Hey guys, I’ve never used Plex before but am looking to set up a server this week for me and my family as streaming bills are getting out of control. I have a small library of legally acquired media that will work as a good test before I go sailing for the rest.

I have a Thinkserver TD340 desktop with dual xeons and space for many hard drives that I was going to use simply due to its HDD capacity

(12c24t combined and 64gb RAM)

However they’re sandy bridge Xeon’s and not very power efficient. However I can put a Quadro P2000 GPU in it for hardware accelerated transcoding

The other idea I have is I have access to an HP SFF PC with an i5 8400T and a few external hard drive mounts I could plug into power in the wall and USB to the PC

This is smaller and saves power but forgoes GPU acceleration leaving me with only Intel UHD 630 graphics. It’s also only 6 cores/threads but they are much faster.

I also want whichever system I use to run pi-hole for DNS level ad blocking. But that’s very light and shouldn’t be an issue to run at the same time.

Am I overthinking this? I have access to both systems. Which would be best. At most maybe 3 people would be accessing it at once. Across iPhones, smart TVs etc

  • @Anomalous_LlamaOPEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    I’m a PC gaming enthusiast and work in IT support so I’m very comfortable working on PC’s etc but just have never gotten into media encoding/decoding so I really am unfamiliar with the capabilities of UHD 630 and if it can handle the load

    Using the external HDD mounts I could give it several terabytes of storage (though many more on the TD340 of course)

    • Faceman🇦🇺English
      3•8 months ago

      The uhd 630 is pretty good but it is old enough that it might have some codec limitations. I think it was the first generation with full H265 10bit support so your 4k hdr rips can be transcoded if need be.

      You should be able to manage 4 or 5 simultaneous 4k to 1080 transcode and at least 10 (likely more depending on bitrates) 1080p transcode streams.

      It is still best practice to avoid transcoding wherever possible, but if it is needed it should be quick and seamless on that chip.