Which GPU for Plex Transcoding on TrueNAS Scale?

TrueNAS General
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I am running TrueNAS Scale Dragonfish-24.04.2 on a mini-itx system with a Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU D-1541 @ 2.10GHz (8 cores - 16 threads) with 128 GB of RAM. It works great for everything except playing or transcoding media to 4K in Plex. As long as I just play 1080p or 720p content passthru, it works fine.

My system has a PCI slot for a graphics card so I thought I would try buying one and seeing if doing hardware transcoding fixes things. Given that I am the only one ever watching the Plex server so it will never need to transcode more than one stream at a time, which card would be the least expensive card to fill my needs?

I don’t want to spend too much because once the RTX 5090s come out (next year?), I am planning on buying a new gaming PC. I’ll through four enterprise DATA drives into my existing existing PC with its RTX 4080 and turn it into my new NAS. This graphics card is just a stop-gap measure to get me over until next year.

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  • Intel ARC A380/310
  • Tesla P4 (needs 3d printed cooling solution, available on ebay)
  • Quadro P600/1000

All good options IMO.
Not sure why you need a 4080 in a NAS.

3 Likes
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Arc 310 is around $100USD.

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Need. This word need. I’m sorry, but there is very little about my home server that is about NEED. I will use it because I have it. :wink:

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@Eternal2
You can see that this graphics card is very suitable for encoding and decoding.
Address:

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This discussion would, imho, be better served on the Plex forums.

That said, the Golden Rule when transcoding 4k content is: don’t transcode 4k content :slight_smile:

Seriously, it’s so dependent on memory, disk and cpu, as well as network throughput, you’re better off separating your content into 4k and non-4k libraries, and advising your users with non-4k capable hardware to not watch stuff in your 4k library.