old server any good for Plex

P4Clock · 7 Jan 2018 at 21:36

my friend work as a few old servers in a store room and wants to know if it could be used for plex?

i said i dont see why now but to be fair i have no idea... the server is a HP Proliant ML350 G5.
it as dual Xeon X5355's.

bremen1874 · 7 Jan 2018 at 21:57

G5 is old. It would probably handle Plex okay but would cost a fortune in electricity and is likely to be noisy.

P4Clock · 7 Jan 2018 at 22:35

i will pass on the info but i think it will be a no,

Thanks

leigh_boy · 16 Jan 2018 at 16:11

you say that i run a dell R720 that runs plex and other thigns.. it does live in the loft, its not power hungry at all,

Armageus · 16 Jan 2018 at 16:21

leigh_boy said:
you say that i run a dell R720 that runs plex and other thigns.. it does live in the loft, its not power hungry at all,

R720 is ~3 Generations newer - Roughly Equivalent to HP G8's.

G5's are power hungry for the performance on offer due to older Core2Quad based processors, power hungry chipsets, and power hungry FB-DIMM memory.

neodude · 17 Jan 2018 at 19:46

The processing power required for a plex server is dependent on the requirement to transcode. If no transcoding is required then you can run a plex server on almost anything.

AyeAyeAhoy! · 20 Jan 2018 at 21:49

I would have thought it would handle the transcode ok? Depends how many streams you'll need.

Conanius · 21 Jan 2018 at 21:00

I can't comment on a G5 X5355, but I've got a G6 Dual X5650 box that I use for FreeNAS (with plex etc) and I can happily transcode loads of streams. Its almost impossible to saturate an entire CPU, let alone both. Previously I've used several different Xeons from this period and all of the X and L series models work great on Plex.

Looks like my X5650 is about 25% faster on single thread than an X5355 but then obviously its 4core vs 6C/12T.... and I've got two of them.

LewisRaz · 21 Jan 2018 at 22:09

Just saying how low plex can go. My "server" uses a celeron G1610T and has no trouble with a single 1080p stream. Those Xeons are far more powerful.

Chris · 23 Jan 2018 at 20:33

I use the following server and its great for Plex, can do some 4k transcoding as well

Dell Poweredge T710

* 2 x Intel Xeon X5670 CPUs
* 64Gb DDR3 1333Mhz ECC Ram (8 x 8Gb)
* Nvidia K620 Quadro
* H700 Perc RAID Card (512Mb)
* 4 x 6Tb HDDs (RAID 10) - (Media)
* 2 x 4Tb HDDs (RAID 1) - (Backup)
* 1Tb SSHD HDD - (Downloads)
* 250Gb Samsung 850 Evo SSD - (Boot)
* 2 x 1100w PSUs

OS - Windows Server 2012 R2

Wasn't too pricey either, the biggest expense was the HDDs

Cheers Chris