Hardware Options for upgrade (3 options)


Manwdaplan

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I have been in analysis paralysis on the upgrade of my Unraid server. I currently have a Threadripper 1950 and a Quatro P400. My server is mainly a Plex server, and a NAS. I do download movies and shows and convert them to h265 to save space. I have three 18TB drives (and have plenty of space so that is not part of the upgrade). Transcoding is not great with the p400. 

 

I am planning on moving my daily driver to a VM on UNRAID with a GPU allocated to it, and another for my son to stream games with. 

 

So this is what I am thinking about for upgrading. 

 

Option 1

Intel  i7-11700K and use onboard GPU. This is the safe option because I don't think there are any trouble using Quicksync with plex and unraid. I only get 8/16 cores, but for now this should be fine. This option seems to be the easiest, though I have no way of upgrading down the line.

 

Option 2

Intel i7-12700 and use onboard GPU. Now from reading the threads here, this is not the best option as right now its pretty buggy for transcoding. Also the motherboards for the 12th z690 boards seem to have issues with the onboard NIC running at 2.5GB. This has Big/Little options that these chips provide which I would like to play with. Also this has a option to upgrade in the future (DDR5, newer kernels that take advantage of the chips)

 

Option 3

AMD Ryzen 9 5950 CPU and a quadro A2000. This is the closest to my current build. AMD can have issues with VM and device allocation (Intel does it better but some people have no issues with AMD).  The A2000 should be very close to the P2200 that everyone uses for Plex, so this option also allows for good transcoding.  But this is the end of the road for AM4 so no upgrade paths.

 

So don't worry about price (I have all of the parts in stock right now, I run a computer repair business, so this stuff is in inventory). So which way should I go and why. I am happy to hear about your personal experience with any or all of these parts. 

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