Looking to upgrade CPU on new build


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So I just threw together my old NAS and put unraid on it to try it out and see how I like it and I haven’t touched the 96GB of RAM, the drive speed and NIC speeds are all being limited by something and im pretty sure it’s my two old CPUs. They are E5603s and with sonarr, radarr, plex, sabnzbd, and a half dozen other dockers running it gets sluggish when I go to stream. What’s a cheap-ish upgrade for those two CPUs that will be plug and play with my LGA1366 chipsets?

 

thanks in advance loving the unraid community so far 🤗

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A single Xeon E5603 has a passmark rating of ~2300 - two of them are slower then an old i3-4130 (passmark ~5300).

Single Thread Rating: 675 passmarks. This platform is outdated.

Not enough power for all the work.

 

For comparison: My "old" i7-3770 from the year 2012 has a Single Thread Rating of 2068 and an overall passmark of 10005.

I would at least recommend an i5-8400 or something similar - but you have to change MB and RAM too...

Edited by Zonediver
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5 minutes ago, SnickySnacks said:

Nobody is going to point out that he's running two emulated parity drives?

That's got to slow you down a bit, I'd imagine, since writes are going to spin up and read the whole array.

Am I wrong?

Technically they are not emulated, they are being synced, but yes, performance will be very noticeably impacted, especially if still on v6.7.x, since all disks are being read do sync parity.

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30 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

Technically they are not emulated, they are being synced, but yes, performance will be very noticeably impacted, especially if still on v6.7.x, since all disks are being read do sync parity.

Yes the parity is still being built I know that will effect performance but I front loaded all the data onto the array prior to adding the parity disks to increase the speed which I could transfer onto the array. Before I added the two parity drives that are now building into the pool I was already having CPU in the red quite a bit just running the dockers and streaming simultaneously which is where I decided to investigate how crap these CPUs were. I found a website that shows all the LGA1366 socket CPUs and it looks like the two 5680s I found are the second best CPU (5690s being the best) that I can get. I am going to buy those two CPUs for 20 bucks each and see what the difference is. With the passmark score being 3x higher should I expect 3x more CPU performance or is it not linear?

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2 hours ago, Ortoch said:

With the passmark score being 3x higher should I expect 3x more CPU performance or is it not linear?

Oh, you should certainly see a difference.  With respect to streaming, about 2000 passmarks per 10Mbit 1080p stream is the recommendation if transcoding is needed.  With direct play media locally, of course, that is not an issue. 

 

You are not likely to see 3x more CPU performance in everything you do on the server, but, you might be able to do 3x as much simultaneously without the CPUs being taxed to their limit.  You'll have a lot more CPU overhead with the 5680s and the 5680s run at a faster clock speed as well.

 

It is also recommended that in normal NAS operations with unRAID about a 2000 passmark overhead is needed as well.  If you are running a lot of active docker containers, it may be a bit more.  4139 to 13340 will certainly give you a lot more overhead for simultaneous operations and you should see an improvement.  Streaming (especially if transcoding) and running a lot of dockers and doing normal NAS functions simultaneously would have had the 5603s sweating.

 

The only real "concern" is that the recommended single thread passmark rating for 1080p transcoding is between 1700-2000 depending on various factors.  The 5680 single thread rating is 1485.  If you direct play and don't transcode, not a real big concern.

Edited by Hoopster
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47 minutes ago, Hoopster said:

The only real "concern" is that the recommended single thread passmark rating for 1080p transcoding is between 1700-2000 depending on various factors.  The 5680 single thread rating is 1485.  If you direct play and don't transcode, not a real big concern.

I've never seen Plex transcoding limited to the speed of one thread, when watching CPU utilisation when someone starts a stream, every thread hits 100% on my server as Plex races to pre-buffer.

Edited by Spies
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24 minutes ago, Spies said:

I've never seen Plex transcoding limited to the speed of one thread, when watching CPU utilisation when someone starts a stream, every thread hits 100% on my server as Plex races to pre-buffer.

Can't say that I have either.  That is just an often-quoted Plex recommendation which is why I am not sure how big of a "concern" it really is. 

 

My first CPU in my current server was an i5 with an ~1800 single thread rating and I never saw any transcoding issues.  Lately all of the CPUs I have used are above 2000 for a single thread so I don't even think about it.

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