Intel 13th Gen + Unraid + Plex = OMG4K!

okay so I have learned a couple things in using newer technology aka the latest and greatest from Intel to build an unread server to run Plex I know unread and Plex that's oddly specific but the point is remember that thing about the 4K transcoding stuff that I said that's a little stupid and that you shouldn't do it about that I'm not quite there yet I don't want to actually say transcoding 4K is a good idea it kind of hits me in the pit of the stomach when I say that I legitimately still think that transcoding 4K is a bad idea just overall there's a lot of bottlenecks that you could run into issues that you could have just based off of using a larger file and I know a lot of people say you shouldn't be transcoding at all but that's the whole point of a Plex Media Server that's the whole point of the hardware that we mess with that way we can transcode it's not that we want to but we can but even though I don't actually want to say 4K is a good idea I'm at that point now where I can say 4K is not a terrible idea it's really thin line [Music] this is a test bench with an Intel 13900k it has 128 gigabytes of ddr5 RAM running at 5200 megahertz that's sitting on an Asus Pro art Creator motherboard that's actually running a z690 chipset ultimately this thing will be water cooled but for right now I just bought an air cooler mainly because I didn't want to set up a water cooling thing but I still set up an XMP profile pushing this thing to 5.8 gigahertz it has eight performance cores with hyper threading and 16 efficiency cores and it has the embedded UHD 770 Graphics from Intel this is where I get a little moist in my eyes hopefully that didn't get me demonetized it got me all hot and bothered because unraid officially supports the UHD 770 now and now that I can set up plaques with unread it gives me an upgrade path to upgrading my main server which this is kind of a mock-up kinda right now it's a testing ground and then it will be my main workstation computer but going back to what I learned with using these new relevant Parts is that well whenever I do build out my main server I'm probably going to be just fine with the 12th gen Intel really in my current server I don't have any high pcie demand so a z790 is not necessary 690 it is I have 128 gigs of RAM because I want this as a workstation also because I actually had a misconception of thinking that I would need more than 32 gigs of RAM if I wanted to really Flex the integrated Graphics processing power and I mean really stretch it by using 4K transcoding I went with 4K transcoding because really when it comes down to 1080p testing it's just not realistic anymore spoiler alert if I were to math and try to give you a basic idea of how many 1080ps this could potentially do it would be in the rough range of 72 to 90 different streams that many streams brings up a lot of variables on my end for errors and reliability and then the Discover hits you in the face 4K transcoding is actually not that bad the 3900k has the UHD 770 Graphics the 12 900k has the UHD 770 Graphics so if you're just looking at doing Hardware accelerated transcoding in Plex or something similar then the 12s and the 13s pretty much the same thing yes there is going to be a little bit of performance difference possibly just based off the CPU but you know that's really if you're just pushing it to the max Hardware accelerated transcoding using the system memory for the transcode I just figured maybe I'm probably going to need up to 64 gigs maybe not all of the 64 gigs but at least 40 or more in order to do a lot of transcoding however that was not the case during my test I did not go over 32 gigs worth of usage which was a little weird but also kind of nice that lets me know that hey in the future whenever I build this I'm still going to get 128 gigs because I have absolutely no respect for money but at least now I know for sure that I definitely probably don't need it the testing file back to the future of course but this time it's the 4K version hevc 5.1 main 10 a file size of 44 gigabytes just to give you an idea and that's running at a total of 55 megabits per second 49 of which are dedicated directly just to the video portion a solid 4K video file running at 3840 by 2076 resolution and in my test I transcoded all the way down to four megabits per second I should probably note that I ran my unrage server off of ssds is that out of frame that's out of frame isn't it yeah whatever why are you here some people just don't know when to leave there we go so your mileage may vary on this but I used three ssds one for the cash two for the array I wanted to see how fast they'd rebuild stupid fast that was just a small side test of mine but I wanted to make sure I didn't run into any kind of hard drive limitations so now that you have the bill now that you have the video file let me tell you the number it's magical it's 4K and it was 18. 18. different streams that's reliable streams this actually took a while to test because I had to recreate it I had to stop it replay it again make sure it was sustaining itself make sure none of the streams were actually buffering or restarting or freezing up or anything like that and also because I kind of sort of just started watching Back to the Future 18 though was the magic number I could start 19 with very occasional micro buffers randomly 20 gave me more buffers I just made up micro buffers I don't know if that's a thing but it is now 20 of them was definitely less reliable it wasn't a usable experience 19 of them was possible somebody might get a little micro buffer here and there but it's not that big of a deal 18 on the other hand was solid I was able to watch probably a quarter of the movie and not once did I see one of the video files start to buffer I will say this however whenever I get to 16 to 18 somewhere around there loading up a new movie navigating through the Plex screen stuff like that it starts to get a little laggy the way this sits now if I had to like Define what is stupid when it comes to like having video files to transcode just in case you have to like what should you keep what should you build for ETC I start to think to myself like what is that definition well if you have an Intel 12 or 13th gen or maybe in the future 14 or whatever and it can run one 4K transcoded video file without actually feeling it right because it can do 18 of them that's a pretty big step because 18 yeah I mean technically you feel it and it technically is going to take some resources but you can do 18 of them so if you can do five percent on one 4K transcoding stream how many streams are you doing are you doing less than 15 are they all transcoded or I also have to consider this or better yet a lack thereof because this runs all off of the CPU it has the integrated Graphics I do not need a video card which means all of the power that this takes to run is now gone under load this entire build bear in mind this is just ssds not a bunch of hard drives there's a lot of like variables here but under load I didn't see it reach over 200 like maybe 20 ish but it mainly sat at 200 and just idling is 40 to 50 Watts 40 to 50 Watts under stress 200. chilling no killing Idol 49. let me give you an idea so if it's using 50 Watts consistently at least 50 Watts that is 1.2 kilowatt hours per month now it's 200 Watts if it was stressed all of the time that's 4.8 kilowatt hours per month my server right now chills out at like 600 watts it has hard drives in it yes but it stresses out at over a thousand to 1200 watts if you're like five 600 watts just hanging out right that's 14.4 kilowatt hours per month my local energy rate for 14.4 kilowatt hours is 35 a month 35 dollars a month versus this one chilling all month three dollars per month if I was stressing the server it would be closer to sixty or seventy dollars a month just for my server if I'm stressing This Server it's closer to 12. ultimately I'm not going to be upgrading my Hardware to save all of the money back in electricity however electricity consumption equals heat so you know there's that that means your room is going to be a lot cooler which means it takes way less effort to keep everything going which means graphics cards are cool if you have a use for them in a server but if you don't then maybe just not do that before 4K transcoding was just dumb in my mind almost stupid I'm going with stupid now I'm just thinking maybe not as stupid now I'm thinking that maybe if I wanted to slowly start upgrading all of my content to 4K if I wanted to watch 4K video files primarily as my main source of video that maybe that's not a terrible idea I mean I won't be able to pull 18 transcoded streams off of a single hard drive so when it comes to a 4K video file and I have no plan to like again the whole bottleneck thing all ssds I mean hard drives ssds there's a big difference so it's not time yet to start switching everything over to 4K but maybe just maybe it's not stupid well guys I have a few more tests in mind that I want to do on this build before I erase everything and start doing other things I want to do with it so if you guys have any questions comments or testing ideas make sure to post those in the comment section down below one of the biggest things I really want to focus on actually is going to be the 4K folder is that still a thing I want to do some tests to see how the automatic switching is between different files what the structure looks like how reliable is that like how well could you integrate 4K into your main library and does that play well with the RS if you know what I mean so make sure to like And subscribe below as always thank you for watching and have yourself a great day hmm I like mixed it up almost messed it up it wouldn't be the first time but I sent it out over like And subscribe if you have any questions as always have a good day yeah that was weird

Channel: Byte My Bits

Views: 56,339

Keywords: 4k, transcoding, plex, unraid, plex media server, 13th gen, 13900k, intel, 3800k, 3700k, 3600k, igpu, hardware accelerated, hardware transcode, nvidia, gpu transcoding

Id: PsyV1j6mc1E

Length: 11min 30sec (690 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2022