ENTERPRISE

Cheers bud. Will be good once I sort the issue out with Asrock regarding the BIOS resetting issue which seems to be an issue on some of their boards at the moment : http://forum.asrock.com/forum_posts....eeps-resetting The build is fine, but it is a pain to restore your BIOS setting profile after every cold boot.

Hmmm, well at the very least Doom Eternal will be on my hit list !

Pffff...the other place !

Also posted up my build here: https://extremehw.net/forum/full-pc-builds/server/7175-my-plex-server-build-rough-guide#post7175

Released.

Hey all. So I thought I would just document a Plex server build I have recently put together with a view to getting maximum performance when it comes to the transcoding of 4K UHD files. I used some sources as a good guidelines as to what the best components would be in order to achieve this goal. This article will cover the main components of the Plex server. The rest of my build will be listed, but components such as the Motherboard,PSU, Optical drive ETC are not vital to Plex server performance. The CPU The CPU is a massively important part of a Plex server. As the CPU will be doing the bulk of the transcoding of your files (Unless you have GPU hardware acceleration, we will get to that). I used a rough guidelines from the Plex crew in order to figure out an approximate best fit CPU. You can check this guide out here: https://support.plex.tv/articles/201...for-my-server/ While it is a guideline, it is a fairly accurate one. As we can see it is mentioned that for 4K HDR processing, it is best to have a CPU capable of 17000 points in Passmark or above. I hunted around and found that the Ryzen 2700X CPU is a great fit. It has a Passmark of 17599 which you can see HERE. With the Ryzen 2700X being relatively affordable, it seemed like a no brainer. It is worth noting that the Passmark score detailed will be the Ryzen 2700X running at maximum performance through AMD's PBO technology (Performance Boost Overdrive), you can read all about how this works HERE. Arguably you can increase this score and transcoding performance with an all core overclock. However you will need to ensure your overclock is stable, otherwise your Plex server will be unstable. The GPU Plex can use Hardware Acceleration for transcoding. This means that if you can get a GPU into your server, then better for it as Plex will utilise the GPU for transcoding. GPU's due to their architecture are very efficient at processing video files, more so than a CPU. Now begins the journey of finding out the best GPU for that task. After doing some research Nvidia is kind enough to supply a matrix that details their GPU NVENC capabilities which you can find here: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-e...support-matrix A small snippet of the matrix The matrix above cover Pascal,Turing and Volta architectures. At the time of writing this article you can pick of a Pascal GPU for hardware acceleration cheaply. However the Turing generation of GPU architecture actually comes with a new and improved NVENC chip, so it made sense at this time to go for a Turing based GPU. Now, there is no need to have a super top end GPU to help with transcoding. As such I opted for the GTX 1660. It offers the latest NVENC capabilities while remaining affordable. I can tell you that when processing a 4K HDR File that the GTX 1660 Video utilisation never goes above 50% utilisation, that is not bad at all and certainly gives you plenty of headroom. Now let it be known that a GPU is NOT a requirement for a Plex server. If you have an adequate CPU, you will be fine. GPU's are just more efficient and can help out if you have a weaker CPU in your build. **NOTE** You will require a Plex pass subscription in order to use Hardware Acceleration. This can either be a monthly subscription or with a one off purchase (One off purchase is well worth it). Unfortunately using the free version will mean that your GPU will not be utilised. Storage In this day and age, we all know that SSD based drives are the way forward. Plex is no exception. I highly recommend that your Plex/Windows/Linux install uses an SSD. Why ? Well Plex creates temporary files for access when it is transcoding a file for streaming, the faster the drive the better, especially if you find yourself providing multiple streams at any one time, with an SSD you are less likely to hit an I/O limit whereby you start hitting performance issues. Ideally, if you have another SSD, you can use it as a dedicated drive for the Plex temporary files and keep those off of the main OS drive, but it is not 100% necessary. Another reason for SSD, Optimized files. With Plex you can create pre-transcoded files also referred to as Optimized Files on Plex. On Plex you are able to create additional copies of a video in different file formats. This is useful if you know you will be streaming to a device that cannot natively play one of your video files. The good thing about optimized files is that your Plex server will identify these and stream these directly to the client. As these files are pre-transcoded...this lessens the burden on your system. An SSD again in this case would be ideal simply for quick files access and once again, there is less chance of hitting that I/O limit if you are providing multiple streams. If you are wanting to go with the ultimate storage then you would want to Opt for M.2 SSD drives, but these do come at additional expense. I personally opted for a standard SSD using the Sandisk Plus 1TB, which admittedly I had laying around....so even better. RAM I am happy to say that RAM is a very small concern when it comes to Plex as it barely utilises any. While at the date of this article I would recommend most systems be built with 16GB of RAM, you can get away with 8GB. I personally built my Plex server with 16GB RAM, this was a personal choice as it allows me to utilize my Plex server for other purposes without worrying about running low on memory. On another note regarding RAM. You can choose to use some of your RAM as a RAMDISK. This can be best explained HERE as to what this is. If you are looking to create a super fast drive for Plex temporary transcoding files, this is also an option. that being said for my use case and for most use cases this will be overkill, however this is ExtremeHW, so if you are looking for the best of the best, then why not! .......................................................................................... So that concludes the journey of sourcing the best components for my build, and will hopefully point you in the right direction on how to identify the best components for yours ! So now to my build in its entirety CPU: AMD Ryzen 2700X @ 4.1Ghz all core. CPU Cooler: Corsair Hydro H75 AIO Motherboard: Asus ROG I-Gaming X570 (ITX) (Formerly the Asrock Phantom Gaming TB3, Had to be replaced due to terrible design flaw) RAM: 16GB Corsair Vengeance 3200Mhz DDR4 CL16 Storage 1: Kingston A2000 256GB M.2 (For Windows OS) Storage 2: Sandisk Plus 1TB SSD (For Plex transcoding temp files) Storage 3: Toshiba X300 4TB HDD (Used for Steam Cache, not Plex) GPU: GeForce GTX 1660 MSI Armour OC PSU: Be Quiet Power 11 600 Watt Case: Thermaltake Core V1 As you will see, I went for an ITX build. For me, I prefer that my Plex server be as discrete as possible while maintaining an element of power that will last me for the coming future. This is more easily done with an ITX build over an SFF or uSFF build, but each to their own. This build cost me approx: £650-700. You can most certainly go for a cheaper build with a lower end motherboard, a Pascal based GPU (over Turing) and 8GB RAM. A Plex server does not need to cost the earth and if done right can last you for years to come. I did not document every stage of my build as I felt that is not necessary for this particular article, but you can see below some images of my build. I enjoyed my latest build as well as writing this article, hopefully some of you Plex people out there will enjoy this read and hopefully helps you get a rough idea when it comes to your own server. If you would like to read another users experience and build process you may wish to check out Laithan's thread. All the best, E

I imagined that was what you were doing. That is fair enough, probably a little overkill but hey ...we chase performance right ! I have put my transcode folder on my standard SSD, should still suffice nicely for transcode temp files.

As it happens, I did a little searching and found a Windows solution...well it is not Windows but Linux in a VM such as you described. I found a fairly decent tutorial of the process in the below video, may give that a watch and see how far I get with it, but first thinking of getting a 4TB HDD to host the steam content as only have a 1TB and could get filled easily.

Wallets going to be in pain again.

Going to have to look for a Windows version as I would like to set this up on the same machine that I run plex from...which is a windows machine lol.

Yes, I was able to run 1900IF with my RAM OC. However I did hit some instabilities, but that was not necessarily down to me hitting an IF ceiling. My RAM native speed is 3200Mhz and I have pushed it a fair way. So I may have hit the ceiling to my RAM OC as opposed to the IF. What I can say is that the 1900IF on the 3950X is certainly do able as it will boot into windows and work for the majority of tasks, but I was doing RAM tests specifically and I was getting errors here and there, as such I had to wind my IF and my RAM OC a step back to achieve 100% stability.

Well when you are ready, we are here. I doubt much will have changed in the Ryzen landscape between now and then, aside from getting closer to the Ryzen 4000 launch.

Nice kit indeed, same as mine except mine was native at 3200Mhz (I did not go higher simply as I knew Zen+ had a ceiling that can easily be reached by overclocking). That being said I am able to OC this memory to 3733Mhz on the Zen 2 platform with the 3950X. Fantastic kits. It certainly improves performance by messing with the timings...sometimes a little more time consuming but all do able.

Ban as I am just so darn tired.

Nice selection of components. I actually used a very similar CPU cooler in the CFP. Cannot beat a Noctua ! My GPU should hopefully arrive today and will be about the size of yours, needs to be as my build is an ITX one (Mostly finished, will post a thread soon.) What are you going to use the RAM Disk for ?

Nice thanks ! It was put on the back burner but will be looking into this again soon. Will check out Lan Cache

Those are some nice results ! Certainly goes to show what a difference efficient RAM speeds can do. I certainly focus a lot more on the timings these days than I did back in the day.

Oh man that sucks ! Sorry to see this bud, get that sucker returned for a refund if you can.

....again that is part of the problem, just seeing the same old products on the market. Much prefer to see something new, even if it is not great, at least someone is trying lol.

Well that is good to know, I mainly use Chrome as it is and have no issues, just wondered if MS had managed to bungle it lol.

Windows XP directly to Windows 10 then lol...so far as approx timescale. Crazy when you think about it, but Microsoft will use the same model with Windows 10, just lots of feature updates until they decide on Windows 11

A nice win for ARM. I would imagine all the recent security issues with Intel CPU's also helped with Apples decision here. I wonder if we will one day see and ARM that is able to compete and rival AMD and Intel. Having a third wheel in the arena would certainly improve on competition.

A win for Facebook...A win for anyone else...hmmm

I need to download the new Edge Chromium version, anyone had any particularly positive experiences ?

If they do this then they will I would imagine put the RTX processing on a separate die. This way they can sell this as a separate product to the GTX crowd. Of course this will not just be RTX, as the die will be tensor cores, there are other applications to this tech other than games.