So I’m in the middle of testing everything for the new TrueNAS Scale and this OS will allow PCIE GPU transcoding in docker. I’m looking at getting either a P2200 or P4000 for this machine. I do have a bunch of people who stream off my existing TrueNAS Core machine. everything is 1080p on the machine so down coding is what uses a lot of the cpu.
Is it worth paying the little more for a P4000 on ebay so I never have to worry about the amount of streams and really my only limit will be my upload speed?
I have a P2000 and have pretty much duplicated Byte My Bits results with running out of stream clients before running out of transcode stream hardware. Bandwidth on the other hand I do definitely still run out of (screw you Spectrum and your 15mbps max upload in a major city).
That’s good to hear. I ended up winning a referb p4000 for $500 yesterday. I figure this will future proof me for quite a while and until the build is ready for deployment when beta comes out I can use it for video rendering with my 1080ti
Just curious but what would be the difference in the number of streams between P4000 and P2000 and 1080p? Down the road, I am looking to set this up just not in the cards right now for me.
I have plex running on a FreeNAS box that I build using a threadripper so I could run multiple VM’s. More and more people are building machines with Ryzen and getting away from Intel so the whole iGPU has become a moot point.
Sure if you’re not using an Intel desktop CPU based system, then I would partially agree that a quadro might be a better option.
That being said:
I just performed cursory eBay search and the least expensive (buy it now) P2000 was listed for $399. The least expensive (buy it now) P4000 is listed for $560.
I might suggest someone considers buying an Tiny/Mini/Micro PC and running Plex from that. I’m sure you could find several systems with a UHD630 that are less expensive than a P2000.
Here is one example: HP ProDesk 600 eBay listing. This is less expensive than the P2000, and includes everything you need for an additional host in your stack.
Just a thought! The intel iGPUs are very impressive for Plex transcoding.
I know what your saying. And this machine probably is fine if you don’t need a ton of storage and your only using it for Plex.
I may be an outlier but I have learned that having multiple VM’s and being able to have lots of storage required quite a bit of ram and CPU’s. I started off with just running it on windows but as my media collection grew I grew into a WD NAS and then as I got more and more media I went for a prebuilt server. and out grew that quickly. That is when I realized if I got high end hardware I could offload a lot of the work my windows computer did to different VM’s with FreeNAS now TrueNAS. And since cutting the cord I use Plex as a DVR with my TV antenna and share it with my friends. So my Threadripper 2920X is getting plenty of a workout. So much of one I have also contemplated going to a Threadripper 2950X or a 2970WX just to have more processing power. But If I can reduce the CPU usage with a Quadro that would be my cheapest route.
Maybe I’m failing to understand something, but wouldn’t you just continue to use the TrueNAS host for storage and simply use the proposed intel host for Plex transcoding and nothing else? You could load proxmox or Ubuntu server and run plex server in a VM/docker/LXC. Then you can use the beefy Threadrippers for the rest of your VMs that need lots of CPU & RAM.
How many plex transcodes do you ever see at once? More than 20? More than 30? I’m not saying you shouldn’t go with whatever route you want to - but if you’re looking for the most cost efficient method than I still fail to understand how threadrippers and quadros are most cost efficient.
Bit of a thread revival, looking at moving my Plex from my QNAP over to my Proxmox host (was VMware until the silliness ) I’ve got a 1050ti in my QNAP TS-873A and it works well with transcoding 4K content to various devices when on VPN etc. Upload bandwidth is currently 50Mbps, but will hopefully by 900 by the end of the year if Toob get their build sorted.
Looking at getting a NVIDIA Quadro P1000/P2000 card to install into a Dell PowerEdge T340.
Did also consider using a Dell Optiplex Micro PC with a modern Intel GPU for the purpose, but I’d rather run an Ubuntu VM within a hypervisor and pass-through the GPU.
I like the A2 cards, but they’re £££
I may even then install TrueNas Scale in the hypervisor and sell off the QNAP.
) I’ve got a 1050ti in my QNAP TS-873A and it works well with transcoding 4K content to various devices when on VPN etc. Upload bandwidth is currently 50Mbps, but will hopefully by 900 by the end of the year if Toob get their build sorted.