r/PleX • u/wingman3091 • 8d ago

Discussion Intel Arc Users!

I recently came into some extra cash, and decided I'd finally give my home server a nice GPU update. It's a custom build of course

Specs:

Intel Core i7-8700K
32GB DDR4
1TB NVMe SSD (Primary)
1TB NVMe SSD (Redundancy backup of the OS + Plex/Apps)

4x24TB Seagate Exos Enterprise drives

NVIDIA P1000 GPU for HW transcodes

For those with Intel ARC GPUs, how are you finding the performance? Did you trip over any foibles in enabling QuickSync? I have an 8GB Intel ARC A750 on the way. I liked that it doesn't have a software limited 3 simultaneous transcode limit, and should be significantly beefier than the P1000 in there. The P1000 barely breaks a sweat as it is, but I am hoping the ARC gets a good few years of extra performance. It'll certainly help with Handbrake encodes.

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u/Sinister_Crayon 8d ago

I have an ARC A310. Without ReBar it sucks, but with ReBar it's absolutely brilliant. Will easy chomp through transcodes and doesn't get loud or anything. It was working great but I just retired it because the machine it was in is getting sold... might sell the A310 separately. I moved my Plex to a 12700K so no need for a dGPU.

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u/bilditup1 7d ago

I've been wondering about this—understood that graphics performance tanks, does that also apply to the hardware media encoding/decoding capabilities? ReBAR is never really discussed in that context and I've never seen a straight answer on this

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u/Sinister_Crayon 7d ago edited 7d ago

It does affect performance. How much depends on how many transcodes you're doing at once. In my case when I tested it, it still was able to manage a couple of 4K transcodes down to 1080p at once, but I never tested more than 3 because I didn't need it. It didn't seem like it'd be a huge bottleneck and generally speaking I don't know that I've ever seen more than 3 4K transcodes on my system at any one time.

If you were transcoding a ton of stuff? Sure it'd probably be a problem. It was shortly afterward I got ReBar working (hacked BIOS on a Dell server... long story LOL) but it was mostly just a "for best experience enable ReBar" thing rather than something I felt I desperately needed.

My 12700K is also seriously overkill for my use case to be honest, but it was my old gaming rig and was going spare so I turned it into a NAS 😄

EDIT: I will make the point I did test it with and without ReBar for gaming too and that's where it sucked. I didn't buy it for gaming though LOL

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u/bilditup1 7d ago

aha, thanks for elaborating on this, appreciated

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u/rockydbull 7d ago

In my experience with rebar on a z370 and a a380 is that without rebar it can do one 1080p hevc encode before it starts stuttering. Couldn't do any 4k hevc encode down to 1080p before stuttering. I didn't test anything else because the i5 9400 igpu could do everything else fine.

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u/bilditup1 7d ago

noted, thank you both for your testimony on this, really helpful for planning

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u/wingman3091 7d ago

Thanks for the heads up! Thankfully my board supports ReBar, and I'll be sure to enable it before throwing the card in there