Advices for upgrade

[Eric Mako]

Hello,

Some time ago I bought a NUC based on J4005 and it works very well, but I'm thinking about an upgrade to be able to take on a few additional users.

I need your advice, is taking a machine with an i5 / QSV type processor interesting or will the electricity costs be much higher?

There are also the next Intel ARC cards, to see...

With 300mb/s upload do you think it would hold up for 5/6 external clients? Files are 1080p on average video 10000kbps and audio 1500kbps

Otherwise I buy a NAS to store files, but the NUC is still less powerful than a complete desktop

[TheDreadPirate]

What is your budget? And how many users do you have?

[Eric Mako]

Around €600

At home there are 2/3 clients and I thought I would give access to the family so 2/3 external clients

[TheDreadPirate]

Get a 12th or 13th gen ##100 CPU, 32GB of RAM, an H series motherboard, and an Arc A380. That should be under your budget and will 100% handle your use case.

[Eric Mako]

Thank you I will try to do a configuration, do you have an idea of the watt consumption?

Why an H series?

[Efficient_Good_5784]

While I can't tell you how much watts the setup @TheDreadPirate suggested, I would suggest that you try running without the GPU first. The reason is that a plugged-in GPU will consume some watts even if it's idling doing nothing and you're worried about the power usage.
The CPU has a built-in iGPU, so you could try and see if it's enough to transcode the amount of streams you need at once.

Do you expect all the clients to transcode at the same time? If you have your media in a format that's compatible to be direct played on the clients you'll use, needing a GPU will be less important.

[Eric Mako]

The clients will not always be connected at the same time and there will not always be transcode, but I foresee a little wider, depending on the connection, and the fact that some will put transcode without doing it on purpose

Perhaps in the evening 4/5 customers at the same time, so 2 locally

I don't have the equipment yet so it's difficult to have an idea of consumption, maybe below 150W would be good

[TheDreadPirate]

Before I put in an Arc GPU I ran my setup with just a 12100 for a while. My testing showed that the iGPU could handle about 12 1080p transcodes. If that is enough for you, and you don't need HDR tone mapping, you can skip the Arc GPU entirely.

I suggested an H series board because Z series are overkill for a ##100 CPU. H series boards have enough features without being too basic.

I don't know the power consumption, but my 12100 has a 60w base TDP. But I turn off all turbo-ing settings since A) I don't need them since my GPU is doing most of the work and B) turbo-ing is very inefficient.

[Eric Mako]

For the moment I only watch 1080p, if I take a 12th or 13th gen ##100 CPU and 16GB of ram will it be enough for 8 encodes?

And in a while the purchase of an A380 for example, will it be enough for HDR without being slowed down by the processor?

Like that I would add 16GB of ram also with the graphics card

[TheDreadPirate]

Depending on the board you get you might only have two DIMM slots. The price difference between 16GB and 32GB kit isn't much. If this will only ever run jellyfin, 16GB is fine. Especially if you run a headless Linux server distro.

The A380 should be plenty for your user case. Should handle 5-6 HDR tone mapped streams (only if the client can't handle HDR directly). And the CPU has nothing to do with that kind of processing. And, as you mentioned, they are unlikely to all be at the same time.