I’m taking down my big Supermicro server to save energy and moving Plex/Jellyfin/*arr to a spare 10th gen Intel NUC with SSDs. Performance is fine for DirectPlay media to my SHIELD and mobile devices, but the onboard GPU power is limited and struggles to even transcode some 1080p media – let alone 4K. Does anyone have experience using eGPUs in a Thunderbolt chassis with a NUC and can you share what worked or didn’t work for you in terms of hardware and configuration?

Edit: this is an i7-10710U with NVMe storage and 32GB of RAM, running Windows 10 with all the latest drivers directly from Intel.

  • InvertedParallax@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    The onboard gpu is likely more powerful than all but some workstation gpus you could add for transcoding, it’s more likely you don’t have hardware acceleration working properly.

  • Faceman🇦🇺
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    1 year ago

    something is definitely wrong with the config if its failing at a single 1080p, I did a plex server test on an intel n95 nuc (one of the lowest end cpus in their current range) and it blasted through multiple 4k HDR transcodes simultaneously.

    • evidences@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I agree something isn’t right, I have Plex on an HP Chromebook G2 with a Celeron 3865U, it’s a 1.8ghz dual core without HT, and I had it doing like 15-20 1080p streams during testing. Quick sync is amazing.

    • scarilog@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Does the n95 handle 4k to 4k Plex transcodes well? Or are you talking about 4k to 1080p?

      • Faceman🇦🇺
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        1 year ago

        It’s fine, it can do a few at once. I didn’t do a lot of testing since I never have to transcode these days anyway.

        • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 year ago

          Okay then there’s no reason why a hyperthreaded hexacore i7-10710U should struggle unless, like you said, there’s a misconfiguration. That makes me feel better because I’m hemorrhaging cash at the moment.

    • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.worksOP
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      1 year ago

      That’s encouraging. In Plex, what did you configure other than to set the transcoding quality and enable acceleration?

      • Faceman🇦🇺
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        1 year ago

        your problem might be windows.

        I think everyone here might be nerd enough to be assuming everyone is running Linux.

        • Fuck spez@sh.itjust.worksOP
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          1 year ago

          And it’s fine if that’s the case. It’s not like I actually needed another reason to finally start ditching Windows for good but this might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back. I’m just a lazy Windows sysadmin who uses what he knows, but not if it doesn’t make sense for the application.

  • SheeEttin@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If you tell us exactly what hardware, we could give you better answers.

    If you want to avoid transcoding, you could configure your stack to filter out unsupported codecs, or pre-convert them.

    • Whiskey_iicarus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Can you elaborate on pre converting them? Do you mean with an outside application like handbrake or an automated one in the arr stack?

      • Faceman🇦🇺
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        1 year ago

        There’s tdarr, unmanic and fileflows as the popular choices.

        Personally I use fileflows as it is extremely customisable and you can set up quite complex rules for how and what to convert.