SOLVED CPU that supports Plex hardware acceleration for Dell R720xd?

[Daisuke]

Anyone know if there are any CPUs supporting Plex hardware acceleration for Dell R720xd? Thank you.

 

[Ericloewe]

No, there are no Xeon E5 (or E7) CPUs that have an iGPU.

 

[Daisuke]

Thanks @Ericloewe, what Dell R7xx would have a CPU supporting Plex hardware acceleration?

 

[HoneyBadger]

Thanks @Ericloewe, what Dell R7xx would have a CPU supporting Plex hardware acceleration?

None of them will, the R7xx series is a dual-E5 platform and there are no Xeon E5 CPUs with support for Intel Quick Sync transcoding. I believe that's exclusively limited to the single-socket consumer/workstation chips.

Your easiest approach for your R720 would likely be adding a low-end NVIDIA GPU for transcode duties. I'm not sure "how low you can go" but the GT1030 is a low-profile single slot solution that technically only uses PCIe x4 and 25W.

 

[Daisuke]

Your easiest approach for your R720 would likely be adding a low-end NVIDIA GPU for transcode duties.

That's great info. So technically, I add the GPU and Plex 4K hardware transcoding will be automatically available, once I enable the setting in Plex? If anyone went this route, please share your experiences, what GPU model you used. Currently looking at NVIDIA Quadro M2000.

Thank you for your input, I don't have a lot of experience in the GPU area.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Having never used Plex transcoding I can't answer it definitively - but it seems that the GT1030 lacks the required NVENC hardware encoder.

From doing a bit of searching, there seem to be two schools of thought on this. The first is the use of a supported NVIDIA card in the system (which needs the NVENC hardware) and the second is devoting a separate small-form-factor machine to Plex, using an Intel 7th-gen or higher consumer CPU with the HD 630 iGPU. Quick Sync performance and quality are reported to be significantly improved with that generation of hardware.

As far as which option is better, I would have to defer to someone with actual experience.

 

[Ericloewe]

I imagine one of the upcoming Intel GPUs would also work well, once the drivers are ironed out.

 

[HoneyBadger]

I imagine one of the upcoming Intel GPUs would also work well, once the drivers are ironed out.

The results so far seem to indicate that encode is great on even the entry-level A380 - the driver woes are in more gaming related workloads.

Of course then you face the challenge of physically fitting the GPU into the server and supplying it with power, which can be challenging in rackmounted machines.

 

[Ericloewe]

The results so far seem to indicate that encode is great on even the entry-level A380 - the driver woes are in more gaming related workloads.

Sure, but I suspect that there will be general wonkiness while the drivers get polished for Linux (and by extension FreeBSD).

Of course then you face the challenge of physically fitting the GPU into the server and supplying it with power, which can be challenging in rackmounted machines.

There should be Dell upgrade kits floating around to enable GPUs in the R720XD, which would take care of the major pain points: sufficient cooling and additional power delivery. Though the A380 seems to be a 75W card, so it would fit within the power limits of a PCIe x16 slot. Cooling would then be a simple matter of swapping out the fans for the higher-speed ones, if necessary.

 

[Daisuke]

Thank you all for the useful info. I purchased a NVIDIA Tesla P4 server GPU on eBay for $170, which I believe it hits the sweet spot for my needs and is fully supported in TrueNAS Scale Angelfish. Once I receive it, I'll perform tests and post the findings into my TrueNAS Scale build thread.

I presume the card will be using NVENC - Encoding for Plex hardware acceleration?

NVENC - Encoding support:

NVDEC - Decoding support, no H.265 (HEVC) 4:4:4: