000 plex transcoding, p2000 plex 4k, budget plex, cheapest plex media server, intel quick sync video, plex budget build, budget plex build, plex cheap, dell poweredge t30, bytemybits, byte my bits, byte my bits plex

Id: jNv44KkMvzU

Length: 12min 39sec (759 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 01 2018