I stand corrected1050 2GB has 640 CUDA cores, 1050Ti has 768 (Rare 3GB 1050 also has 768).
The actual issue for transcoding is whether NVENC is supported or not - both 1050 and 1050Ti have an NVENC chip (whereas the cheaper lower power 1030 does not) and support everything encoding wise with the exception of "HEVC B Frame support" and "AV1".
Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix
Find the related video encoding and decoding support for all NVIDIA GPU products.developer.nvidia.com
what used office machine for unraid
- Thread starter RobTi
- Start date
I'm looking at changing my unraid server to account for energy prices. I have a dual purpose unraid server which I made so I could have a gaming machine spun up and to also mine when it was profitable, whilst also serving Plex in docker. To be honest these days it tends to mainly be sat there doing plex duties and is overkill. However, I do like having the gaming VM there for when required. It's built on Ryzen 5900x where 2-4 cores are given to unraid and the remainder for the gaming VM. The idle power consumption at the wall is around 100w as well. It does have 2 GPUs, lots of fans, 2 x NVMEs and several mechanicals on a HBA, but even when they are spun down it still sits at 100w.
I've been debating whether to:
1: Buy a purpose made low power usage NUC or something just to run unraid and plex and let it sit doing just that. Then just use the remaining gaming components as a dedicated bare metal gaming machine turning it on to game as and when.
Target under 20w at wall for the unraid/plex server.
2: Keep the dual purpose server I have but swap the Ryzen components out for Intel 12th Gen (might also come down in price a bit now 13th is just coming out) which apparently idles much, much lower. I would also try to buy a board with 8 sata ports and ditch the HBA card. I'd also remove the 1050ti which plex uses for transcode and just use the iGPU from the Intel processor. Target under 50w at wall.
As you've given most of the info needed, lets break it down:
Assumptions:
I don't know your pool size/drives and as such can only guess what they may use.
You pay the industry average energy prices and we're basing this on October onwards.
You have PlexPass
1: NUC etc. 20w (£60/yr and likely rising), UnRAID + Plex + storage.
Yea, that's not happening on a NUC. UnRAID on a NUC is a car crash, you're low on CPU to start with, you haven't got the SATA or HBA options to make it work, USB3 isn't supported under UnRAID for pool use... I can think of ways to solve that, but honestly, just don't. Besides you'll need an external enclosure or disk shelf and that's going to double your power footprint anyway or multiply it by ten at least for a shelf. You could go the QS box route and just have a NUC or similar with the shared storage mounted to it, but then again rclone+cloud and you still have to power the storage server. Basically this is not a great route in most cases as you may as well go with a efficient desktop system.
If you want to go UnRAID as a standalone, then anything 8th gen onwards (I suggest the i3-8100 as 8th gen i3's were 4c which was historically i5 territory and they go for nothing now) and as few drives as you can reasonably consolidate to. Again, look at mounting cheap cloud storage, the unraid forums are full of people doing exactly that, it's the cheapest way to store large static files that you only access once in a while assuming you can steam them quick enough.
2: 50w mixed usage.
Again, i'd really look hard at 13th gen to see what it will actually save relative to what it will cost you, I suspect the payback period is likely pretty high and the savings small compared to something much cheaper and 8th gen. Everything i've seen paints them as a power hungry mess with increased TDP to keep up with old AMD chips and likely failing to do that on same gen. Intel were the masters of power gating and it's been that way since at least Sandy/Ivy, but idle hasn't really altered massively since then. AMD wise I have an A300/2400G (my smallest UnRAID box) that can be made to idle sub 6w, but once you load it up, things change quite quickly and dramatically. That said at least in my experience of a Ryzen 3600 vs i5 8400 terms you're not going to save anything significant on power unless you're comparing software and hardware transcoding, when it comes to HW transcoding, intel is king, so look for real world corroboration before dropping any money and trying to offset it against potential savings, I genuinely think you'll be looking at a hell of a long payback relative to cost on anything beyond 8th gen. I pushed some numbers in a previous thread on the subject in this section involving x99 and a 2630L v3, the HBA power is quite minimal (I want to say 7w?) that's circa £21/yr, spinning fewer drives will do the same, spinning no drives and using the cloud... well you can see where I am going.
In my example I use Ubuntu, Plex and other stuff is in docker, storage is via UnionFS merging a remote rclone mount and local NVMe, Plex see's everything as local content, transcodes are done in hardware, all transcode writes are to RAM, NVMe is for meta data and posters, it's easily capable of keeping up with anything that's thrown at it and runs silent/cool. This is about the most efficient way possible of doing Plex locally with transcoding and i've run this way on and off for years. A case can be made for using a remote dedicated server and just off-siting the lot for roughly what you will pay in power annually, you offset upfront hardware costs and ongoing power bills against server rental and cloud storage and generally get symmetrical gigabit and versioning/backups and no storage management thrown in for free, down side is you have no hardware at the end to sell, but your cost to upgrade is constantly dropping and switching servers is relatively easy. You still have your gaming hardware to turn on as/when. Various ongoing projects make this possible easily, dockserver.io or just learn to use Ubuntu, it's easy to run/manage once you get past the initial learning curve.