I am trying to put a parts list together for a Plex server. What I know for sure is I will be running an Intel Arc B580 (tested on the Plex reddit), TrueNas scale w/ Docker.
What I am unsure about is if I should go AM4 or AM5. I want to have at least 4 SATA drives and one or two m.2 drives (maybe gen4) .
Which platform will give me the PCIe bandwidth to run everything or is it something I shouldn’t be worried about and just go with either?
Unless you have an AM4 CPU already sitting around there is no reason to go with AM4 anymore. The platform is essentially EOL, it just doesn’t make sense.
The B580 is an x8 card so you’ll have the PCIe lanes anyway.
That aside, unless you’re dead set on Plex, you might want to take a look at Jellyfin instead. Plex is doing some… weird things.
Both have 28 pcie lanes total am5 has slightly different requirements on where they go. Am4 is going to be gen4 vs am5 will have atleast the gpu as gen5. Both platforms dedicate 4 of the 28 to the chipset.
I dont agree with this, mobile devices are still being sold new with zen2. AMD continues to produce and sell more AM4 cpu’s. With that said, AM4 can now be considered a dead end platform in terms of new better cpus. Assuming your good with the limitations of the AM4 platform, and the price to performance of the AM4 parts are competitive, i see no issue.
Weird things is an understatement. I have a lifetime pass so I am sticking with it until it breaks.
Any thoughts on Emby, seems to have better client support and less plex like auth stuff.
I have a B580, and it isn’t compatible with Plex as of right now. B580 requires the xe kernel module and Plex’es transcoder engine still doesn’t support xe
Haven’t used it, all I know is that there was some falling out with the dev team and hence the fork to Jellyfin.
I just don’t really like the idea of having to have a subscription to use my own media… that’s kind of the whole point of having a media server.
That’s not AM4 tho?
That’s pretty much what I said, but ok.
Emby is great, and in my experience more stable than Plex. For the past 3 years I have had crashing issues with Plex Server at randfom times, sometimes it crashes daily, sometimes weekly, sometimes monthly. Mostly coinciding with server version updates as I notice much more frequent crashing on the days immediately after an update and then it mellows out a bit. I know frequent crashes on Plex arent the norm, Im pretty sure it just doesnt like some specific piece of hardware I have. I didnt use to be that way, but for the past 3 years or so it has been. For the past 2 years I have run Plex and Emby side by side, and Plex does its normal crash thing and Emby just keeps going along and never has any problems.
As far as features and actual use, Emby does some things on the server end more streamlined than plex, but then it also doesnt have some Plex features. So its a bit give and take. Personally I am about to rebuild my Plex server with an upgrade, and when I do I wont actually be installing Plex this time around I will be using Emby exclusively. From the few users who I have had try Emby instead when they have issues with Plex, they found EMby just runs better on their end. And I know on my end the server side Emby has been far better and more stable as well.
This is the same for Plex or Emby though. Either a subscription or get a lifetime license. Jellyfin is the only actually free one, and I believe this “continue being free and open source” is the issue that started Jellyfin when Emby went commercial.
I havent used Jellyfin, and when I first looked into it the features and support were far too barebones and didnt fit my needs. I have seen more recently it has come a long way and has a lot of great features and better user interface and ease of installing the server now. So it is probably a great option now days.
While AM5 is better, if you are buying parts and can get an AM4 setup on the cheap it will handle your video playback needs handily. I have experience that ECC memory is generally operational (without XMP) on B and X boards with AM4, but you should probably attempt to find a board that lists ECC memory in it’s QVL. If you see similarly priced AM5 boards that an ECC entry then AM5 is the rec.
I will do as the prophets before me, use ZFS if you’re going to do anything more than a jbod. It’s not recommended but you can just plug them into the mobo (or get HBA in JBOD mode.)
I have had a few iterations of a proxmox server running for a few years now, r7 2800x, runs multiple videos streams, game servers, nextcloud instance. The important bit for video playback is that arc B580. That will make your video transcode sing.
Now, I don’t know why you would run plex when jellyfin is right there. It’s really good. Entirely free. I don’t know what feature could be so important that jellyfin doesn’t already have that won’t meet your needs.
You will just have to do it yourself when it comes to reaching the server from the outside. You can either run a reverse proxy on your network, or setup a VPN for when you want to watch from away.
It’s compatible with Plex, not TrueNas.
My hope is by the time I get all the parts there will be support (4 to 6 months).
I think you meant the other way around. TrueNAS Scale 25.04 uses Kernel 6.12, so basic xe support should be available.
To this very day Plex on Linux doesn’t support Battlemage. But maybe in your 4-6 months time frame Plex has updated all the preceding tasks to include the then current Intel media engine in their transcoder library.
my AM4 based Plex build is described here Real Ultimate Plex Server by dk9 - RTX A4500, Fractal Design Define 7 ATX Mid Tower - PCPartPicker and it had plenty of performance for simply running Plex + lots of HDD’s
if the question is “does AM4 have enough bandwidth for this” then the answer is Yes.
in that build you will note that I am using an HBA model LSI SAS 9201-16i (https://docs.broadcom.com/doc/12352036) which runs at PCIe 2.0 x8 and its got plenty of bandwidth for up to 16 SATA III HDD’s.
you can refer to the table here for PCIe speeds at different combinations of PCIe generation * link size PCI Express - Wikipedia
SATA HDD = ~250MB/s
250 * 16 = 4000 MB/s
there are a variety of PCIe configurations that can achieve this bandwidth. iirc all AM4 and AM5 CPU’s can do at least PCIe 3.0, most are PCIe 4.0 capable and many AM5 are PCIe 5.0 capable. Though good lucking finding HBA’s that run on PCIe 4.0 or 5.0…
for only 4 SATA HDD’s you likely do not need an HBA and could probably get away with only your system onboard SATA ports. Make sure to check your motherboard’s onboard SATA availability. On AM4 systems, it was mostly standard to have at least 6 SATA ports but it seems like AM5 boards are cutting this back. If you dont have enough onboard SATA then you use either HBA as mentioned or you can get a PCIe → SATA adapter or M.2 → SATA adapter
For storage bandwidth these are the things that matter, moreso than AM4 vs. AM5
I posted this in a few other threads recently as well but I also recently upgraded this same Plex server to AM5, for completely different reasons, and the final build list looked like this;
but none of the benefits I got from making such an upgrade are relevant to the use case described here.
based on the OP description, these are some of the other considerations that stand out (some already mentioned)
Intel Arc drivers on Linux are still somewhat “young” in terms of server lifespans and so you need to make sure your Linux OS is fully compatible with them ; iirc this generally means that you need at least Linux kernel 6.8 and preferably you would be running Ubuntu since that would give you the easiest driver install path since apt has a lot of them already available. I have no clue what this looks like if you are using TrueNas Scale. For my own purposes I put together recently a Dockerfile with all the stuff needed for Intel Arc GPU usage (specifically with ffmpeg) which also includes links to the Intel driver docs which you would find easily on Google too. ffmpeg-av1/intel_arc/Dockerfile at master · tazzuu/ffmpeg-av1 · GitHub
as mentioned its not entirely clear what the support for Intel GPU looks like within Plex / Emby / Jellyfin / etc., so you will want to research this ahead of time to know what you are jumping into.
one of the selling points of the Intel GPU’s is that they include hardware based AV1 encoding, so if you want to make use of that, you’ll want to be aware of the software requirements (this is what the dockerfile I made is intended for) - if you dont care about AV1 then you can just ignore this
it can definitely be difficult to recommend a new plex server build on AM4 right now since AM4 is basically EOL and there’s so many available low-end AM5 configurations available for relatively comparably low prices. This is ultimately gonna end up coming down to pricing and availability I think. Am4 is not a bad choice but if they are the same price I would likely lean towards AM5 at this point.
Kind of my point? x_X
I was saying Jellyfin as an alternative for a reason.
Thanks for the detailed post.
I have a define R4 and it’s a beast of a case so I would be a fool not to get the define 7, hope they release a 8 before I have to build.
I am planning to build it in 4-6 months so there’s time to get the drivers in order.
I have a 5800x and a itx b550 board, was wondering if I could repurpose them without having any issues
Most definitely, i use much older hardware than this without issues.
For reference im using a i7-6700k which has pcie gen3 and i don’t have any pcie bandwidth issues.
You can always upgrade later if you need something better.
Well my current server is a 4790k so it’s a huge upgrade