New AMD with HW transcoding

[Bobby121418 17]

Hi,

I currently have an Athlon II running xpenology and Emby. Not a bad setup,  but transcoding is not great.

I'm looking to update to a more modern AMD processor that works well with Emby (& xpenology) and can do hardware based transcoding, including 4K if possible, given my broadband is crap!

Can you recommend a few decent AMD CPUs that would do the job? No need to go overboard. 

Anything else I need to consider?

Cheers

[Neminem 1518]

Get 1 with a Intel iGPU it will run circles around any AMD gpu when it comes to transcoding.

[Carlo 4560]

8 hours ago, Bobby121418 said:

Anything else I need to consider?

Cheers

Do you have room in you case to add a GPU?

Which Athlon II CPU do you presently have?

Caro

[Bobby121418 17]

9 hours ago, Carlo said:

Do you have room in you case to add a GPU?

Which Athlon II CPU do you presently have?

Caro

Its an Anthlon II X2 250.

I have GPU PCI card, the board also has a GPU. Is there a way to utilize these?

Thanks

[Carlo 4560]

What GPUs do you have available?

I looked up the specs on your AMD system and you're right, it's old and slow.  
Passmark 1168, 2 threads, PCI 2 max 16GB RAM

[Bobby121418 17]

12 hours ago, Carlo said:

What GPUs do you have available?

I looked up the specs on your AMD system and you're right, it's old and slow.  
Passmark 1168, 2 threads, PCI 2 max 16GB RAM

Its a 

Sapphire 11166-02-20R HD 5450 1GB DDR3 PCIE HDMI Graphics

[Bobby121418 17]

Any answers, suggestions?

Thanks

[Bobby121418 17]

On 31/01/2025 at 17:58, Neminem said:

Get 1 with a Intel iGPU it will run circles around any AMD gpu when it comes to transcoding.

How about a Core i7-10700K? Overkill?

[Luke 42077]

6 hours ago, Bobby121418 said:

How about a Core i7-10700K? Overkill?

Depends on what you're transcoding, how many users, etc.

[Bobby121418 17]

5 hours ago, Luke said:

Depends on what you're transcoding, how many users, etc.

Thanks Luke. Is there a way of working out how many simultaneous users, HD or 4K streams can be transcoded with these cpus. For example:

Intel 10700K

Intel 11700

AMD Ryzen 5600G

Many thanks

[Carlo 4560]

The two Intel CPUs would be ideal since they are both 8 core and support Quick-Sync.
The 11700 is slightly faster, uses less power, and has Intel UHD Graphics 750 on board vs UHD Graphics 630 on the 10700.

You should also check the following as well which ups the cores and graphics. These 4 CPUs should all be within $50 or priced from each other.

Intel Core i7-12700K - UHD 770 Graphics
Intel Core i9-12900K - UHD 770 Graphics
Make sure you don't get an "F" model which doesn't have the integrated GPU.

 

[weyon668 8]

On Youtube there are videos about some NAS with Intel Celeron J4125 CPUs, able to transcode about 6 to 9 1080p streams simultaneously, and at least one 4k. So a „big“ i5 oder i7 CPU should be more then enaugh. But most devices are able to play lots of formats without transcoding (smartphones, tablets, Fire TV, etc.).

Edited February 11, 2025 by weyon668

[DonMacaroni 54]

J4125 can do three 4K streams to 1080p with Tone mapping in HW, more than enough for home use.
Nowadays, transcoding becomes less and less relevant (mostly only audio) since even browsers have started supporting h.265.
So unless you have very old client devices, you should not worry about transcoding at all.

[Carlo 4560]

If you look around the forums, you'll see I've written many tips and tricks for Synology NAS boxes and the Synology 920+ in particular which has a Celeron J4125 CPU.

From firsthand experience, I'll tell you 6 to 9 1080p transcodes while doing a 4K transcode isn't something to expect as far as performance and would be more of a planned "made for video" situation where videos are carefully selected.

On the flip side, I can give you a "made for video" situation where this CPU can't transcode a single HDR video. Depending on the setup of the machine a J4125 may not have enough muscle to handle 2 live TV transcodes due to the IO,

The onboard QuickSync is going to be similar on an Celeron, i3, i5, i7 or i9 from the same generation but it's more than that. What instruction sets does each have, have many cores are available, how much cache, what's the core speed & bandwidth, etc. The cores are being used to run the OS and programs running on it. They are being used for any special disk access like mirroring's, RAID, BTRFS, ZFS, for queuing reading/writing to disk, including the optional use of NVMe drives as a disk cache. Same with managing bonded NICs, IP4 and/or IP6 and handling calculations for SSL of all packets sent/received over the NICs. Not to mention the work the cores do to move data from storage to memory, to and from the PCI bus, the GPU, the cache to Quicksync.

Short of using hardware with the ability to offload functionality from the CPU, the CPU is involved multiple times for nearly every byte of data that moves through the system. The number of cores available as well as PCI bandwidth can make a huge impact in overall performance.

If something needing transcoding can't be done entirely in the Quicksync hardware pipeline the bandwidth and core count of the CPU becomes a big factor. A typical example of this is often working with media using non-text subtitles. If the CPU is now a bottleneck because there isn't enough cores/threads available to do what's needed without adding latency the transcode job is going to fail.

Going from 2 to 4 cores will make a HUGE difference. Going from 4 to 8 cores generally will make a big difference. Going past 8 cores will make less overall difference in general.

There isn't a specific answer what's the best CPU as you want to factor in what UHD graphics it has, what speed the CPU runs at, what type of core and how many, the number of threads it handles and of course the cost (cpu, motherboard, RAM, etc).

The Intel 11700K the Op mentioned could be a great choice, but depending on parts that needs to be purchased the i7-12700K or i9-12900K both with UHD 770 Graphics could be a better investment depending on purchase prices.

[Luke 42077]

@DonMacaroni has this helped?

[Bobby121418 17]

Thank you @Carlofor a great explanation.

[DonMacaroni 54]

On 2/21/2025 at 1:53 AM, Luke said:

@DonMacaroni has this helped?

Nope, as I don't have any issues. 

But nevertheless, great explanation.

Edited February 27, 2025 by DonMacaroni

[Luke 42077]

@Bobby121418 has this helped?

[Bobby121418 17]

2 hours ago, Luke said:

@Bobby121418 has this helped?

Yes, thank you.