Well, hello.

[MikeyBe]

Hi.

I've registered here for some advice, if you don't mind.

I have a home server, serving around 48Tb of media over my network to 12 clients around the house. Most of the media is 1080p, through there are some 4k files. It also hosts a HomeAssistant Virtual Machine. For years I’ve used Plex (And have a Plex lifetime pass), though I’m in the process of migrating to Jellyfin.

For a while now,I’ve been using an Intel N100 based mini-PC as the server. It works fine with regard to streaming content but the plex/Jellyfin user interface is starting to run slower and slower (Doing a media scan can take 8 hours). I think it’s time to consider upgrading it.

Now, being the cost conscious person I am, I’ve have a root through the cupboard of old parts left over from upgrading the kids gaming PCs. I’ve come up with the following:

Intel I7-4790k with 16Gb DDR3 RAM
AMD Athlon X4 860K with 16Gb DDR3 RAM
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X with 32GB DDR4 RAM

None of these CPUs have decent (or in some cases any) onboard graphics, so digging through the pile of graphics cards, I’ve come up with:

Geforce GTX 780ti
Geforce GTX 960
Geforce GTX 1060
Geforce RTX 2060 Super

This PC will only use the graphics card for decoding/encoding video so I really don’t care about 3D performance. Obviously, the best combination would be the Ryzen along with the RTX 2060, however that sounds a bit power hungry for a media server that will be turned on 24/7 - especially compared to the 6W N100.

The other possibility is to buy another mini-PC, maybe Ryzen based with onboard Radeon 780 graphics - though I don’t know how that compares with the Nvidia 1060/2060 for video. It would however wipe the floor in power consumption.

Suggestions, anyone?

Thank you.

[Selur]

Usually the newest GPU has the newest decoder and encoder chip, whether the vpu is onboard or on the graphic card doesn't really matter.
compare the capabilites of the graphic cards over here: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-decode-support-matrix
main difference between 1060 and 2060 for decoding seems to be that the 2060 support HEVC 4:4:4 (and more vp8/vp9 decoding) => which probably doesn't matter to you (for encoding the 2060 is faster) the Radeon 780 should also add 4k av1 decoding and should be less power demanding than the old nvidia gpus.
=> choose depending on what you want to decode/encode