Server build

[zyfinity 15]

Hi, I am planning on building a new server for emby, whats a cheap cpu (around $90 USD) that can transcode as much streams as possible, i was thinking about either a ryzen 3 2200g or pentium g5500, the g5500 has the UHD 630 graphics and has quicksync, i was wondering how many HEVC 10bit to h264 transcoded streams i could get out of it, or if the ryzen was better, im also wanting the server to be fairly power efficient aswell so i would rather not get an old workstation and pop in a gpu, i searched for g5500 transcoding results but didnt really get any proper results (same with the ryzen) if anyone has either of these CPU's or even similarly priced CPU's then please tell me the max concurrent transcoded HEVC H265 to H264 transcoded streams it can handle.

[rbjtech 4265]

Too many unknowns to give you an exact answer - but looking into this myself recently, Intel QuickSync with a UHD 630 appears to be the best 'bang for buck' in both $ and low power consumption - managing at least 2-3 HEVC to H264 streams @ 1080p.   I think there are a couple of threads on this, so may well be worth doing a search... 

[pgriffith 65]

I think CPU encoding has less 'issues' than GPU transcoding, so maybe a higher core count Ryzen might be the go? Happy to be refuted 

[Q-Droid 643]

I started this post to recommend an i3 for only a little more but holy crap, what happened to Intel CPU prices? At $120 the i3 8th or 9th Gen is superb for media but the current prices are nuts.

[zyfinity 15]

I'm really wanting to know how many hevc streams the g5500 can do, I currently have an it 9600k in my personal pc and the uhd 630 on it doesn't seem to encode ? Even with encode enabled on handbrake and it seems it's using the 630 for decoding but the CPU still spikes to 100% on all 4 cores, (this is transcoding 4k hevc to 1080p h264.

[Q-Droid 643]

I'm really wanting to know how many hevc streams the g5500 can do, I currently have an it 9600k in my personal pc and the uhd 630 on it doesn't seem to encode ? Even with encode enabled on handbrake and it seems it's using the 630 for decoding but the CPU still spikes to 100% on all 4 cores, (this is transcoding 4k hevc to 1080p h264.

 

That seems like high usage for what you're doing. My reference is an i3-8100 and I've tested it with 4k HEVC HDR -> 1080p h264 hardware accel in Emby. It was able to handle 4 simultaneous streams with throttling enabled playing to bitrate limited "remote" sessions. I think it was 6 or 7 mbps each. The CPU wasn't at 100% until I tried a 5th stream and then it had problems keeping up. My guess is that since audio conversion still needs to use the CPU then a G5500 would not be able to do as much.

 

Emby does and Handbrake should encode h264 in HW. The (U)HD 630 CPUs support HW decode/encode of h264 and HEVC but the software has to be able to use it.

[PeteLocky 22]

I was going to build a server too but in the end performance versus cost (operational not just purchase) I bought a ds918+ currently only have 22tb tho but it's perfect!