So I have a kind of interesting situation going on here. I recently replaced my gaming rig’s 2080 with a 4070ti that I picked up at a good price. Then, I put the 2080 into my home server and got it up and running with plex.

Now, it has always been my intent to put that 2080 into a computer for my fiancee after we get married sometime in the next year. So, that leaves me with a conundrum: when I pull the 2080 out, I’ll need a decent GPU to replace it with for the plex server to help with transcoding. That’s why I’m here

What GPUs should I look at? I don’t want to break the bank and would prefer to stay under $600 when I do this, if possible. I’m not getting a Titan X which I keep seeing recommended, I can’t even get one of those for my own gaming rig let alone for a plex server that only we and a couple of friends use. I’d like something that can run up to 4 4K transcodes at once- I don’t think we’ll ever get more than that running at any given time since most of the use this server gets is in the same house via direct play, no transcoding needed.

Any suggestions?

  • @Fribbtastic
    link
    English
    51 year ago

    There is a very helpful link that I will link below that shows stats of what some Nvidia Cards are capable of.

    Though, as with everything “transcoding 4K related” would be, WHY? Why would you go through the trouble to store 4K content and then be okay with letting that high quality be transcoded to either a lower bitrate, resolution or even different codecs? All you do in those cases is affect the quality which you specifically want with 4K content. An alternative, 1080p version would not even take that much storage space from you and eliminate the transcoding requirements.

    Transcoding should be the backup that should be used to make a video playable if any other attempt or way failed, it should NOT be the standard.

    https://www.elpamsoft.com/?p=Plex-Hardware-Transcoding