You can get coffee lake i9 cpu’s that have 8c/16t and are lower cost than their Xeon counterparts. Coffee lake i7 are 8c/8t and are even lower cost. I have a large UNRAID 16c/32t 256GB RAM box and currently running plex in a container. Currently building a HP 290 ($120) [Official] HP 290-p0043w Owner's Thread that comes with a coffee lake dual core 3.2ghz celeron that can encode/decode 21 1080p streams at a very low power draw. I am going to move my plex server to this box and connect via 10G to my UNRAID box for media access. This will allow me to move this currently inefficient CPU bound process off of my unraid box and potentially either move to a more efficient unraid box or use those cores for other tasks.