Cheap upgrade


ytddewqf

Recommended Posts

Hello all, 

 

I've been using unRaid quite happy for several months now since building my own "cheap" server, following;

 

https://youtu.be/OQ8g9OjfvGo

 

J4105B-ITX (£87)
8gb RAM (£19)
MSI GTX 760 (£35)
PNY 120gb SSD (£22)
Fractal Design Array R2 (£40)
Fractal Design PSU (£30)
WD 10tb HDD x2 (£800)

 

I primarily use my server for Emby streaming and have a lot of 1080p content. As I slowly upgrade to 4K, my server is unfortunately unable to keep up and refuses to play most high end content, certainly the recent Lord of the Rings 4K releases.

 

My question is, can anyone recommend a cheap upgrade path to bring my server up to speed. I'm not after setting any speed records, however I'm sure anything will be better/faster than my current setup.

 

A quick look around and an "ASRock B460M-ITX/ac Mini-ITX" board might do the trick. Relatively cheap, will mean I can keep the same case, but alow upto 64gb ram and something like an i5-10500.

 

Many thanks. 

Edited by LoneTraveler
Link to comment

Please elaborate more, as to why the current setup is not suitable for 4k content...because storing and transporting over a 1Gbps LAN connection is not an issue. IMHO the CPU and RAM alone doesn't count into it, at least for the part where unRaid is accountable for.

Are you using transcoding (is the MSI GTX 760 the bottleneck, I don't know)?

Are you sure that your player can actually process/display the 4k content (i.e. wrong movie containber format?)

 

 

Link to comment

Hi, 

 

I always ensure that I am not using any other service(s) (Nextcloud, Sabnzbd etc) at the same time as Emby (I've tried PLEX too) to give it the best fighting chance, however my CPU usage normally maxes out and if it drops, it only goes down to around 70%. I always play directly when at home and do not transcode. I must admit, I've just tried playing the 4K content on my tablet (Galaxy Tab S7+) in order to get a few screenshots for you of the issues, however things do play better (not perfect) on the tablet than my the TV's.

 

The TV's are relatively new models (75" Samsung and 83" LG) and so I thought they shouldn't have any issues playing direct content from the server. 

 

I just assumed it was my system that was the bottleneck as the simplest of tasks will use 50-80% of my total RAM, which is only 8gb.

 

Here's a quick screenshot of when just Sabnzbd is running.

 

 

20201219_121254.jpg

Edited by LoneTraveler
Link to comment

...I don't use or know sabnzbd, but I think this is just for downloading files and not touching the files content?

If your CPU gets maxed out on this, do you have enabled disk encryption, by any chance?

Or maybe you did enable to many download threads (if that is at all possible).

As you do seem to have a cache drive as well, this should not impose such a load on your system, I think.

 

Regarding emby (which I don't use either), the transcodinbg could take place without you knowing, depending on Source (codec for audio and video) and destination capabilities along with the video/audio bandwidth needed. Even if only the audio codec (I believe Samsung TVs don't support direct HD Audio, but AAC or AC3) is wrong, transcodinbg will take place and yes, this can max out your little CPU easily.

 

Can you see someting in the logs from emby or sabnzbd, what actually is happening that might give a hint?

There are many mITX boaards that would physically fit...finding the right CPU would make the difference in your case then.

Also increasing RAM, as you just said...but if you really need more than 16GB, which is plenty for running unRaid and some dockers and no VMs, I don't know.

Edited by Ford Prefect
Link to comment

Thank you for taking the time to reply, I'll certainly look into Emby and any background transcoding that it may be doing. I'll review the logs also. 

 

I do have system wide disk encryption, could this be causing the spike in memory use? If that was the cause of all my issues, I could live without it as I encrypt my backups to Google nightly, however if it is only a small performance hit, I'd prefer to keep encryption and move forward with an overall system upgrade. 

 

Looking around on the CPU front, I keep coming across the i5-10500 as potentially the way to go, it seems to have the best price/performance ratio. 

 

Link to comment

...although the J4105 comes with hardware acceleration for encryption, my best guess is, that this is what results in a high CPU load....RAM usage will also be a bit higher. I do have an older AMD opteron 3350HE (4 cores) driving an encrypted array of 11 disks +1 cache....and without anything else RAM usage is approx 20% from a total of 16GB.

CPU load however goes up to 80/90% sometimes, during writing to the array.

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment
1 hour ago, LoneTraveler said:

Looking around on the CPU front, I keep coming across the i5-10500 as potentially the way to go, it seems to have the best price/performance ratio. 

...no chance for ECC RAM there, as intel skipped that feature for all 10thgen Desktop processors.

Also, transcoding using the IGP is currently not supported (yet).

For speed and future upgrades, I'd look into a MB with support of 2 NVMe-PCIe drives (for cache or high-speed pool), but I think an mITX might not have that.

 

Also, MB with S1200 often have a newer revision of the onboard i219-V NIC, which is only supported from unraid 6.9beta/RC onwards.

 

In terms of the pricepoint for i5-10400 vs i5-10500, i doubt that you would feel a difference in performance that is worth the money (25%, where i live) today.

 

  • Thanks 1
Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.