I recently inherited my father-in-law’s collection of 900+ DVDs and Blu-Rays, so I would like to buy a new dedicated workstation to rip these and place on my Plex server. My budget is $2,500 for the motherboard, CPU, RAM, and cooler. However, I am not 100% sure which platform would work best with Handbrake. My research has turned up mixed messages about how well Handbrake scales with multicore and SMT. Some say over eight cores is wasted, and I should focus on clock speed. Other posts say the more cores, the better. Some posts even say the disk IO is the limiting factor.
So what would you all recommend? The Threadripper platform is within my budget (well, the 3960x anyways) and seems to perform well. But does it perform that much better than a 3950x or 5950x? And does Intel even have a dog in this hunt, whether it be current or previous gen, workstation or server chips? Thanks in advance for any and all advice and assistance!
TR is massive overkill for 95% of people. Frankly a low cost high speed CPU is a great place to start. I would actually go with an intel i5-11400 as its $40 cheaper than a R5 5600. It also has built in graphics with quicksync which handbreak can take advantage of.
Best part is since GPU’s are hard to find, you dont have to day one. You can run the OS on the integrated graphics more than well enough.
If handbrake / ffmpeg doesn’t use all the cores, you can always run more handbrake / ffmpeg in parallel and max out any number of threads.
I don’t recommend cpu encoding because it’s slow, gpu encoding can be way faster. Eposvox has made a few videos on the matter.
Ryzen is great if 16 cores is all you need
Ryzen is also great if you do not plan to use more then the 24 PCIE-LANES (think multiple add-on cards, GPU, RAID etc…or multiple of these are NOT possible
Ryzen is great if 128gb is the max ram you need
For anything else buy a THREADRIPPER - it’s true that it is beyond what 95% of users need. But you could be with me in that last 5%
So I would spec out your requirements here in details and then we can collectively suggest the best way forward
I’m going to be one million percent honest with you.
You can buy whater the fuck you want to process dvd’s and video data, a powermac G5 will rip through all that shit way bloody faster.
Now assuming you don’t want to deal with that, get a 6 core, ryzen 1600’ll do, 300 series board too why not they’re cheap, some ram, and something with nvenc. Get like a gtx 970 or something. Then with handbrake, crank all that shit out over nvenc. You’ll have 4 more cores doing nothing, so run handbrake twice.
Processor transcoding for this sorta thing is a joke unless done on ppc/POWER
Also get a 6 drive laptop cd dre caddy for the front of your case. Fit 6 max in 2 bays of the super slim laptop drives.
Yes I’ve done this before, no don’t buy thread ripper to SCAN DVD DISCS
To be fair, Ryzen was made for the guys who don’t need more than 16 cores, 2 or (in the highest end of boards) 3 NVME SSDs, only use one GPU and don’t need 72 PCIE lanes or over 128GB RAM (most Ryzen users don’t even use 64GB, let alone 128GB). TR was made for people who need 128GB+, need lots of PCIE lanes and have deep pockets to account for it (because let’s be honest, no one’s gonna get a Threadripper and pair it with an $300 motherboard). Ryzen on the other hand can be used with an $100 board without problems. HEDT is for professionals and/or users whose workload is huge. For Handbrake OP won’t need more than 8 cores, a 16 core 5950X will most likely cover all his needs .
For your use case and if you want the budget-friendly option, I would probably try and get the soon-to-be-released Ryzen 5700G on a high-end B550 board like the B550 Aorus Master or Asrock B550 Taichi. That would be an 8 core, 16 threads CPU with embedded graphics strong enough to do light CAD work on, so you can 100% dedicate whatever GPU you have for encoding duty. This should also let you weather the storm until GPUs are back to decent prices.
If you need more PCIe lanes or more than 128 GB of RAM, then Threadripper is the way to go. You could go x570, but the extra lanes it offers over B550 are few and far between, and only a single enthusiast card supports x8 / x8 / x8 PCIe 4.0 lanes for expansion cards. This should allow you to do a PCIe x16(actually x4/x4/x4/x4) NVMe addon + x8 GPU, but it’s still a bit of stretch compared to Threadripper.
So, yeah… The B550 workstation will last you quite a while, but it depends on your needs.
nVIDIAs NVENC, is an applicable capacity to some Pascal / any Turing(+) based GPUs.
It is a common chip, so even likes of a 1060 / 1650S, would be effectively same as current 30 series, for most codec formats [newer GPUs will have some efficiency gains].
More cores are of course better [to a point], in handling them sub-processes, outside of NVENC chip
You can lookup Phanteks, for viable case options [multiple builds host 2+ 5.25 bays]
Also plenty of harddrive count potential [additional drive sleds sold separately]
What software, are you looking to toss at this rig, outside of the [steady] DVD ripping?
So… there’s two parts to building a media machine out of optical disks.
You’ll need an optical drive of some kind to read the media and tons of patience (assuming you don’t end up pirating everything).
Plex is weird, it can’t deal with (2a) DVD organized directories . Folks usually use makemkv or similar to remux (2b) the movies from folder structure into a file per title… … or (2c) run with the lazy handbrake option or use (2c) fancy vapoursynth python scripts from enthusiastic pirates
Personally, I like “archiving” and I like simplicity, so I prefer remuxing (2b) into 1 file per title. That doesn’t require lots of CPU or GPU since it’s not running fancy algorithms to figure out what image/motion information to keep and what to throw away … it merely copies the bit stream.
For TV playback, Kodi is absolutely unsurpassed in terms of compatibility over time, eventually everything just works, especially when running on Odroid N2+ where you get nice HDR support and CEC works out of the box so you get away with one remote.
Focus on disk space, spinning rust and lots of it to store all the media.
You got to love people who don’t read the original post…
No one is telling anyone what to do, but are helping defining the pros and cons of the two platforms mention. Some are offering alternative solutions.
Ultimately the original poster will need to make up their mind, by the sound of things $$$ isn’t an issue. Hence the reference to a Threadripper system (assuming that would be the most expensive platform) so you now have an upper limit for investment.
We are all well aware that the specific requirements for the task doesn’t require such an extreme build such as a TR system. The questions that should be asked is what else are the OP going to use the system?
