are cheap quadros viable for budget multi stream encoding?

[Noobulon 1]

I'm trying to put together an emby server for my friends to use for movie night just like in olden times, but ye olde faithfull (fx 6300) in my home server isn't going to cut it for more than one transcoded stream (and my upload speed wouldn't handle it anyway).
So I'm trying to put together a cheap, lower power (a friend is hosting it, and it would be rude to give him a hot, loud, machine to deal with) server that can handle 3-4 transcoded streams at once of mixed quality.

Now for what's actually in the title, I noticed that you can get a quadro k2000 for a measly $40+shipping. How well would that work with a lower end cpu (like this pentium g3240 on my desk) for my needs?
Would it be worth it to get a k2200 instead (double the encoding performance for a little over double the price) for my use?
Would a dual core cpu be holding me back in the end anyway? (the only other things running would probrably be syncthing and maybe transmission, an nfs server if we're feeling exotic)
Should i give up and just use an i3 8100 instead with no dgpu

and for shits and giggles, what would it take to get a couple of 4k transcodes going?

other notes: the os will likely be fedora server, and the media is mostly stored as high quality hevc encodes

Edited December 23, 2018 by Noobulon

[Happy2Play 8292]

Have a look at this matrix, you will have to click quadro to expand the list in both encoding and decoding matrix.

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

Edited December 23, 2018 by Happy2Play

[MSattler 387]

So I have a P2000 that I am passing through to a Linux Ubuntu VM, and encoding and decoding works perfectly.   The only thing your CPU will still do is the Audio Codec decoding/encoding if required. 

 

The VM is a 24 vcpu VM, with 50GB of memory </dev/shm has 45GB and I transcode there>.   With utilizing the P2000, I was able to transcode 4 full quality UHD movies with DTS-HD/True-HD down to 1080P AC3, and my overall load was between 3 and 4.   At 4... that's roughly about 16.7%, and all of that was just the audio transcodings.

 

The cards works really well, and your only limitations cpu wise will be how much CPU you need to transcode audio.

[MSattler 387]

So I have a P2000 that I am passing through to a Linux Ubuntu VM, and encoding and decoding works perfectly.   The only thing your CPU will still do is the Audio Codec decoding/encoding if required. 

 

The VM is a 24 vcpu VM, with 50GB of memory </dev/shm has 45GB and I transcode there>.   With utilizing the P2000, I was able to transcode 4 full quality UHD movies with DTS-HD/True-HD down to 1080P AC3, and my overall load was between 3 and 4.   At 4... that's roughly about 16.7%, and all of that was just the audio transcodings.

 

The cards works really well, and your only limitations cpu wise will be how much CPU you need to transcode audio.

 

BTW, this is a P2000, and yes it is more expensive, Dell has them for about $350.   But it will handle 4k with no issues.

[Noobulon 1]

Have a look at this matrix, you will have to click quadro to expand the list in both encoding and decoding matrix.

 

https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-gpu-support-matrix

I'm aware of it, the streams aren't terribly quality sensitive so h264 should be just fine, but I'm a little worried about decoding as everything bluray or better will be in hevc. I'm not really keen on keeping h264 encodes around just for that.

 

 

 

BTW, this is a P2000, and yes it is more expensive, Dell has them for about $350.   But it will handle 4k with no issues.

$350 is still relatively obtainable, I'll be keeping an eye on that in the future.

 

 

For now I think I'm going to go for the 8100 mainly for its h265 support