Hello everyone,
First time poster on Tek Syndicate.
I have some questions that I'm hoping I can get answered here. I have been looking around all over the place for the answers.
I am planing on building a new home media server that will suit my needs better than using my current gaming rig, which is handling both gaming and Plex Media Server transcoding right now.
First my needs.
I have about 8TB (and growing fast) of movies on my gaming rig. The main reason I am building a new rig is to handle my Plex media streaming/transcoding and leave my gaming rig for..you know, gaming. I have 4 TVs in my house, Master Bedroom, Loft, 2nd Bedroom and Living Room. Also, 3 tablets, 2 Android and 1 iPad Air (Wife loves apple, go figure )
So I would like to be able to stream/transcode my movie collection to 4 TVs/Devices simultaneously with headroom, whether it be 2 TVs and 2 tablets or 4 TVs or 3 TVs and a tablet. I see the issue here after extensive testing on my current gaming PC is transcoding. My movies are my main concern, they are made up of multiple file types so transcoding seems to be a must here. Oh, forgot to mention all of my movies are 720p and above, 90% probably 1080p, some in huge file sizes. For example: Hobbit - Desolation of Smaug is 80gb high quality Blu ray rip
I need help choosing a CPU/parts to handle the task of streaming and transcoding 4 simultaneous streams to my devices.
Hardware Ideas.
My current thoughts are to build a high powered NAS, as most NAS solutions from places like Synology have lower powered CPUs and cannot handle what I'm asking it to do. My parts I was thinking of buying are, a Gryphon z97, 8 or 16GB of ram (Not sure yet), i7 4770k (or i7 4771), NH-D15 cooler in the new fractal node 804, with about 8 - 2TB or 3TB HDDs. Given the NH-D15 fits in that case, I haven't really checked that thoroughly yet. My main part concern is the CPU, can the 4770k handle 4 transcodes of high bitrate/res movies? Would the 4930k be better? How important is L2/3 cache in transcoding? I have no real cash limit, although I don't want to spend like $3,000 on a media server.
In testing my current gaming rig, my 3930k is at about 20%-30% CPU usage for one of regular 1080 movie, and at about 70%-80% for the high bitrate of The Hobbit Blu ray rip for instance.
Any help or ideas/suggestions/comments on what I can use to suit my needs would be greatly appreciated. Perhaps a Intel Xeon? With a server grade motherboard? Even software ideas, Windows, Linus etc.