Also is 1080p required? In all honesty, nearly all my videos are 720p because, luckily, when I'm watching a film/tv show the quality difference is small enough that I don't notice it on our TV because I'm not specifically looking for it, and everyone else can't tell a difference even if they are! If people can't tell the difference, then I'd drop it to 720p. Handbrake will do a better job than plex transcoder will, and then stream with no transcoding to the devices. IMO, if you're keen on keeping the source material, I'd transcode a separate copy of your videos specifically for streaming if quality is important. If anyone is feeling ambitious you may review the other builds I considered from here.Ĭlick to expand.I believe they have introduced hardware transcoding, not sure if it's a plex pass feature only at the moment or why are you transcoding and outputting 2 1080p streams? Where are they going to? What's the source material quality? Note I have limited my selection to those that are available from NewEgg.ca as I my experience is that once shipping for multiple vendors is included there is very little savings when sourcing from multiple sources. Cost $ 496 (all prices in Canadian Dollars)Ĭomments, suggestions, or compatibility errors?.I don't have a lot experience with cases and selected this one becuase I really like the Define R5

Case: $ 95 Fractal Design - Define Mini C MicroATX Mid Tower Case.PSU: $ 55 SeaSonic - S12II 430W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply.I am wondering if I'd do better to pair the CPU with a B250 motherboard Motherbaord: $ 71 MSI - H110M PRO-VD PLUS Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard.

CPU: $ 85 Intel - Pentium G4560 3.5GHz Dual-Core Processor.

As this computer shall be on 24/6 I want to keep the power consumption down. Using Plex’s guidelines I will require a CPU that scores 4000 (2x2000/1080 transcode stream) on Passmark’s benchmark. Unfortunately, there isn’t an exact way to know if the computer will meet these need as it all depends upon the source media. My goal is to build a reasonably cheap but powerful computer capable of a handling 2 1080p transcoding streams.

I am planning a dedicated Plex media server.

Plex media server build cpu xeon