June 27, 201610 yr I came from a FreeNas setup and quickly put together a MSI - A88XM-E45 (MS-7721) CPU: AMD A6-6400K APU system with 16G. Noticing cpu at 100% transcoding and wondering if switching up my cpu without breaking the bank is do able. Not sure if just putting in a A10 would fix things up without having to replace the motherboard or anything else. Any ideas would be welcome.
June 27, 201610 yr The A6-6400K has 2286 passmark. Plex says transcoding need 2000 passmark per stream so your CPU at 100% while transcoding sounds about right. I think you can just go to www.cpubenchmark.net and enter the CPU you entire to replace (assuming your motherboard supports it) and see how many passmark it has and it should (more or less) work as you would expect.
June 27, 201610 yr If you want to do Plex transcoding, I recommend starting with a CPU that has at least 4,000 Passmarks for one 1080p stream. Then you should be able to add additional streams at 2,000 Passmarks per 1080p stream. As you've found Plex likes a lot of CPU and can use more than the 2,000 Passmark general rule of thumb on a single stream depending on the source material, bit rate, etc. Your A6 doesn't have any overhead capacity to deal with spikes so it definitely would help to jump up to an A10. That said, an A10 isn't going to turn your server into a Plex transcoding monster - but if you get a high end one you'll give yourself some headroom for one or two streams plus basic NAS and Docker functions. It looks like your motherboard can handle the 6xxx and 7xxx APUs. FYI, my movies are full native BD Rips and I can max my 4,000 Passmark CPU on high bit rate sequences.
June 27, 201610 yr Author Thank you for the great replies. The charts say my ancient i7 2600k and AMD 1090T PCs will handle the trans-coding better or the same as A10, yikes. If I can do a silent swap with my daughters 1090T "Sims 3 machine" I may do that as the 950 GFX card does all the heavy lifting and I'll just switch that over. I don't mind upgrading the A6 but if the 1090T is close to the A10 then I can save some cash.
July 10, 20169 yr I know the feeling, I'm on a previous gen A6-5400K and I've picked up on the same. It sits at 100% for the first few minutes of any video that needs transcoding, then it jumps between idling and being pinned at 100%. My solution is to hold out until I can afford to chuck an E3-1230 Xeon and new board into my server. I've looked into upgrading to an A10-6800K, and considering they're still around the $140AUD mark, it's really not worth the money imo.
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