Hardware for new Plex server

Hardware Build a PC
1

Hello there,

Well, i’ve been running Plex for some years now, made the shift from Kodi (XBMC) back in the days, when i wanted to be able to watch my media anywhere :slight_smile:

Anyway, my current setup consists of the follow hardware:

Intel i7 2600
8 GB of DDR3 RAM
Gigabyte GA-Z77N-WiFi
Seasonic 400w Gold PSU
Fractal Design Node 304 case
4x WD RED 3TB

Mostly salvaged parts from other PC’s, so actually quite a low-cost build back in the day :wink:
Bob (as he is called), is using Debian as operating system, and he is loving it!
But well, with 6 concurrent 1080p streams, and well, full disks, it’s time to upgrade. (Poor Bob)

I’m looking into 2 more disks WD RED 3TB since i’m running them in Raid5.
I’m considering using ESXI on bare metal to make some more machines, i have a dream of a machine with PFSense and a 5 port switch PCIE card in the future, you know, since i got the hardware anyway :wink:

Anyway, the hardware i’m considering are the following:

Ryzen7 1700 LINK
ASUS Prime B350M-A LINK
Corsair Vengeance DDR4 PC-24000 16GB (Is that enough?) LINK
Samsung EVO 850 250GB M.2 (At the moment the os is running from the WD red disks in Raid5) LINK
Fractal Design Define Mini (6 disk slots yay) LINK
2x WD RED 3TB LINK

RAM is checked in QVL from motherboard, so should be fine :slight_smile:
My other concerns are if i should chip in for 32GB of RAM? And if i should go up a level, and go for 500 GB on the SSD, you know, for the virtual machines :slight_smile:
(And oh yes, is the 400w PSU going to be enough?)

Please, any input is appreciated :slight_smile:

2

Without knowing what all services and VMs you are running its difficult to say exactly what you need, but speaking generally, more cores and more RAM are always helpful when you want to run more VMs. I don’t know that Plex uses that much RAM however but again, RAM and cores will be your limiting factor on how many VMs you can run.

If you give yourself ~20 watts each for each hard drive, and around 200 watts max for the CPU +motherboard that would leave you around an 80 watt overhead with that power supply. Assuming you don’t go adding anything crazy like a GPU, a 400w PSU should work.

If you plan on running the system maxed load 24/7, you might want a bigger PSU for efficiency and lifespan of the PSU but if its going to mostly be sitting idle with the occasional spike, then it should be fine.

3

Besides expanding the storage i don’t see anything wrong with your current build. Plex doesn’t take much RAM given what it does, i only ever had 2 1080p streams going from my plex VM and it would just barely max out 4 gigs of DDR3 with a 4 core vCPU (which hung around 30% utilization if i recall). So maybe more RAM and storage but an i7 is gonna handle 6 1080p streams fine unless you’re having to transcode on the fly and not use the h264 hardware acceleration built into every processor these days.

Alas i gave up on Plex after they locked me out of their browser player with their stupid plex pass bullshit. I’m with Emby now. Not as snappy but has alot of nice features and is far more controllable than Plex.

With the i7 a 400w PSU is fine, but if you’re going with Ryzen you’ll need a discrete graphics card, in which case you’ll want to push that up to somewhere between 550 to 750 depending on how powerful the card.

3 Likes
4

Good point about needing a GPU with Ryzen. He could possibly use it headless couldn’t he? A very low end/low power GPU would be all he needs though but you might be getting a little close for comfort on the PSU in some situations.

If all he wants is a couple of streams on Plex, his old box is probably enough. If he is trans-coding many streams that could be a different story.

5

You can run it headless, but you will still need a GPU installed. A GPU is going to be required for the machine to POST. Unless something has changed with Ryzen, which I doubt.

I used to run a g210 GPU in my FreeNAS box for the same reason.

6

You’re absolutely right.

Plex has experimental hardware transcoding support as well. Getting something like a GT710 or GT730 would allow the system to post. I’m not sure if plex can take advantage of those GPUs, but it might be beneficial.

7

Yea, maybe i should have specified that.
The plan is to be running a VM with PFSense, one with Debian (running Plex), and one, maybe two test machines for different purposes, Windows/Debian.
Plex dosn’t use RAM at all (well almost none).

The server will be online for 24/7, but won’t be 100% load 24/7, mostly spikes :slight_smile: So guess the PSu should be fine.

@mrpopo
Well, atm i’m running a mini-ITX build, which don’t give me much room to expand to a sata controller (only got 4 sata ports on motherboard), and a PCIE switch.
And on socket 1155 i don’t have many options to find used motherboards in my country, sadly.
But yea, Plex dosn’t use RAM, RAM is mostly for VM utilization.

@Cobra92fs
Do i really need a GPU installed to run headless? Of course i’ll need one in the initial setup, but thought i should be able to remove it afterwards, and then boot the PC?

@SgtAwesomesauce
Read up a bit on the hardware utilization from GPU’s, and didn’t seem to give much really, so wouldn’t use the money on it, but still stuck on the fact, that i might need a GPU to post the server at all?

8

Ive heard of people having success at removing the GPU once the system is powered up, but I have never tried it. Seems a bit risky to me to unplug a PCIe card with the system powered. Maybe someone with more experience here will chime in.

9

I think he was saying put in a GPU in order to do the initial install of the OS and configuration, then unplug the GPU after powering it off and restart it to run headless without any GPU either onboard or discrete. Yeah unplugging a GPU would at the very minimum cause kernel panic, at worst it might kill the GPU/motherboard.

10

Yes, was talking about shutting the system down, the remove the gpu and power on the system, might need to test that

11

The system is going to need some type of GPU to POST.

12

Some people are aying what you are saying, and others says it shouldn’t be a problem.
Anyway, got access to the hardware at work, so might just do a test tomorrow to see :slight_smile:

13

If you are going to run an Intel with an IGPU, no dedicated GPU would be needed to POST. To my knowledge, Ryzen has no IGPU, and therefore needs a dedicated GPU to get through POST.

Keep us updated on your testing. :grinning:

14

You absolutely need to have a GPU.

That sounds like a recipe for disaster. You could burn out pins on the PCIe slot and the sudden change in load can cause problems as well.

15

If you need a GPU to post or not depends on the mobo, some will run headless (mainly server boards), some will not. Ironically on some of the consumer boards you’ll need a graphics card to enter the bios and set the configure the system and enable headless mode, however once set you won’t need a GPU again unless your Cmos gets cleared. Some boards even have bios versions available to allow headless running when the stock one doesn’t, so you really need to research well if you hope to use such a feature outside of workstation\server boards that come advertising it. That said just like ECC on Ryzen, its possible if you put the extra effort in to find the select few parts needed.

16

I was not aware that there are boards out there with these features. Very cool. Thanks for the information! :grinning:

17

Well some one on my Old IT Dept, did the old lets try to hotswap GPUs on a Dell Presicion, well the PCIE Got fried, but the machine its still working, and the GPU its like nothing happened, so yeah i wouldnt try that on a new motherboard

3 Likes
18

@Fallenzoul 100% agree pulling a running PCIe device is a HORRIBLE idea, may cause hardware damage, certainly will crash. On the other hand you can get thunderbolt or USB type C GPU docks that allows PCIe devices to be hot plugged, but in my brief testing it only helped on systems where you where running several virtual machines with hardware pass-though, as turning off the virtual machine to add or remove worked, but actual hot swap still just resulted in either the card not being usable to the OS or a driver crash.

@Cobra92fs The Asus ROG Corsair 6 Hero is known working for boot headlessly via lan in at least some bios’s, but I highly recommend at least having a GPU on hand to set up UEFI, and its easier to install the OS with one (although you can live boot from USB as some distros will let you remote into the live OS by default, and PnP should auto configure usable setup for your hardware).

19

As much as I hate to say it, I would suggest you go with a new Intel system. The i5-8600k will be better. I believe it will use slightly less watts at idle and with plex dabbling in hardware acceleration will help a lot if you get into 4k h.265 material thanks to quick sync. You dont have to worry about getting a gpu to sit idle in the system, at least Plex can leverage the igpu of intel (really wish it wasn’t like this). Plus the single thread performance is quite high compared to Ryzen. Some codecs in Plex are single threaded. I really like what AMD did but for Plex today, I recommend Intel.

20

Only if you’re looking for shit quality transcodes. Quicksync is problematic when it comes to non-twitch style real-time transcodes because it’s designed to do low-quality quick transcodes.

There was a post on /r/plex about this a while ago (can’t find the exact post for some reason, I’ll have to dig some more). Long and short of it is that it turns out extremely low quality when not using nvidia hardware.

Which codecs? I’ve never encountered this.

I recommend the CPU with the higher cinebench score.

Not trying to trash your advice, but I just don’t think that hardware encoding is the way to go on an Intel iGPU. It’s just too low quality.