Dell PowerEdge R730 for Emby Server, Transcode Accelerator?

[Dizzy49 94]

LOOOOOONG story short, I'm replacing my current setup with a R730 and a couple MD1200s.

I'm going from an i7-7700 in my current setup to two E5-2697v4 and I was looking to add something to help with the transcoding, BUT I have ZERO idea what would be good.  I don't want to drop $1000 on a video card that will never output video.  Would something like a Tesla or Quatro work, or is a full blown video card better?

[Luke 37093]

Hi, we do have a lot of users here with Quatro's so I think you'd be fine with that:

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/search/&q=Quatro&quick=1

[Dizzy49 94]

Helps if I write/search for the correct thing... Quadro is the Nvidia card, Quatro is a HDHomerun thing

It looks like getting a cheap ~$200 RTX 3050 8GB or ~$400 RTX 3060 12GB may make more sense.  From the threads it seems like the Quadro cards in the same price range are equiv to 1660-2060.  I don't care if they are loud since it's in a server in a server closet far enough away from the theater that I can't hear it.

I guess alternately I get a "cheap" RTX 4070 and put my RTX 2080 4GB in the server.

How much of a difference does additional ram on the GPU make?

[Luke 37093]

It can make a difference especially when it comes to burning in subtitles or tone mapping. Generally speaking the more you expect to use transcoding the more you’ll probably want to invest in it. If it’s something you barely use then you can probably get away with going cheaper.

[RanmaCanada 345]

Why are you going to a server that is so power heavy?  That's an insane jump in power usage.  I do hope you are doing other things than just Emby on that server.  For the price of a video card, you could get a completely separate laptop (would need a USB C NIC Adapter) to do the encoding and hosting the server instance (not the files obviously) and said laptop would be far superior to any video card for hardware transcoding.

[rbjtech 4283]

11 hours ago, RanmaCanada said:

Why are you going to a server that is so power heavy?  That's an insane jump in power usage.  I do hope you are doing other things than just Emby on that server.  For the price of a video card, you could get a completely separate laptop (would need a USB C NIC Adapter) to do the encoding and hosting the server instance (not the files obviously) and said laptop would be far superior to any video card for hardware transcoding.

As you say, I guess really depends on what its being used for - but the lure of a proper (cheap) 'server' is great on the surface - you get a lot of 'tin' for your money - but when when you look under the hood - that 'server' from 2016 (7 year old technology) will get destroyed by a desktop CPU today, running on a fraction of the power - and if you go the intel route, the embedded (free) GPU will also largely be 'on-par' with any discreet GPU (as far as transcoding) as well - and not limited by dGPU memory !    An intel based laptop is a great all-in-one package for smaller installs but probably not recommended if you are going to be hitting it hard.

Circling back to the main question - why are you upgrading - where is the current bottleneck ?

Edited July 22, 2023 by rbjtech

[Dizzy49 94]

13 hours ago, rbjtech said:

As you say, I guess really depends on what its being used for - but the lure of a proper (cheap) 'server' is great on the surface - you get a lot of 'tin' for your money - but when when you look under the hood - that 'server' from 2016 (7 year old technology) will get destroyed by a desktop CPU today, running on a fraction of the power - and if you go the intel route, the embedded (free) GPU will also largely be 'on-par' with any discreet GPU (as far as transcoding) as well - and not limited by dGPU memory !    An intel based laptop is a great all-in-one package for smaller installs but probably not recommended if you are going to be hitting it hard.

Circling back to the main question - why are you upgrading - where is the current bottleneck ?

I've had all kinds of issues with the Norco case.  Backplanes dying and taking drives with it.  I have 24 bays, and only 16 of them actually work right now.  Replacement parts are non-existent at this point.  This is something I need to just work and be left alone for months or years (hardware wise).  I've shopped around a few places, and I don't trust eBay worth crap, I have been burned on eBay so many times and it's cost me well over $12k.  So it's worth the extra money to find an actual Renewed/Refurbished unit (as opposed to just USED), and several places include a warranty.  I'm checking out a place now that can load up most of the hardware, and the prices are really good, and I can get a 5yr warranty on all the hardware.  And they pointed out some possible hardware conflicts ie with the 2697v4 I can't have a video card, but the 2695v4 can, up to 2x300w.  The one I'm looking at is 130w.

It's used for a lot of home stuff, main one being Emby of course.  I also run a minecraft server for my daughter and her friends, taichidesk, and for work I run SQL server which I used a lot, and a VPN (partially because my omada controller went belly up on me last month).  I'll be running an Omada controller in a container.

I plan to use VMs for work and some other things as well.  And I'll play as time goes on.  Who knows, maybe I'll play with AI.  My father-in-law is a master photographer and has been fascinated by what AI can do.

[Dizzy49 94]

That said, I am open to suggestions.  I know I want to move my drives to some kind of JBOD box.  I was looking at MD1200, after two Norco boxes have died on me I don't want to go cheap.  It just needs to be able to take all my SATA drives.

I have an i7-7700k and a bunch of SSDs I can reuse along with a couple LSI HBAs.  I would prefer everything to be rack mountable.