[flatiron]

I still have a haswell i5 quad core as my plex/pi hole/openvpn box. It’s never cpu pegged. I do have hardware transcoding enabled which looks like crap but teaches people to not have such low birtates on their gigabit connections. Silly plex defaults. The most cpu used is deluge/openvpn combo out to PIA as it uhhh acquires new content. That and rclone as it pulls off google drive. But I see no need to upgrade. What do you use yours for that it’s cpu needs refreshing?

[wil421]

Intel QSV does degrade quality. The i7-7700k can’t handle a 4K HVEC transcode to 1080p very well on the fly with Plex. Plex optimizing a 4K video takes about as long as the movie to get a 1080p version. I’d like something that’s not dependent on QSV. My Asus motherboard also has a Bluetooth issue from time to time that requires unplugging the motherboard power connection.

Not sure I want to spend the money on a 10gb backbone or wait and upgrade the desktop. My UniFi switches and supermicro board can do link aggregation but my Asus mobo only has one port.

[windexh8er]

If your UniFi switch has SFP+ you can get 10Gb copper SFPs these days for under $60 and then a dual 10Gb PCIe is another $180-200. Probably not worth the upgrade just for Plex - but most people don't realize how cheap copper 10Gb PHY has gotten. And if you have SFP+ on both ends and just need something to fill in-between you can get fused 10Gb DAC cables for under $20 which is a drop in the bucket for those SFP+ ports that are sitting there collecting dust.

[wil421]

The SFP+ ports on my 150w PoE switch are only 1Gb. The MikroTik CRS305 switch is the most cost effective one I’ve found at ~$130. UniFi has an option but it’s $599.

DAC is the most sensible option considering I need to go from my basement, up 2 more stories to my attic, and drop into my office.

[lostlogin]

It’s a weird time with UniFi gear. Is the USG getting replace or is it now the Dream Machine only? Where is 10g?

[windexh8er]

True that. Between the weird "phone home" stuff that Ubiquiti just stopped responding to publicly and some of the odd overlap with their product line. That being said if you own their stock today you were smiling because they're up over 30% at the time of this writing.

With regard to USG the Dream Machine looks to be a kind-of-sort-of successor to the really old USG. I would guess a USG replacement is coming, but the Dream Machine Pro will have 10Gb as I understand it. They do product rollouts pretty horribly IMO.

[flatiron]

I don’t have any 4K TVs. So i guess I’m lucky I don’t need much horse power.

[windexh8er]

If you're up for a migration project on deluge/ovpn you can probably cut out quite a bit of overhead by moving to WireGuard and Mullvad, WireVPN, etc... I thought PIA donated a bunch to WireGuard dev, but it doesn't look like they support it in GA yet.

[flatiron]

Thing I love about deluge and PIA is it’s all in a docker container. So I didn’t have to muck with any settings on the host machine. Works great. I didn’t see anything like that for wireguard sadly.