CPU or GPU
Whatever plex defaults to under Free/TrueNAS. Just click drool install pluginâŠ
edit:
10 users?
Fair enough⊠For most home use i would have thought 1-2 concurrent but OKâŠ
CPU and then you have max 2-4 4k transcode. I need about 10.
Big family + i want to upgrade to more 4k. Siblings watching on crappy phones have to transcode. Intel quick synk gpu trancoding is a beast in plex.
Whoa, slow down here. I know nothing about your history or your current setup other than the information provided in this thread. A lot of the things you are saying were true years ago but at the same time I have heard things are much improved with the latest generation. This is why I think you might be acting out on old information.
At the end of the day the only one that knows your setup here is you, you are the one paying the money, and you are the one maintaining it.
Both me and thro have positive experiences with AMD, especially on Linux; and like thro mentions, AMD does still offer a compelling package on AM4, even though AM4 is end-of-life this year. We are exploring one option you might not have considered - this does not make us fanbois. I was warning you to not fall into the fanboi trap, but I never meant to say you were one. If you took offense, my apologies.
Note that I make a distinction between fanboi (person who idolize a brand to the point of ignoring all flaws or bad use cases) and fanboy (person who likes a brand to the point of heavy endorsements and want to see that brand succeed, but can see the flaws for what they are). Iâd concede me and thro are both AMD fanboys, but not AMD fanbois. 
Regardless, if you have considered the AMD path, and discarded it due to technical reasons, then fine. Your setup, your money, your time.
Some loose ends: From all the evidence I have seen 12th gen is now roughly on par for equivalent Zen 3 chips for idle power, it is however much improved from 11th gen. Intel had a power advantage until Gen 9/10 somewhere. Then AMD beat Intel on power with their Zen architecture, and then Intel caught up again in the low end with Alder Lake.
My views on it:
- Intel or AMD is pretty much a wash when it comes to CPUs
- DDR5 draws about as much power as DDR4, but DDR5 currently costs twice as much
- Intel has no support for ECC unless you buy specific W680 motherboard, AMD has inofficial support
- 4 cores with 8 threads (like the 12100) is pretty good to serve 10 users already, 6 cores 12 threads (12400, 5600G, 5600X) should thus last you a loooooong time
- If in doubt, a 5600X or 12400F with an Nvidia Geforce GT 1030 should give enough low power to rock your world
- Radeon 6400 would be nice, it is newer and draws less power - but it cannot encode video, so that go bai
So my recommendations:
- CPU - 12400F or 5600X
- Motherboard - W680 or B550 with ECC, B660 or B550 otherwise
- RAM - DDR4, for sure
- GPU - GT 1030
- PSU - 300W should be enough to cover everything
With this, you can then put the rest of your budget on drives. Here are two PCPartPicker spec outs. Both systems are ECC compatible but not specced with ECC RAM.
Note that the intel side uses a motherboard equivalent in price to a W680 board (those are coming but not here yet). Yeah, looks like Intel is going to keep the same socket but make you pay out of your nose for ECC support. No real low cost competition â milking time, but that is just business as usual! 
If ECC isnât a thing you can get a B660 Aorus Master instead which makes Intel system $250 less.
Ryzen 5 5600X build (idle power ~40W without disks)
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 6 core 12 thread | $199.98 |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-L9a-AM4 chromax.black | $54.95 |
| Motherboard | Gigabyte B550 AORUS PRO V2 | $179.99 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x32 GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | $249.99 |
| Storage | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB SSD NVME | $64.98 |
| Storage | 4x Seagate EXOS Enterprise X18 18 TB 3.5" 7200RPM | $329.99 x4 |
| Video Card | EVGA GeForce GT 1030 2 GB | $124.71 |
| Total | $2194.56 |
Core i5 12400F build (idle power ~45W without disks)
| Type | Item | Price |
|---|---|---|
| CPU | Intel Core i5-12400F 6 core 12 thread | $169.98 |
| CPU Cooler | Noctua NH-L9i-17xx | $44.95 |
| Motherboard | (W680 stand-in) | $475.00 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance LPX 2x32 GB DDR4-3200 CL16 | $249.99 |
| Storage | Samsung 970 Evo Plus 250 GB SSD NVME | $64.98 |
| Storage | 4x Seagate EXOS Enterprise X18 18 TB 3.5" 7200RPM | $329.99 x4 |
| Video Card | EVGA GeForce GT 1030 2 GB | $124.71 |
| Total | $2449.57 |
Hope that helps somewhat!
2 Likes
OK thank you very much for this
OK thank you very much for this this is much informative thatâs Iâm looking for
Welcome to the forum!
I skimmed a little through the comments, but I didnât find the use cases, except for running plex and wanting Intel QuickSync.
Personally, Iâd say you do 3 computers. You can get a lot done with low-end hardware. I had 2x Asrock J3455M PCs, those things sip power. A quad core Celeron based on Atom cores with a max 10W TDP? Plenty. Not sure what newer stuff you can put your hands on today.
I would use something like the above for pfSense (thatâs what I used it for, but the other one I used for Proxmox and it was decent, it had 8 GB of RAM).
For the NAS, it really depends if you are going to do a lot virtualization on it. While I would still say to split the NAS and server, in some situations a storage appliance might make sense.
I havenât yet tested how well the Odroid HC4 behaves as a NAS, probably soon. But given that you want about 10 plex users, I would say to go with a RAID 10, although a RAID1 should still do the job.
If your goal is to save power, I would say to go with a quad core CPU. If going with Intel, you may want an i3 12100. The other option would be AMD, maybe a Ryzen 3 4100 paired with the lower-end Intel ARC Alchemist GPU. They should be dropping pretty soon. If an APU, Ryzen 3 3400G. I donât know how well, if at all, does transcoding works on AMD GPUs, I only saw plex users using nvidia GPUs.
In this setup, especially with a 4100 + Intel ARC GPU, I would say to build a box with 3x HDDs in RAID5, 2 SSD in RAID1 (or even just one) for the OS and potentially VMs / containers and some m.2 slots for the optane drive.
In a setup where video media is involved, not spinning up the HDDs is a tall task. Especially is people arenât going to watch the same movie around the same time or not too far apart from one another. I believe a 4K movie will use twice the space of the optane 32 GB drive on a good day. With that amount of storage usage, you would need a 256-512 GB read cache. But will you even make use of that cache?
Think about it. If you got 10 people who want to watch movies on demand, are they going to browse your library for the same movie? If they were going to watch a movie together, I donât think the odds of them watching it from their own homes makes a lot of sense. It may happen a few times, but more often than not, you will have each user watch something else, so disks will have to spin up.
If you donât want to build a router, just get a single board computer, like an Odroid N2+, slap wireguard on it, do some port forward on your router, get a DNS and call it a day.
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I have great experience with AMD cpu in linux. Less about AMD/ATI gpu. My latest AMD gpu RX570 have been 90% in the bin since i bought it. 3of4 linux distro 3 years ago wouldnât even go to GUI. âWhite line loopâ. Still does it last year when i VM it with GPU passthrough in the server. And encoding/decoding is a mess in AMD.
1030 is not NVENC compatible. I had it in my old HTPC, and have it in the spare parts bin. I did that miss with NVENC to then⊠DO NOT BUY 1030 if someone buying for their server encoding video. Worst GPU you could buy for any video application.
You need more than that in nvidia case. And you get their 3 stream limit on all consuming products. You need to search thoroughly in google to find cards that works. Their are a LOT of pitfalls I gave up after i saw that i need enterprise GPU to get it to work in my case. Intel have not that limitations nvidia has.
And i do not use Flash nvme no more. And i do not recommend it in server application with large database and cache drive. I have burned down 2 in raid, Samsung 960 evo i think it was, TBW read and write to end of life. Corrupted segmente like hell last month i had them 10% over TBW. Took me less than 2 years. Thatâs why i bought 2 optane. 1 i sold last year. Didnât have place for it any more. And it rock solid like a beast+frequently backups instead. 8720 TBW vs â970s 500GBâ 300TBW (only 600 times full writes).
I have Noctua NH-D15 and they have free mounting for life. So no need for new.
And if i go with ddr4 i do not need new ones. Itâs leaning ddr4 way.
Biostar. Never used, never heard (actully). Not big in swedish market. Only 1 place i can find in denmark is selling that for 550$. Are biostar good?
Thank you!
Some off the tasks: Home Assistant(8 users, about 200+ devices), Plex (10 users), Nextcloud (10), Postgresql (5 databases, about 50GB+), Redis(3 databases), wireguard (5 users, offline now, testing it on pfsense) adguard dns block (5 users outside local), Unifi (4 devices), Zigbee2mqtt (40 devices), mosqitto, zwavejs2mqtt (10 devices), nginx/swag (reverse proxy and cache 20 sites), nginx (2 websites), nodered, authellia (auth manage 20 sites), bitwarden(5 users), tdarr (HEVC archiving, auto on when electric price is cheap and gaming pc is on and not gaming, paying hourly electricity) etc.
3 pc is a big no no. I need the power vs efficiency a modern cpu per clock can give. Between 4-10PM itâs working hard. I strive to do a single pc. I have a pfsense on a laptop that draws about 10w. Wanted to change it for my old NUC but the extra battery is an extra UPS for PFsense. Not had any problems with only 1 nic in 4 years. Worked like a charm last power loss. I had internet even when the cell phone mast was off after 2 hours. Thank god fibre company had a good UPS to their local fibreswitch. I was maybe the only user that evening.
I do not use KVM at the moment. Donât see a point anymore. Only docker containers. Maybe pfsense. But like i said. Itâs is a horror show to set up.
66TB 95% full now. Raid 5, 3pc hdd is not going to work. Maybe 6pc 18TB, 90TB total. Lot of spinning rust all the time.
Itâs only a brief comment but I have electric cost issues too, and resigned to a 3 area solution:
Pool 1 - using an SSD FOR VMs/Jails
Pool 2 - 2 X HDD in mirrored for daily accessed files
Pool 3 - 8 x HDD storing rarely accessed data and set to min energy use after 5mins (no spin down ever).
Just a friendly reminder: You can disagree and drive your point home without dropping F bombs and profanities.
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You got a lot of stuff going. Yeah, a 6 core 12 thread would be a minimum here if you want to run all of those in containers and have 1 router VM. Iâd go with a 5600X/G and an Intel ARC GPU for quicksync, or any AMD card if it works with transcoding in plex.
I would get 2 SSDs in RAID 1 and have all the containers and DBs run on them (probably 2x 1 TB or something) with either 4 HDDs in stripped mirrors or 6 HDDs in RAID-Z2.
6x 18TB drives in RAID-Z2 gives you 72TB of usable storage, 108TB of raw storage.
Data hoarding is real.
Are intel ARC GPUs out yet?
If youâre going to go down that route it probably does actually make more sense to use an intel CPU for the onboard quick sync as any AMD cost saving would be mitigated by the discrete GPU.
The other option is to offload the cost to the end users and tell them to buy less crap devices (and turn transcode off) 
Just on that though, do you think youâll have enough disk IO for 10 concurrent streams of 4k? Might be worth running the numbers if you havenât already.
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Delayed until further notice. They âpromotedâ Raja Koduri to now work in another department. Doesnât look good from the outside for the 2022 Intel GPU revolution.
This wonât be a problem with encoded/compressed data. Weâre talking ~20MBit/s bitrate here for 4k. Sequential read speed of a single HDD can easily take 10 concurrent streams, let alone HDDs in a RAID-like configuration that amplifies performance and/or cache/tiered architecture. Disk IO on streaming data for compressed media streams is basically negligible unless you are sending raw footage through your network or building your own Netflix for 100s of people.
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Hmm, I really donât think you are doing yourself any favors by ruling out small Raspberry Pis from the equation here. A Raspberry Pi 4 with 4 GB of RAM is quite a capable machine and one or two of those could easily handle half of your use cases for something like 5W per machine. As a bonus it is available right now in Sweden, though you do need to be quick about it.
The only big showstopper(s) I see are NAS and streaming encoding. NAS could easily be built for something like 40W, Intel will dissapoint you in the power draw though, maybe next gen will do better though.
Decoding can easily happen on the client side, encoding is tough to solve on the server side for more than a few users. 
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