This is a great guide! If I didn’t already have 3 290s I might considering rolling one of these. Depending on my my NVR 290 does I might upgrade the cpu to a i3-9100…
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Don’t forget about PSU and Case into the cost unless you have one lying around.
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This is awesome. Hopefully my thread is what made you make this!! I finished picking out my build and while i went slightly off track it still follows this pretty closely! Makes me feel somewhat decent about mine
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Check this out…
Mini-ITX transcoder
Case: InWin B1 w/ 200W PSU - $85
Motherboard: Asus Prime H310I-Plus R2.0 - $95
CPU: Celeron G4900T - $38
CPU Cooler: Arctic Alpine 12 LP - $14
RAM: TeamGroup Elite 8GB - $30
Just add an SSD for OS/metadata storage.
Other chassis models are available.
- InWin BP655 w/200W PSU - $68
- InWin slim ITX w/150W PSU - $79
REALLY tiny mini-ITX transcoder
Case: Morex 557 - $50
PSU: Dell laptop 90w 19V DC PSU - $15
Motherboard: ASUS Motherboard PRIME H310T R2.0 - $95
CPU: Celeron G4900T - $38
CPU Cooler: Arctic Alpine 12 LP - $14
RAM: G.SKill 8GB DDR4 SODIMM - $30
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Hi all before I pull the trigger on parts I want to confirm if what I wanna do will work with the parts I’m planning to use. What I want this to be is Unraid Nas/PleX server using igpu to transcode but I’m not sure if two cores is enough to handle unraid and plex. Would I be better off with four cores?
Edit: Forgot to mention that at absolute max there will only be 4 streams.
Motherboard: Asus h310-c
Cpu: G4900T or 9100
Ram: 8gb Team Group Elite
Ssd: Inland 256gb
Lsi sas card (not sure which yet)
Are you going to run everything (Sonarr Radarr Plex) on the same machine? If you are then I would suggest the better cpu (@JDM_WAAAT actually suggested it to me). I just ordered all my parts for my Plex server running everything and I chose the i3 8100.
For the “Multi-tasking NAS” why go i5-9400T over i5-8500T?
They have the same TDP, core count, price, and igpu. But the 8500T has higher pass mark. Just curious if I was missing something.
Thanks for another great guide!!!
I’m not planning on running anything besides plex within unraid and I’ll probably have a raspberry pi for any dockers I wanna run which won’t be many.
I just wanted to confirm if those two cores were gonna be able to handle transcoding dts-MA for clients that don’t support it.
Main reason I was even concerned was because I read somewhere that unraid needs two cores and if that’s true then there won’t be any cores left for plex to use to transcode audio (unless that’s also handled by igpu?).
The i5-9400T is a generation newer than the i5-8500T, which I why I preferred it in the sample build. The performance difference between the two is marginal.
I’ll let JDM confirm it but I believe the 4900 would be fine to use for just transcoding. I planned on using it to transcode up to 5 streams at once but I also needed to run my other programs at the same time so I chose the i3-8100 for more power.
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So I am a little confused with this. Are these transcoders an external box that you would hook to …say your unraid server and somehow pass transcodes to it or are you also running plex on this same box?
So some of these boards have 6 PCIe slots, but a bunch of them are x1. What can anyone use 3 pcie x1’s for? All the 10gbe nic’s are x4 and higher.
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The transcoder runs on the plex server. Ideally you would use this separately from a NAS to handle only plex functions, while the NAS would store all your media.
Ok…so to do this I would uninstall the plex docker and install plex on a separate box. Then connect the transcoding box with plex on it to the unraid server, correct?
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That’s the idea, yes.
If you have an existing server, yes. If you want to upgrade or build an all in one box, it’s possible to do this through Unraid.
Generally, a dedicated box is convenient and cheaper.