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I’ve been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It’s a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 “maxed out” with 16BG of RAM.
Since then it’s ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I’m planning on moving my server closet, and I’ll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I’m at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware.
I’ve built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I’ve never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It’d be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.
Video encoding you’ve really got 2 clear options: Either a 8th gen or newer consumer Intel chip with integrated graphics for QuickSync support or toss a GPU in there. You can also rely on raw CPU cycles for video transcode but that’s wildly energy inefficient in comparison.
I’ve heard good things about how anything AM4 compares to x99 era Intel on both raw performance and performance per watt, but I have no personal anecdata to share.
Personally I’m currently eyeing up a gaming computer refresh as the opportunity to refresh my primary server with the old components from the gaming computer, but I’m also starting with literal ewaste I scrounged for free, so pretty much anything is big upgrade.
So my current processor has QuickSync. Are there generations of quicksync? Would a newer implementation be faster? There’s not a lot of data out there. It seems like QS support is either yes or no.
QS is generational, and newer versions will be much better in quality than older ones, and have some more throughput too.
Important note: ARC gpus all have the same qs engine right now (A780 = A310), so even an arc a310 will decimate any cpu qs and will be much faster than any nvidia hardware encoder too. (qs encoder in a310 is slightly handicapped by lower vram bandwidth and size, but it is negligible)
Newer generations have decoders/encoders for more codecs. 8th gen Intel Core cpus have good HEVC support while you need the more recent gens for good AV1 support.
I’m not entirely certain. QuickSync is an Intel GPU feature and generally just listed as Yes/No on ark.intel.com so I’m inclined to suspect it doesn’t have significant change from one generation to another. Most GPUs have a limited number of of video streams they can transcode at a time, so if you’re exceeding that number then I believe it will have to brute force it on the processor which will be anemic on an older Celeron. Have you verified that Plex is actually using QuickSync to transcode? If its been hitting the processor this whole time that would easily do that.
Not sure what Plex is using, but Shinobi and Photoprism do.
Plex usually runs at native resolution, but it can just barely run if it has to downscale or bake in subtitles in real time. I’ll have to check the settings to see what it’s using.
Edit: Ah, looks like you need to pay for Plex Pass to enable Quick Sync.
That would certainly do it! Stating the obvious, here, looks like you have 3 clear paths to take: