CPU Recommendation

[serviam]

Looking to build a unraid server and trying to figure out what CPU is best for my use case (don't want to over or under buy).

 

I want to be able to transcode videos with Plex to 1-2 users (most content is original BluRay/4K BluRay backups or encoded 1080p files), and run up to 3 VMs (e.g. Volumio, Kodi, Win 10).  Ability to handle 1080p gaming on a VM (with passthrough) would be a plus, but not necessary if its going to drastically increase the price.

ECC would be a plus, and it must support VT-d and VT-x for VMs with USB/GPU passthrough.

 

Intel or AMD equivalent. 

 

Thank you.

[Tybio]

1080p gaming is almost trivial compared to transcoding 4k BluRays. 

 

Hit up the passmark scores, figure a 1080p transcode takes 2000 passmarks per stream, and 4k is 4 times more data...and 265 being a BEAR to process and you are looking at north of 15-20k passmarks to do one stream at BEST.  The hardware offload for h.265 is just not there yet and the data in a 4k encode is massivly larger than a 1080p encode.  Honestly, to transcode one 4k stream you are looking at a minimum of an i9 or a TR 1950...and even then some 4k blu rays will buffer and have issues.  Perhaps one of the newest high end Xeon's in a dual cpu setup could give you reliable transcoding, but at the moment I haven't heard of anyone having success with it.

 

There are threads about this on this forum and the Plex forum, I'd search around before making it a requirement.

 

Outside of that, everything is rather tame, I'd say anything that gets you 12k+ passmarks and has enough cores to divide between the VMs should be a good start, perhaps as low as 10k.  However 4k are gone off the top from transcoding the 1080p, so look at the passmark scores and figure out what "CPU worth of power" you want for each VM, add up the total with the 4k for transcodes and leave 1 or 2 k for the OS and that should help you isolate the level of CPU you want to start with.

 

[tdallen]

I agree with @Tybio.  Ultimately I think all 4k transcoding will be hardware assisted in some form, rather than the brute strength approach we apply to 1080p.  But the standard approaches aren't there yet.  That said you're in a tough spot.  You want a lot of cores for those VMS, which puts you in server/workstation level chips.  But you want HEVC support for 4k, which means Kaby Lake or newer.  I'm not sure you can get both in the same package right now.

[serviam]

Thanks for the replies. Thinking about the 4K media I have I would only actually want to direct play this content locally on my network. I won’t actually be transcoding it to stream. 

[ashman70]

I should think any hex core CPU would be fine, even the new i5 8400 coffee lake CPU would be a good choice.