QT3 Hivemind $500 CAD build advice thread w/ spare parts:

Hi it’s me again.

I don’t post as prolifically as I used to and it’s amazing that I no longer upgrade every my primary box every 1-2 years like I used to–GPUs and smartphones are still another matter entirely. My current build is coming on 5 years old:

24GB RAM, Bloomfield i7-930, Geforce 650 Ti, Asus Rampage Gene II microATX mobo in Antec MiniP180 mid tower case with some Corsair modular PSU
32GB RAM, Haswell i5-4670k, Geforce GTX 1080 Ti, Asus Z97-Pro Gamer ATX mobo with some Corsair modular PSU in Fractal Design Define R4 case
2012 Mac mini I haven’t turned on in some time but I recall maxing out the SSD/HD and RAM
4 or 8 GB RAM DDR3, AMD APU E-350, GA-E350N-USB3 mobo in Antec ISK300-150 case with 150w PSU
8GB DDR3 SODIMM RAM, Asus P8Z77-I DELUXE mini ITX mobo with i5-2400 CPU, in Silverstone SG05 case, running Geforce GTX 1050Ti from @wumpus

Spare parts:

500W EVGA PSU
Fractal Node 304 microATX case
Silverstone SG05 mini ITX case w/ 300W PSU
2x 4GB SODIMM DDR3
2x 8GB Ballistix Sport LT PC4-19200 DDR4 DIMM RAM
1x Raspberry Pi2 (planned for RetroPie)
2x Raspberry Pi3 (planned for Home Assistant and PiHole)

My 2010 gaming box i7-930, 24GB RAM had been serving as the main Plex server off 50-some TB storage in a Synology NAS and a DAS via eSATA but it’s maxing out at 10 concurrent connections and not being able to transcode to all the connected clients (4 average, up to 10).

Initially I’d planned on spending $500 tops to get a Ryzen 5 1600 setup ($260-300 CAD) with some microATX mobo ($85-130 tops) to better serve those connecting to my Plex server but I just realized even a current day Ryzen has better single + multithreading than my 5 year old Haswell.

Should get the new hardware for myself or for the Plex server? RAM is overpriced now, and making my old/current gaming/productivity system with 32GB RAM would be useful for VMs and my infosec labbing.

Is gaming on Ryzen that bad? Do AMD users have to install all the AMD optimizer/weird utils/drivers that they used to have back in the Athlon/X2/Duron/etc days because Intel was the standard?

Intel CPUs have HEVC H265 hw-assist decode right and not AMD?

Ryzen has basically the same single-thread performance as broadwell, which is basically the same as haswell. Your 4670k will clock faster than any ryzen so it’s a faster CPU for everything that isn’t massively multi-threaded. So, all games.

Skylake/kaby/coffee all have HEVC-assisted decoding, but that doesn’t matter as most Maxwell and all Pascal GPUs have it also. Skylake and later have H265 encoding also.

Older AMD CPUs do support hardware HEVC decoding, but they had GPUs-- Ryzen doesn’t yet. I haven’t found anything saying Ryzen will do it. But again, CPUs are more than fast enough to decode in software and GPUs can do it too.

I have a 4K HDTV in the living room but I hardly ever watch anything 4K and my Plex server serves remote streams from a library with 99% H264 content since my upstream (50MBps) is insufficient a pipe for serving 4K externally over the Internet.

NVIDIA Maxwell-and-higher cards can do max 2 streams of hw-assist (NVENC) decode so a Ryzen-based Plex server can have 2 streams of hw-assisted HEVC-decode/transcode I believe. I don’t THINK I will watch 4K content primarily on my 1440p gsync monitor and almost all my theatre video consumption is on mobile.

Just have to decide if I should make a new Ryzen 5-1600/16GB mobo the new Plex machine or my new productivity + gaming machine or continue with the Haswell for that.

Ryzen won’t be any faster for gaming, and would probably be slower. Just compare the clock speeds, they offer the same performance clock for clock.

Yeah, I’m gaming less nowadays and am wondering it the extra cores/threads for the cost would help with the productivity/media stuff instead though.

Netflix 4K stream is around 15.5 Mbps. I was surprised it was so low but it looks great on my new TV. Presumably the newer codecs such as H265 are responsible. That said, I don’t doubt that a higher bit-rate UHD Blu Ray looks better still.

In going through my media collection, it’s obvious where things started to move from XVID/AVI to H264 in the past 10 years for transcoding/converting/downloading/pirating video files. HEVC/H265 looks to be the next step but I doubt my primary machine will need to be doing the CPU/GPU-assist heaving lifting of transcoding when all the playback devices I have are still H264-support only.

Trying to decide if the extra cores and CPU threads are better used as the Plex server or my main PC.

Depends on what productivity/media stuff you’re talking about. If you render huge videos, compile code, or stream gameplay online then sure, the cores will be of benefit. Same thing if you stream multiple Plex videos to your friends and family.

What they aren’t useful for is gaming, normal desktop stuff, and office-type productivity like excel and powerpoint.

From elsewhere:
As it stands with Zen:

General performance is @ Haswell.
Draw calls (w/ fast DDR4) are @ Sandybridge.
Emulation is @ Ivybridge.
And there is a significant cross-CCX performance penalty.

Haswell made a big jump over Ivybridge in emulators, due to the cache speed being about 2x faster. Resulted in a 40% speed up. With draw calls, nobody knows why certain architectures perform better than others; Nehalem, clock for clock is a touch faster than Haswell at draw calls, IIRC. And Phenom II performs below Core 2 at draw calls, yet general performance is on par with Nehalem stock vs stock.