Do you NEED a Fast CPU with a P2000? (Ryzen)

[@christophersmith108]

A lot of work, resulting in yet another concise, fascinating, information dense video. Thanks!

[@SlothTechTV]

thank you so much this really means a lot It keeps me going :D

[@brandonculler8550]

Great video, would love to see the same chart with 4K transcodes. I think Jason’s went from 12 down to 3 or less... but with an old CPU.... Reason being most of my library is 4K but there are times when other clients in my house have to transcode the video.

[@blindsay]

As pretty much every reviewer says, transcoding 4k is a bad idea, it is phenomenally demanding and the HDR tonemapping issues as well. Personally I have a 4k library just for myself and then a separate library with just 1080p copies but there are a few different ways to tackle this. Also if they are in your own house, buying clients that support 4k is probably easier. I have Nvidia shields myself

[@Limitbreakur]

I transcode 4k all the time, the trick is to decode using hardware but encode using software. Simply check the "Use hardware acceleration when available" box and keep the "Use hardware-accelerated video encoding" box unchecked. the demanding part of 4k is really the decoding, the encoding takes far less power and the cpu can handle it just fine. edit: make sure the gpu you use can handle decoding 4k, you can use a 1050ti or a gtx 1650 but they are limited to 2 simultaneous decoding, you'd need a quadro for more.

[@DansDrives]

Your videos have saved me a ton of money and made my users so happy. Thank you so much for doing this work for all of us. I need to send you a Christmas card or something.

[@Felix-ve9hs]

You Literally just made the follow up Video to the one Byte my Bits just posted one hour ago 😂 He did a Video with the AMD FX 6350 and a P2000, but the CPU Bottlenecked it to 12 Streams

[@SlothTechTV]

I recorded this a few days ago and edited and uploaded it yesterday.. he put his video up this morning and i just watched it lol .. yeah weird i agree but you cant record and edit, and upload content like this within 2 hours ..

[@SlothTechTV]

slothtechtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/uploaded-7-7.png < proof

[@Felix-ve9hs]

@@SlothTechTV :^) I know it was a coincidence, no need to worry

[@SlothTechTV]

@@Felix-ve9hs lololol

[@JDMeister]

This video is so much better, they not are even comparable.

[@DudleyPRushmore]

In one of your videos, I believe you said that the P2000 wasn’t fully compatible with Linux. It would encode but not decode, I think it was. Any idea how to make it fully functional or if it will support it in the future?

[@soundfire79]

We love subtitles at our house but unfortunately, Plex does not. HW trascoding of PGS subtitles on an H.264 MKV file is not supported, so it must be software transcoded by the CPU along with the audio. The Plex Android player is the only one I have tried that can direct stream with PGS subtitles (others - Roku, Chromecast, iOS). The dual E5-2640 V3 Xeons are almost completely utilized with only 6, 20mbps, H.264 transcodes with audio and PGS subtitles being transcoded by the CPUs. I am running a Quadro K2200 and it works great for HW transcoding (based on your recommendation), but it can not hw transcode subtitles so its utilization is very low. I do not have enough clients to see how many streams it would take to max out the Quadro. Running 6 HD streams with subtitles turned on at the same time will never happen for me, but it is a case for needing a faster processor. I have played around with SRT subtitles, but they are a P.I.T.A. By the way, have you noticed why Plex seems to randomly choose which CPU to software transcode audio and subtitles with? On my system, sometimes is starts with Core 2 on CPU 0 until there are about 2-3 streams then starts using CPU 1, and other times it starts with Core 2 on CPU 1.

[@blindsay]

I had a 7800X with a P2000 for a while and yeah as you mentioned it was because i was running other VM's in it. Recently I have been using a DS1019+ NAS and I have been really impressed with it considering the cpu it has, i can get about 6 transcodes at the same time. The only things i have noticed with the NAS (being fairly picky) is while i do have SSD cache setup on it, you cant really force something to stay in the cache, I rely on the fact that the more frequently accessed items like my plex metadata should stay there, but i cant force it to. So when I am on a client and scrolling really fast it doesnt keep up quite as well. Also videos dont start quiet as fast. The only thing i didnt like (but not unexpected) is when it encounters a video that cannot be hardware transcoded it falls flat on its face and cannot do anything. Considering the NAS was only a little bit more than the P2000 by itself, i am very happy with it for the money, if you want a pretty easy to setup and reasonably power server then it is a great option. That said i do want a bit more power personally so i was thinking about using a NUC, that way i can use the NAS for the mass storage and then force the plex meta data to live on the NUC (which would have an nvme drive). Also I found out that my vpn traffic is being bottlenecked by the performance of the cpu in my NAS

[@dabigi]

OMG another plex video? Thank You! Love this content, you provide much more details than other channels. Have to keep the Plex community together. Keep up the great work! And Thanks Again!

[@SlothTechTV]

Thank you for the encouragement and I agree there aren't a lot of plex KZbin channels.. it's unfortunate but I love the few that we do have.

[@NorthTowerDesigns]

Per usual, you're right there with the research and straightforward info when everyone needs it. Thanks, Alex! You've helped confirm my theories once again! Keep doin what you do.

[@themacjunkie]

Great video, keep em coming. I have a suggestion though, there are a ton of videos benchmarking the number of simultaneous transcodes but none that will benchmark your network bandwidth. I'd be curious how fast of an internet connection you will need if you want to serve 27 1080p transcodes over the internet. Just a thought.

[@SlothTechTV]

great point! thanks for the feedback!! :)

[@SlothTechTV]

i go over this slightly in the starting a plex server video but you're right it should be covered better.

[@andrewbobulsky3505]

@2:42 you've got a knack for drilling down to the most critically important data for Plex server sizing. Bravo :)

[@SlothTechTV]

thank you so much for the encouragement! damn. This is the kind of comment that makes me excited to put out more videos :)

[@jonnie0rtiz]

What do you think about keeping all of the media on a NAS and pointing a plex server to it vs. having an all in one solution like the one you have with a single unraid machine? I'm trying to keep things as simple as possible while keeping the setup easy to maintain. Great video as always!

[@SlothTechTV]

We all start somewhere man! Honestly -- I don't see anything wrong with a NAS usually the bottleneck is the spinning disk anyway performance wise. What Kind of nas were you thinking about ? Thanks for the encouragement too! :D

[@jamescox5638]

Oh man, this is the route I am about to take my self. I low powered pc just for a nas (i7 2600) a 10gbe card and some pciex1 for extra data connections and a Plex server with a r7 1700x with a few nvme drives. Maybe adding in a p2000 or maybe a 980 ti with the driver patch if it performance better in the p2000 in a Windows server 2016. I feel like this is a good way to go about it so you can make full changes to one system and not screw up the other

[@jimlong4208]

This is the question I have been struggling with, where do I get enough PCIe lanes to support the cards I will need in the box? Trying to keep the full 16x lanes for the Quatro card is a challenge when I also have a 10GbE 4x card and the SAS card with 8x lanes. Even if I get a motherboard with built-in 10 GbE, because of the two remaining cards, the two PICe slots will default to 8x/8x for both intel and AMD. Maybe 8x is fine for the Quatro? I really don't know. Because of the PCIe lane restrictions I have been looking at Threadripper for my next upgrade.

[@SlothTechTV]

I ran into this issue too, and you are right you don't need 16 lanes a quadro seems to get full performance at 8x the typical pcie bandwidth i see on mine usually peaks at 1-2Gbytes/sec even with 10-15 transcodes.. so it might work even fine on 3.0 4x.

[@andrewbobulsky3505]

@@SlothTechTV That's actually an interesting experiment. You could use a riser to force a p2000 into a PCIe x1 configuration and see how it handles :)

[@soundfire79]

If you want more PCIe lanes, go Xeon.

[@blindsay]

@@soundfire79 Or AMD... But to the OP, as mentioned x8 is fine for the GPU

[@PusterPL]

The A2000 is a transcoding beast, 11 4k hdr tone mapped transcodes, and a lot more if 1080p 🎉❤ can highly recommend

[@maoandmi]

Dude your coverage on plex server is comprehensive!

[@MarcoDM1571]

Fantastic video! If one watches them all it's then super easy to choose the parts to build your perfect Plex Server.

[@professorh8398]

I was thinking about a ryzen 3600 and quadro 2200 build for 3d modeling. Is that wise? 3d modeling relies heavily on single core performance.

[@darius6845]

here is an idea how about a cpu only test, no hardware transcoding at all with $200 ish dollar cpus; r7 2700, r5 3600, i5 8400/8500, i3 8100, any xeon around this price

[@SlothTechTV]

Great idea. 👍👍👍

[@scornillez]

another great video! I just added added the p2000 to my old lenovo desktop with an i7-4790. I get heavy pixelation just playing 1 session on an x265 1080p (HEVC main 10) file being transcoded to 1080p (h264). when i turn off HW transcoding. the video plays perfect but ofcourse my cpu jumps to 100%. I put back the old GPU that was in there (geforce gt 720m) and the movie plays fine without any pixelation and HW transcoding on. everytime i uninstalled either gpu i used a program called "Display driver Uninstaller". with the p2000 and just 1 session at a time, i got pixelation on appletv, firetv, roku, and on chrome on the same computer the PMS is installed. do you think i missed something?

[@SlothTechTV]

This is interesting i've never seen this kind of quality loss -- the fact that your 720m doesn't experience this same problem makes me wonder if you actually have a defective p2000 .. that is not normal behavior. can you test on a clean windows install with the same test file? the P2000's quality should be close to indistinguishable from software/cpu transcoding.

[@scornillez]

@@SlothTechTV i was thinking defective as well. when i received it from amazon the box and insides looked really sketchy. i forgot to mention it was on a clean Windows 10 install as well and only plex, chrome, and the nvidia drivers were installed . i tried on 2 different computers. the i7 4790 and the other with an AMD 8350 and got the same result on both.... i thought i just wasnt installing the nvidia drivers correctly or missing a driver.

[@rcast05]

I have a AMD A8-7600 (4C @ 3.1GHz) (2014 Tech), but I am planning to add a P2000 mainly for 4K transcodes. My 1080p's plays Good. I am not planing to have more than 3 transcodes at a time. Can I just add the P2000 or I have to upgrade my system as well?

[@Ky-vv8nj]

Cool. Wanted to take the load off of my 3960x by using a p2200. Let the thread ripper handle some VM's and what not.

[@Alphahydro]

Interesting. So instead of upping my cores, I could pop in a P2000 or higher and use my CPU cycles for my other VM’s? Interesting indeed.

[@MrFido7up]

you got a statment wrong: minute @01:05 you say you won't get any better performance from pairing 3900x with P200 than a ryzen 5 2600 let me tell you something you forgot to include in that sentence, the performance of plex when you add new content to it lets say 4k HDR TV series of like many episodes it will generate thumbnails and that will use all the cpu 3900x 100% to and a tiny bit of p2000, so the 3900x will complete that much faster than ryzen 5 2600. also now newly added the feature to detect intro's but not sure what that will utilize :)

[@cheerbeerification]

Your comment that Plex won't switch to software encoding is patently false. It will not switch with unrestricted cards, which is the case with the P2000. If you are using a restricted card then it will switch when it hits the limit, but only for encodes. Decodes are unlimited on all Nvidia cards as far as I can tell. Anyways, combine a restricted card with driver unlocking and you can actually set the number of encodes before it switches to software encoding. This combined with the lower cost of the restricted cards make them much better for Plex than expensive quadros. I also don't believe cuda cores make much of a difference when hardware transcoding, but I haven't been able to test this theory yet. I'm going to test a P400 vs a GTX 960 in the coming days to test this.

[@blindsay]

A P2000 really isnt that expensive, also some people dont want to deal with the driver unlocks, it just works out of the box with the P2000 - Cuda cores do not really effect it, the amount of NVENC chips does though - developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

[@theo610]

Great mate love your videos. Regards from the UK

[@Reynieri]

what happen if you want to use dual P2000 with the Ryzen. would this double the number of transcodes ? or its gonna be like the SLi where you get like 15%/20% performance gain ? in games.

[@jesseg8298]

If I'm strictly using a server for Plex, do I even NEED a P2000? Wouldn't an i7 10300 be enough? It's Passmark score is 19k. Ideally, I would like to have the option to transcode at least 2 4k streams simultaneously. But most of the time I'd be direct streaming.

[@joemann7971]

If you mean the 10700, (since the 10300 is an i3) then it might be capable of of 2 4K streams, if that's all the system is doing. If you're going to do direct streams, even my old i5 2500k was capable of many 4K direct streams, as direct streams hardly tax the CPU. You could always add a P2000 later if you think you need it or you need more 4K streams. I think the P2000 can handle around 5 4K streams, and it could free up the 10700 for other stuff, if you later plan to use that machine for other stuff.

[@umoraes2009]

1080p h265 to h264 is ok. Can you please test those small 4K Ripped movies at 21Mbps to 1080p h264 ? I know 4K remux makes no sense 😁

[@SlothTechTV]

I'll do that :) thanks for the suggestion! 1080p @21mbps/highbitrates is actually a usecase i didnt think of. thank you for the feedback!

[@lakorai2]

P2000 is the only way to go if you are running Plex on Windows or Linux in a VM (esxi, ProxMox etc). nVidia disables pci passthrough drivers on GeForce cards with virtualization and enforces only 2 decode or encode hard limits on all consumer cards.

[@TheDwchan]

I am looking into using the new AMD 4750G which has an onboard APU. Given the server main function is NAS first, and plex second, I assume this would be sufficient. However, given my CPU has a GPU on it, would adding the P2000 later works in my case or it will ignore it?

[@robertt9342]

Is there a better, cheaper option than the P2000 for transcoding support?

[@Felix-ve9hs]

So a CPU with 4 Cores + 8 Threads or 6 Cores should be enough to max out a P2000 :)

[@SlothTechTV]

Roger -- don't need anything crazy.

[@MPowerMotor]

Sloth Tech TV would you recommend in terms of CPU to match up with the P2000 for Solidworks?

[@bendymcbendface3206]

I would love to see how many transcodes the different cpu's could handle if they had to transcode not ac3 audio but dts hd-ma or dolby atmos...

[@blindsay]

Yeah that would be interesting, I have mostly just ignored audio but i wonder if there is any noticeable performance impact depending on what type of audio it is

[@Pabula]

I think the perfect CPU for P2000 would be a i7 1065G7 but if only we could see a motherboard manufacturer build one mini/micro atx with it.

[@dhowser2008]

What about running dual x5690's ?

[@SlothTechTV]

Sorry for not including these, i think 2 x5690's can easily handle a P2000. I don't think theres any reason they would bottleneck one.

[@aledantas2k10]

Dude. Why do you always have 1 hand under the table? Are you bashing one out?

[@copiernerds]

Great Video - Thank You

[@SlothTechTV]

thank you!!

[@Jmoney4life1]

Well it’s been months so what about AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X & PNY Quadro P2000

[@sassan428]

I'm conflicted, I'm looking into building the most power efficient plex server that is able to also handle maybe 10 transcodes at maximum. Would an i3 quadcore suffice? Or would the new Ryzen 3400g be a better option?

[@lucasgautier8373]

Sassan I believe that Plex can only support intel iGPUs or Nvidia GPUs for hardware transcoding. I’d recommend any intel i5 or i7. Use the intel GPU for hardware transcoding

[@sassan428]

@@lucasgautier8373 people have been using the ryzen igpu on Windows.

[@plexnbrown760]

Good points. Bang for buck right now in my opinion is socket 2011

[@SlothTechTV]

I would agree -- those 2011's are going to come down even more once the market is filled with people buying ryzen chips. Those 3000x series ryzen 9's are insane multicore and single core wise. That should drive the price down even more for 2011 and 2011-2

[@plexnbrown760]

Yup I have 2xe5 2650L v2 in a blade server I’m slowly building up to be my main rig. I opted the L route for power consumption. Knowing full well it’s over kill for my needs right now and going new makes no sense for me to go higher. But I’m enjoying the build like a car guy enjoys his hot rod.

[@SlothTechTV]

@@plexnbrown760 I had a pair of those 2650l v2's in my build too -- i upgraded to 2690 v2's because i have the cpus doing the decode workload and gpu doing encode. Otherwise those 2650L cpus were GREAT .. they were so much more power efficient... i miss that. lol

[@raresolid]

This is bang on!

[@JustARandomSomething]

I only have a E3-1240 V5 in my server, no gpu at present.

[@dylankempker]

Thank you so much!

[@SlothTechTV]

thank YOU! :)

[@dylankempker]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/fqXZmZeVq6p1jqs I also follow BMB interesting video

[@ssaini5028]

need a desktop variant of the Quadro T2000

[@DrDwizz]

Anyway you could do a video on how to setup a reverse proxy for Ombi in Windows??!! No one has a video on this....Help! Thanks, your channels awesome!

[@qtran101]

So these were 1080 transcodes or 4K?

[@SlothTechTV]

H265 1080p with ac3 audio Transcodes to: H264 1080p AAC I think the source bitrate was around 5-6mbps but I'd have to double check.

[@qtran101]

Sloth Tech TV is in depth 4k transcoding testing next?

[@nandurx]

Who really need 27 stream at time? 5 or 10 family members? Am i missing something?

[@joemann7971]

I do believe the more streams it can do, the faster it can also transcode for things like download into on your phone for watching offline on the go. Not to mention, I think the 27 transcodes is for 1080p. I think 4k transcodes is only like 4-5. So, even if you don't care to have 27 people watching at the same time, maybe you want all your movies in 4k. 4-5 streams can easily be utilized by a family of 5 to 10 members.

[@kevinlind7298]

I'm using an m2000 with 2 e5 2430 v2's

[@asmcriminaL]

I like your channel for some reason... The guy BytesAndBits or whatever his username is, I really don't like him. For him, it's always "Plex this and Plex that..." He even wears a Plex shirt. He swears that Plex is the greatest thing in the world. I guess I like the hardware in your videos. It might be beneficial to do hardware videos too. Meaning builds and things of that sort. Educating people on computer components and things of that sort. For example, WHat is the difference between the i9 and the i7? What are cores or threads? How does Hz affect performance? I think that would good. It doesn't have to be on this channel. You could possibly make another one.

[@abdullahtiry6394]

Can Nvidia K2000 gpu transcode 5 video in 4K?

[@PusterPL]

No

[@jacj2490]

Great Video Appreciated deeply. I noticed, If PLEX is going to transcode Audio & Video. Audio will be CPU while Video will be HW. Thus, it worth having a powerful CPU. At least this is my experience

[@jamescox5638]

what would happen if you added a 2nd P2000?

[@SlothTechTV]

Unfortunately nothing -- Plex won't use multiple gpus as of today

[@jamescox5638]

@@SlothTechTV do you think you could do a video of using a 980ti with the patch on a Windows device? And maybe for good measure the p2000 also? I would love to see someone do that cause I can't find any videos that are showing this off. I am much more proficient in Windows than I am in Ubuntu or any other operating system. And would love to hear why you decide to go with Linux over say like server 2016 or newer.