TCG Computer Geeks inside please

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Part of me is considering building a new FreeNAS server. The current server does well enough, but occasionally run into situations where the CPU just wasn't fast enough to deal with all the things I ask of it. Its okay most of the time, except for the rare instances it gets slammed.

I would also like to install a Jail instance of PhpVirtualBox so I can run virtual machines directly on the server, and not have to run them on my daily use PC.

So, I've been entertaining a few thoughts.

One of them was taking my current i7-4790k Gaming PC, and rebuilding that into the FreeNAS box. Then buying an upgraded i7-6800k and Mobo combo for the Gaming PC. The Gaming PC gets a minor CPU upgrade, it really doesn't need.

And the FreeNAS gets a major CPU upgrade. The current NAS uses an A10-7850k AMD Kaveri CPU with 32GB of DDR3-1866 ram.

So option one is to buy a i7-6800k + Mobo. this would be around $650 by the time I add in RAM. http://www.microcenter.com/store/add_product.aspx?productIDs=0465212,0463393

Option 2 consists of 2x E5-2660 v1 8 Core CPU's + a compatible Mainboard for about $650 as well. The twin 8 core CPU's gives me 16 cores. The kind of CPU power that lends itself to Transcoding with Handbrake, or running a Plex Media Server. I would install a instance of PhpVirtualBox in FreeNAS, and run a Windows 7 VM for Handbrake encoding. As well as leaving the existing Plex Media Server jail running, that handles various client transcoding.

If I decide to spend the money next year I'd be leaning towards the E5 Xeon setup. My current FreeNAS server is OK until then, but any speed bumps need to come in the form of a Fork Lift upgrade. I can't do anything with it as its maxxed out.

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[wombat]

Frys is running a special on some motherboard cpu combos where you get 50% off the board w/ cpu purchase, I know nothing more than a little sign I saw in store though

 

[sickmint79]

what do you do that causes a home NAS to run out of cpu/juice? i would think you wouldn't exactly notice things like that at home.

i just got a new NAS mount set up yesterday, by a big datadomain device. the weird thing is this is the 2nd company i've been to that doesn't seem to actually set them up as advised (multiple IPs and multiple mounts to maximize NFS speeds) but just bonds together all the NICs and uses 1 IP.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

what do you do that causes a home NAS to run out of cpu/juice? i would think you wouldn't exactly notice things like that at home.

i just got a new NAS mount set up yesterday, by a big datadomain device. the weird thing is this is the 2nd company i've been to that doesn't seem to actually set them up as advised (multiple IPs and multiple mounts to maximize NFS speeds) but just bonds together all the NICs and uses 1 IP.

Plex Media Server when it transcodes.

I also use my Gaming PC currently for Handbrake Encoding. So when I'm encoding, I can't exactly game because Handbrake is sucking up 100% of the CPU. And depnding on when I get TV Seasons, it might sometimes be sucking up 100% for a week+.

So while I could replace the NAS with just a 4790k, and that would work. Going the XEON route would mean I could free up the GamingPC from Handbrake Duty and run that in a dedicated VM, and it would be faster than the 4790k by far. Probably almost twice as fast.

I encode everything in H265 10bit for maximum quality compared to filesize. The downside of that that H265 10bit is less than 1/4 the speed of H264 encoding.

Example, lets say I can encode H264 8bit in realtime. So will round it out to 30fps. If I encode the same clip in H265 10bit, the encoding speed is more like 5-6fps.

The dual Xeon's will have more than double the CPU power which will make handbrake very happy, and should bring that 5-6fps up closer to 12fps.

Do I need it? Not necessarily. But it would be nice because occasionally if I seek during a movie, it takes the FreeNAS Plex instance 10-15 seconds to re-buffer at the new play point. PMS isn't always so fast at picking up a new seek point in the stream.

 

[sickmint79]

Plex Media Server when it transcodes.

I also use my Gaming PC currently for Handbrake Encoding. So when I'm encoding, I can't exactly game because Handbrake is sucking up 100% of the CPU. And depnding on when I get TV Seasons, it might sometimes be sucking up 100% for a week+.

i guess i'm a little confused as to what is going on here, like you already have a separate server, so why isn't it doing the encoding instead of your gaming one? great if a movie compresses in 1 hour instead of 3 hours, but if you just encode it once and leave it alone, how much does it really matter how long it takes? when you get a tv season does that mean you got it on dvd/bluray to rip? you are encoding all of these things from some raw high quality source?

I encode everything in H265 10bit for maximum quality compared to filesize. The downside of that that H265 10bit is less than 1/4 the speed of H264 encoding.

Example, lets say I can encode H264 8bit in realtime. So will round it out to 30fps. If I encode the same clip in H265 10bit, the encoding speed is more like 5-6fps.

come playback is this actually noticeable? or do you need to crank quality all the way to 11?

i don't really know this media world just trying to understand it and what you are doing. i'd probably only max out da qualities for things like epic movies i really liked.

Do I need it? Not necessarily. But it would be nice because occasionally if I seek during a movie, it takes the FreeNAS Plex instance 10-15 seconds to re-buffer at the new play point. PMS isn't always so fast at picking up a new seek point in the stream.

the nerdy part of me doesn't mind encoding things faster, the cheap side of me might not always want to pay for it, but the above would be the clear annoyance stickler that would actually drive me to spend some money. to skip around a little and have to wait 10-15 seconds would be annoying. this is in part due to your max quality settings as well right?

are both the encode and decode CPU dependent things? why aren't these both actually GPU?

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

the nerdy part of me doesn't mind encoding things faster, the cheap side of me might not always want to pay for it, but the above would be the clear annoyance stickler that would actually drive me to spend some money. to skip around a little and have to wait 10-15 seconds would be annoying. this is in part due to your max quality settings as well right?

are both the encode and decode CPU dependent things? why aren't these both actually GPU?

The NAS is only an AMD A10-7850k. Plex Media Server is set to "automatic" for encoding quality and it can switch on the fly, and usually does pretty good with that. The more loaded the system gets, the less quality on the stream. While even an i7-4790k would fix that plenty. The Xeon path seems to offer me the most future functionality.

An A10-7850k AMD CPU has roughly half the processing power of my i7-4790k gaming machine. CUDA and other GPU accelerated encoding tasks dont' support H265 very well yet. And only certain programs can take advantage of them. Plex Media Server isn't one of those. So its 100% CPU based limitations.

 

[TommyGloves]

FWIW...I ended up just leaving my NAS alone and bought a Dell 790 Optiplex with an i7 to run Plex. I have mapped drives to the NAS. Works perfect.

You can get a used Dell between $250 - $300

DELL OPTIPLEX 790 USFF Computer 250GB 4GB CORE i7-2600S 2.8ghz,(QUAD CORE | eBay

An i5 is even cheaper but might not be enough for what you need:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-OptiPl...a293dc0&pid=100005&rk=6&rkt=6&sd=201720023053

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

FWIW...I ended up just leaving my NAS alone and bought a Dell 790 Optiplex with an i7 to run Plex. I have mapped drives to the NAS. Works perfect.

You can get a used Dell between $250 - $300

DELL OPTIPLEX 790 USFF Computer 250GB 4GB CORE i7-2600S 2.8ghz,(QUAD CORE | eBay

An i5 is even cheaper but might not be enough for what you need:
Dell OptiPlex 790 (250GB HDD, Intel Core i5 Quad Core 3.1GHz,4GB RAM) PC Desktop 884116062288 | eBay

A single i7 is not enough processing power.

I already have a i7-4790k based Gaming PC I use for Handbrake encoding.

I would like to not use the Gaming PC for handbrake encoding.

So one side of the argument is to build a new core system for gaming and transfer the GFX card to that and use the old i7 for FreeNAS.

But for roughly the same investment I can run 2x E5-2660 CPU's and have more than double the CPU power. Which would allow me to run a Windows 7 Virtual Machine for handbrake transcoding in addition to the Plex Server. They can share the CPU's. However, this puts me in a position where I've got a not easily supported server based setup.

 

[TCG Member 5219]

You need an X99 5820k or something of the like. Best case would be an i7 5960x. Both are X99 chipset CPUs.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/437203/Core_i7-5820k_33_GHz_LGA_2011_V3_Tray_Processor

 

[TCG Member 5219]

Or you could buy my i7 6700k/GTX1080 system for your new gaming machine.

 

[Fish]

FWIW...I ended up just leaving my NAS alone and bought a Dell 790 Optiplex with an i7 to run Plex. I have mapped drives to the NAS. Works perfect.

You can get a used Dell between $250 - $300

DELL OPTIPLEX 790 USFF Computer 250GB 4GB CORE i7-2600S 2.8ghz,(QUAD CORE | eBay

An i5 is even cheaper but might not be enough for what you need:
Dell OptiPlex 790 (250GB HDD, Intel Core i5 Quad Core 3.1GHz,4GB RAM) PC Desktop 884116062288 | eBay

I use an i5 2500 for my main PC and plex. No problems.

 

[muskie]

You might be a good candidate for doing a VM host and segmenting things a bit.

I've found that FreeNAS works much better when I let FreeNAS just be a NAS.

I'm running a E5-2630v3 in a Dual Socket Server Motherboard. Currently I have only a single CPU running. I've got a SAS controller passed through to an ESXi virtual machine running FreeNAS. This allows FreeNAS to have direct access to the disk.

FreeNAS hosts NFS shares and I use that to mount to my Ubuntu Linux Plex virtual machine. You would also be able to create as many virtual machines as you want. Performance would be much better than jails and would give you better flexability.

Your idea to go dual 2011 v1 parts would be fine. Lots and lots of cheap stuff out there on eBay.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

You need an X99 5820k or something of the like. Best case would be an i7 5960x. Both are X99 chipset CPUs.

Intel Core i7-5820k Haswell 3.3 GHz LGA 2011-V3 Boxed Processor BX80648I75820K - Micro Center

And more than twice the cost of going with the Xeon's I posted.

For what i want to do with it (encoding VM, PMS) More cores is better.

Handbrake, Fileserve, and Plex Media Server (same workload type as handbrake). Thats the servers workload. More cores is better than more speed.

The more I look into it, the better deal a dual E5-2670 is. About the only negative is power usage, under full load its going to use more power than a single new 10 core processor, but enough for me to care.

Right now, when I'm encoding, the FreeNAS server has to be active, and that sucks up 100 watts in addition to my Gaming PC being online at the same time doing the encoding, and that is sucking up a ton because its powering a completely separate system (GTX980, i7-4790k, Mobo, Ram, etc...)

So the net power usage will be roughly similar as the gaming PC can remain in its low power sleep state.

Then again, my MacPro3,1 sucks more power than both the NAS + GamePC combined. Almost 300W @ idle alone. So if I wanted to save money on my electric bill I'd get rid of that thing.