Dual P2000 vs Single P4000

[smokey7722 15]

Anyone have any direct experience with P2000's and P4000's to be able to give an educated opinion as to which direction to go?  I'm working on a new ESX build which will have one or two GPU's in it for Emby use and trying to decide which direction I should go in.  From what I am seeing, a single P4000 isn't exactly twice the performance of a P2000 so in theory dual P2000's should outperform a single P4000 (once Emby supports multiple w/load balancing) but we all know theories are just that and real life is probably the opposite.

 

 

Other specs of the system will most likely be a single Xeon Silver 4114 w/128GB RAM (Emby getting a good chunk) and a 10G network connecting to the storage array.

Edited January 3, 2019 by smokey7722

[mmmzon 0]

No personal experience, but I was looking for a different combo, i.e., a K2200 for H264 encoding and P2000 for H265 encoding, since they are both quite sufficient for dedicated tasks. Seems like nobody has tested multiple GPU with Emby to date - at least my searches come up empty. 

[mastrmind11 722]

 Seems like nobody has tested multiple GPU with Emby to date - at least my searches come up empty. 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/66990-new-server-build-gpu-transcoding/

[mmmzon 0]

It does seem like a single GPU setup ... the author had plans for multi-GPU build  

[MSattler 390]

Anyone have any direct experience with P2000's and P4000's to be able to give an educated opinion as to which direction to go?  I'm working on a new ESX build which will have one or two GPU's in it for Emby use and trying to decide which direction I should go in.  From what I am seeing, a single P4000 isn't exactly twice the performance of a P2000 so in theory dual P2000's should outperform a single P4000 (once Emby supports multiple w/load balancing) but we all know theories are just that and real life is probably the opposite.

 

 

Other specs of the system will most likely be a single Xeon Silver 4114 w/128GB RAM (Emby getting a good chunk) and a 10G network connecting to the storage array.

 

Dear God,  what kind of usage are you trying to support?

 

I'm running a Dell r720 with Dual Xeons.  My Plex VM has 24 vcpu's and 50GB of memory.  46GB of memory is used for /dev/shm where I point to for all my transcoding.

 

My P2000 is passed through to the VM as well.  

 

I have zero issues with my friends and family using this.  For shits and giggles I went ahead and had Emby play back 5 UHD Full Quality rips transcode to 1080p and my overall system load in the VM was 6.  So essentially out of 24 vcpu's I was fully utilizing 6.  So about 25% CPU utilization overall, and that is simply just for the audio transcoding for the most part.

 

I just cannot imagine for the life of me running a P4000 or Dual P2000's.  The only reason I would buy another P2000 is if I wanted to buy another R720, and be able to live migrate the VM from one physical host to another.  Short of that I cannot see myself needing it.

 

Max concurrent streams has been 12 streams, max transcodes 10, and zero issues.

 

If I were you, I'd look at going dual processor before going Dual P2000.   You are still going to need CPU for transcoding audio when needed.   Most of the load I saw in my test on the CPU's was audio transcoding.

 

Just my 2 cents, it's not worth much these days =)