Build a Budget Plex Media Server for less than $500

building your first plex media server can be a little intimidating if you don't know what you're looking for so today I've decided to take a budget of $500 and use that to piece together a plex media server that's capable of handling just about everything the average home user can throw at it okay so to start this off I will say that everything I'm going to show you today or just about everything is going to be linked to new egg with the exception of one up here just because I found it cheaper but everything should be with new age just because I trust new egg I've ordered so much stuff from them I don't even want to admit it and I'm pretty much a customer for life until they really screw me over so starting things off today let's go ahead and look at the case that I chose which is pretty much entirely only because it's cheap $31 $31 for cases is super cheap this is a mid-tower case the thing that I looked at when I was looking for cases was this I wanted to make sure that I had at least four base for internal three and a half inch drive bays this is just for expandability even though this build that I'm giving you is only going to have one hard drive in it and one SSD in it I wanted to make sure that I had at least four this is why I like this it's only cost thirty dollars and 99 cents now of course you can change this all you want to but if you want to go with something cheap this is definitely an option it looks good it let's see the insides of it see if I get a picture the inside here it is see it looks really easy to access the drives I mean well it even has three separate three-and-a-half inch or two and a half inch so this is definitely a good case this is right up my budget alley I've only been thirty one dollars now starting off again with the budget build I did go with an AMD processor now you can switch this to Intel if you want to obviously if you know what you're doing then you know you can go with an AMD build but I just saw a I'm sorry an Intel build so taking a look at this what I did is I got the eight core 4 gigahertz processor now this is the 8350 when I looked it up on passmark this one had about 2,000 more pass mark scores than the Intel CPU that I found that was actually slightly more expensive so just from a raw processing standpoint this AMD FX processor is going to be able to handle more thrown at it than the Intel the budget Intel that I found now this of course is completely up to you if you want to drop down you could go with the six core and go with the 6300 if you want the 6300 you would go from 169 to 89 and this is definitely a possibility or for that matter you can go from the 8 core 4 gigahertz to the 3.5 gigahertz if you wanted to save yourself a few bucks but the big difference is going to be obviously the 89 to the 169 I mean that's a huge difference in price if you don't need all the power here then you could definitely drop it down here and save yourself some money for me I'm building this one with the idea that once it's built it's not going to be rebuilt because I'm a firm believer if I'm going to upgrade my computer if when it comes to core components like this I'm going to do a full upgrade that means a new motherboard new CPU and everything so just about any CPU that I pick is going to stay in that system if you take a look at the past Mars scores the 6300 six core processor for $89 has a score of six thousand three hundred and forty seven now if you take a look at the 8350 you have a Pathmark score of eight thousand nine hundred and sixty six so with that said going directly to performance of Plex you can get at least one if not two additional streams going with the more expensive processor however if you go with the $89 processor in this build not only will you save yourself some money but you will also still be able to get at least three to four streams out of the server at the same time with ease so this is not a bad server or this is not a bad CPU whatsoever but this one is going to give you that extra two two maybe three streams if you wanted to go with it so definitely a big improvement I chose this for this build but it's definitely up to you as far as what you think you can afford as for motherboard what I did is I just went with this Asus this was mainly just looking for budget but there are a couple things that I was looking for at least one primarily thing that I was looking for if we look at the specific here it has number of memory slots for I wanted something that had four slots just in case in the future if this ever wanted to be upgraded you could and I also wanted to make sure that I had plenty of SATA ports this one has six SATA ports now they're only running at three gigabits a second but that's okay we don't need it to be running at six gigabits per second that's not going to be a bottleneck for Plex so having six SATA ports and having four slots for RAM is going to allow this to not only maintain your growth and your plex media server when you add more hard drives but it's also going to allow you to upgrade it later with more RAM for whatever reason you might need to because as you are going to see here in a second this plex media server build won't have that much RAM and that is course is $55 okay now this is the SSD now I chose this SSD primarily because it was cheap and it was one of the better performing SSDs out of the cheap bundle and what I mean by that is you have 545 megabits per second bytes per second read and 525 megabytes per second write however that doesn't really matter too much a lot of this is just having the price of it within this budget build but what I would recommend if you shop around just a little bit like I did I found this one 128 gigabyte it's the same brand SSD except it's 48 ninety-nine now I went with this because if this is only going to be a plex media server and that's it has no other purpose besides being a plex media server if you do if you were to install windows on this if you install your plex your plex data folder your transcoding sessions all of that was going off of this SSD 64 gigabytes should be plenty for what you need it for however it's still going to be a little close maybe not that close but it'll be a little close and for ten dollars more you can jump all the way up to 128 gigabytes from 64 for $10 more you can double your storage so you can get away with this one but I would recommend in the jump and doing the upgrade to the higher SSD just in case because $10 for double your storage it's kind of hard to pass that up as for the power supply well this is really just because it's a budget power supply this is 350 watts which is more than enough for what we need it for I got this because I had a few reviews to look at and looked like it was pretty decent but the thing I liked about it is that it had three SATA connections now I would like to have more SATA connections but I wanted this one to least have three SATA connections to get us started so what that means it's going to be enough to power the SSD either we're putting in it it's going to be enough to power the first hard drive that I selected to put in it plus it'll be enough to power the second hard drive that you decide that you want to put in it later down the line or right off the bat for that matter if you want to add a hard drive it does have four pin molex connections so you can easily get a molex splitter that goes from one molex connection to two SATA power cables that it would allow you to expand your server in the future and you want it need very many of those because and even if you did it's they're pretty cheap so either way you get plenty of options to power what you have here you can fill out that case with hard drives if you need it to and still have plenty of power when it comes to price this is just this is going to be one of the better choices definitely getting something that is going to give you that price per dollar performance that you're looking for in a budget build like this now under Ram so I want with g.skill because I've always wanted G scale I've always trusted g.skill and they have never treated me wrong this one is eight gigabytes and it's two by four gigabyte DIMMs now the reason why I went with that one rather than let's say 4x2 gigabyte DIMMs is kind of obvious because in the future if I wanted to upgrade I wanted to have that ability now I only win with eight gigabytes because realistically Plex is not going to need all of that memory you don't need 16 or 32 gigabytes for Plex Plex is heavily dependent on CPU power and second hand they're going to be dependent on the SSD for better transcoding speeds so the memory is not really a crucial part here if you team this up with a good solid CPU a nice fast SS only eight gigabytes of RAM is going to be perfect if you wanted to expand in the future or repurpose this PC that motherboard that I picked would allow you to do that also something I forgot I went with this motherboard for another reason because this motherboard has onboard video this will allow us to not have to buy a video card forgot to mention that before but there it is it has onboard video so you don't have to worry about a video card if you want to plug in to make sure it's programmed correctly you don't have to worry about any of that this has everything built into it so that saves money right off the bat as for hard drives now this is definitely up to each user I am a true fan of the Western Digital read drives because they're a good price and they're good capacity for said price now the HD ST drives the four terabytes are usually about 20 to 30 sometimes 40 dollars more expensive depending on the month you look at them I would probably say that those drives are going to be more reliable just based off the numbers i've seen online before but i have had nothing but good luck with these drives you could go down to cheaper drives if you wanted to and you can switch this around but for me i've always went in for terabyte drives what I would recommend is picking the drive that you plan to stick with so if you want to start off with five or six terabyte drives that's absolutely fine just make sure that your next drives that you get are going to be the same drives that way in the future if you start doing things like a raid 5 array or raid 6 or any kind of like a Linux build where you run in the ZF filesystem you have everything going to be the same drives it's going to allow that to work for you without any kind of complications so in this particular build I'm starting you off with 4 terabytes of space that's going to be one drive there's not going to be any redundancy or any kind of data protection but this is just a starter kit bill this is only going to get you started in the plex media server environment so wrapping this all up I went ahead and built this on a PC part picker and I always recommend to do this because this allows you to not only make sure that the price that you found is going to be cheap we're going to be the cheapest price but it's also going to allow you to check for any kind of compatibility issues with the build so when you go in here you can see if there's anything that's going to say if there's any compatibility issues so for example this case that I has has some weird issue with the USB front panel so the it doesn't have any USB 3.0 headers not a big deal I don't care about that everything else works everything else checks out most of them going to Newegg for the cheapest price the Western Digital Red's are going to start shooting me over to B&H photo just because they have them in stock probably but everything else though checks up here so what we have is with $500 we have a plex media server as long as you want with the CPU that I chose that is going to be hid and be able to handle just about everything the average Plex home media server user will want to throw at and what I mean by that well I mean you could have an Xbox in the living room you can have a fire TV downstairs you could have a tablet plane and maybe even somebody off-site playing a movie or TV show on their phone all at the same time without running into any bottlenecks that's what this server is going to be able to provide you at least three to four streams without any problem if you're lucky you could probably get six or more streams out of this server without ever running into a bottleneck now of course this is just a starter server so that means this only has one hard drive I always would recommend to have some sort of redundancy even though my plex media server doesn't have any redundancy but that's my own problems right now I always recommend redundancy because if you lose all your hard work and ripping and converting all of your video files to build and work on your plex media server it would be crushing to lose all of that data just because of a hard drive failure so with this server you can start off with one hard drive that I said or whatsoever one that you decide to pick but you can also add a second one and add a mirror or you could add a third fourth or a fifth or whatever you want to do and you could start building raid arrays something like a raid 5 or a reign 6 if you decided to go down that route or like I said before the Linux build that allows you to go through the Xena file system so this is definitely going to be a nice starter area for most people it's going to give you a pull up plenty powerful media server that's going to allow you to grow it's going to allow you to expand and it's in a pretty decent budget from people I know $500 could be kind of expensive to some but to have a $500 media server that's going to handle everything that you need I think that's kind of a homerun for most people if you have any questions about this build or anything whatsoever let me know in the comments I'll make sure to try to address as many as I could if you see any issues with this build please also make sure to scream at me and let me know in the comments I did some that's pretty I did some pretty good research on this but you know I am human so maybe I could have screwed up overall though if I was going to build a budget PC that was going to serve solely as a plex media server this would be right up my alley thank you for watching like and subscribe below and have a good day you

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 146,043

Rating: 4.7442513 out of 5

Keywords: Media Server (Software Genre), Plex (Software), Server (Film Character), budget, 500, dollars

Id: DSMHrVAuNps

Length: 15min 1sec (901 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 01 2015