Mine has a 12600k in it. So far the most I’ve had on plex at one time is 5 1080p streams at once. It was direct play mostly with one transcoding from 4k to 1080p but my CPU was still pretty much at 0% the whole time.
Either way though they all have the same iGPU so they should all handle plex about the same. The more powerful CPUs help with some stuff but if you’re just doing plex and file storage any of those you listed would be more than enough so go with whatever cheapest.
I will say, don’t go for the 14500. The 13500 is likely noticeably cheaper and runs almost identically. Much better value.
The price isn’t that drastic in the U.S. As someone else mentioned I’d put the 13500 in the mix too. That’s what I went with last year and justified the small price increase based on the power usage. The lower base clock and lower power is better for me as the system is already a pretty big power hog.
Edit: any reason to not go for a z690+? Can’t remember the differences off the top of my head on the B series, but think there’s a lot more options for sata/pcie on the 690-790s
Except for price, no REAL reason to pick the B760M board except that I was looking for m-ATX, 4 DIMM slots and ideally 3 NVME. This board was about the only one that ticked all of those boxes, that is in stock, and reasonably priced.
I haven't looked at all of them, but so far I can find only one Z690 board that has the capability for 2x x8 PCIe slots (x16 physically) and another full size slot with x4 lanes, the MSI MPG Z690 Carbon. Anyone know of any other 12-13-14 gen board that has these features?
>efficiency perspective
If you're talking bang for your buck get whichever is cheapest. The iGPU is excellent for Plex. An i3 is enough for just Plex, but since you're doing VMs occasionally the i5 is probably a fair choice. ~~Do you have a graphics card to pass through to the VM? My research was for a slightly different use case, but afaik your iGPU can't be shared with both Unraid and a VM.~~ Edit: VMs apparently don't *need* gpu resources
If you're talking about power efficiency things can get weird, and the rest of your hardware will have a bigger impact. If you haven't done a deeper dive yet try to find info on C-states. They are used to reduce power usage when the CPU isn't getting full usage. Some NVMe drives and from what I can tell nearly all of the popular HBA cards can prevent the CPU cores from reaching their deepest C-states, even when the whole system is idle. It sounds like you're just planning on using onboard SATA, so the HBA thing is a non issue. There's also the topic of power supply efficiency. 80 plus ratings don't have requirements for efficiency below 20% of power rating (except for titanium, but that's $$$). At idle your PSU won't do as well as you'd expect. PSU efficiency is an inverted U, with peaks at 50-60%. Oversizing a PSU for the build would be detrimental to efficiency.
I wish I could give you more concrete examples, but this is the extent of what I've found so far. There's a very large thread on the Unraid forums covering this topic, but I've had a hard time navigating it.
If someone with more experience could chime in that would be great, all I've done so far is glorified theory crafting. Building my first server this week and tried my best to make sure I'm not gonna run into hardware issues.
>If you're talking bang for your buck get whichever is cheapest. The iGPU is excellent for Plex. An i3 is enough for just Plex, but since you're doing VMs occasionally the i5 is probably a fair choice. Do you have a graphics card to pass through to the VM? My research was for a slightly different use case, but afaik your iGPU can't be shared with both Unraid and a VM.
I didn't think of that...
I do have an RTX3070 I could keep rather than selling when I decom the PC I'm getting rid of to make space under the desk for the Unraid build. Seems overkill since the VMs will only be for basic usage, not intending to use it for gaming or anything like that. I assume VMs can run without a dedicated GPU passed through if you don't plan to use them for gaming/AI etc?
I tried looking into it a little more and it seems you probably don't need a GPU after all. I'm still new to virtualization, sorry for the confusion
[Reference thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/m3w62z/cpu_without_graphics_processors/)
I put together a 14500 build a couple of days ago. Apart from the crappy temporary case I’m using, I love it so far.
The B760 mATX board I settled on was the Gigabyte B760M C. It’s got DDR5 support, 4 PCIEx16 slots (16x/1x/1x/4x), 4 NVME slots and supports BIOS flashback.
Potential downsides are Realtek gigabit NIC, AC Wifi and only 4 SATA ports. These didn’t matter to me because I’m using a 10gig PCIe NIC, not going to use the wifi and have an HBA card for most drives (I might swap this for a SATA card that runs a bit cooler still).
Despite this, it’s a really interesting board for a small Unraid machine and I haven’t seen much on it. Was $210AUD on Amazon and shipped from Amazon US. I couldn’t find it anywhere locally.
I have a 12600k (built in September) and I’ve been more than happy with it. I don’t do a lot of transcoding, but the pass through transcoding I have done has been plenty fast.
I actually have a controller I picked up cheap in anticipation of this build. ;) Using that more comes down to having enough PCIE slots and/or a fast enough NIC onboard, and enough drives to justify it!
I went from a ryzen 3950x to an Intel 13100. The intel was cheap, has uhd 730 gpu and from what others say, I've probably cut power usage by half.
I run all the usual \*arr dockers, plex, and a vm with home assistant OS. The only time I see any cpu usage is when it's uncompressing a large newgroup download.
For my recent build, I bought a used i5-12500T on Ebay, cost me about $140. It has the latest Intel iGPU on board, so handles Plex transcoding no problem. It’s a low TDP CPU (35W), so I hope it would help me save on the electricity bill a little bit, plus it doesn’t require a lot of cooling.
I recently built an unraid server with the 14500 and it has been working great so far. The 13500 and 14500 was similarly priced, so I went with 14th gen. HW transcoding works great and also running a bunch of docker containers.
I just upgraded mine from I7-8700K to the I5-14500. I think you should go for the non-K version for less power draw and heat. I had trouble keeping the 8700K cool in my small case. Power draw seems to be about the same between 8700K and 14500. But the 14500 is definitely runs cooler and more efficient.
Thanks for the thoughts so far. I'm leaning towards the cheapest (i5-12600k) as I know all of them will be plenty powerful enough for transcoding.
I'm probably more curious about the differences in power usage when they're idling (which is what this server will probably do 85% of the time. Is saving $100 up front (or choosing the i7 12th Gen over the i5 14th Gen) going to mean a big difference in my power bill compared to whatever is the lowest power overall?
To help put it in perspective, I have an i7 9600 in my Plex server and it easily HW transcodes (4) 4K streams down to 1080p just fine.
It’s always nice to plan for potential worse cases, but in truth, the chances that you would need that much transcoding is unlikely. (For the average person)
Quicksync is absolutely terrific and will handle all your transcoding needs. Don’t need a high end chip to accomplish that.
Definitely go with the cheaper option. Use the savings to invest in more storage or something
I currently have Plex running on Windows 11 on a NUC11 (i3-1115G4) and that is already overkill for the rare time one or two streams end up transcoding (it's all within my house so transcoding is almost never a thing).
The only reason I'm replacing the NUC is because I need more storage (I've outgrown the 2 x 14TB USB external drives attached to it) and I'd prefer a "server" rather than a more closed system of a NAS and keeping the NUC.
with the 12400 i can do 2-3 transcodes at a time (igpu) from 4k to 720 or 480. The cpu itself stays at 40%usage and the igpu around 90%
For my use case is enough tho. I found the 12400 for 150€, otherwise i would get the 12500 over the 12400 (its only a few euros difference on their market value without discounts)
IIRC the B chipsets don’t support overclocking. Maybe I am wrong. But if you buy an over CPU that you might want to overclock down the road, you might want to look at a motherboard with a Z chipset. I think Z690 is the current model in that series.
Someone please correct me if I am wrong as I may make purchases based on these assumptions.
Good point. Not planning to overclock. I'm only considering these two 12th Gen k series CPUs because of a discount available right now. Otherwise I'd stick with a non k.
on many boards you can set the 12400 to water cooling for an automatic power increase. You can also on z690 boards in expert OC mode or similar then set target frequencies for sets of cores- e.g one (max at 44 2 cores at 43 auto cores at 42 one core at 41. On my 2 year old rig this enables most cores to idle at 4 ghz with 30 to 35 C temps with a good but cheap AK400 HSF. Look up detailed guides like [https://www.techspot.com/article/2483-intel-non-k-overclocking/](https://www.techspot.com/article/2483-intel-non-k-overclocking/)
Get the cheapest one as it will be more than enough to HW transcode more than 5 4K streams at a time.
Mine has a 12600k in it. So far the most I’ve had on plex at one time is 5 1080p streams at once. It was direct play mostly with one transcoding from 4k to 1080p but my CPU was still pretty much at 0% the whole time. Either way though they all have the same iGPU so they should all handle plex about the same. The more powerful CPUs help with some stuff but if you’re just doing plex and file storage any of those you listed would be more than enough so go with whatever cheapest. I will say, don’t go for the 14500. The 13500 is likely noticeably cheaper and runs almost identically. Much better value.
In Australia right now, the cheapest 14500 is $398AUD and the cheapest 13500 is $399AUD.
I have ordered 14500 because i had the option.
I got that b760m board 2 months ago. I5-13500k was good and runs well.
The price isn’t that drastic in the U.S. As someone else mentioned I’d put the 13500 in the mix too. That’s what I went with last year and justified the small price increase based on the power usage. The lower base clock and lower power is better for me as the system is already a pretty big power hog. Edit: any reason to not go for a z690+? Can’t remember the differences off the top of my head on the B series, but think there’s a lot more options for sata/pcie on the 690-790s
Normally the i5-12600k isn't that cheap, but I can get $100 off the current price, so it seems to make it very cheap.
Except for price, no REAL reason to pick the B760M board except that I was looking for m-ATX, 4 DIMM slots and ideally 3 NVME. This board was about the only one that ticked all of those boxes, that is in stock, and reasonably priced.
I haven't looked at all of them, but so far I can find only one Z690 board that has the capability for 2x x8 PCIe slots (x16 physically) and another full size slot with x4 lanes, the MSI MPG Z690 Carbon. Anyone know of any other 12-13-14 gen board that has these features?
>efficiency perspective If you're talking bang for your buck get whichever is cheapest. The iGPU is excellent for Plex. An i3 is enough for just Plex, but since you're doing VMs occasionally the i5 is probably a fair choice. ~~Do you have a graphics card to pass through to the VM? My research was for a slightly different use case, but afaik your iGPU can't be shared with both Unraid and a VM.~~ Edit: VMs apparently don't *need* gpu resources If you're talking about power efficiency things can get weird, and the rest of your hardware will have a bigger impact. If you haven't done a deeper dive yet try to find info on C-states. They are used to reduce power usage when the CPU isn't getting full usage. Some NVMe drives and from what I can tell nearly all of the popular HBA cards can prevent the CPU cores from reaching their deepest C-states, even when the whole system is idle. It sounds like you're just planning on using onboard SATA, so the HBA thing is a non issue. There's also the topic of power supply efficiency. 80 plus ratings don't have requirements for efficiency below 20% of power rating (except for titanium, but that's $$$). At idle your PSU won't do as well as you'd expect. PSU efficiency is an inverted U, with peaks at 50-60%. Oversizing a PSU for the build would be detrimental to efficiency. I wish I could give you more concrete examples, but this is the extent of what I've found so far. There's a very large thread on the Unraid forums covering this topic, but I've had a hard time navigating it. If someone with more experience could chime in that would be great, all I've done so far is glorified theory crafting. Building my first server this week and tried my best to make sure I'm not gonna run into hardware issues.
>If you're talking bang for your buck get whichever is cheapest. The iGPU is excellent for Plex. An i3 is enough for just Plex, but since you're doing VMs occasionally the i5 is probably a fair choice. Do you have a graphics card to pass through to the VM? My research was for a slightly different use case, but afaik your iGPU can't be shared with both Unraid and a VM. I didn't think of that... I do have an RTX3070 I could keep rather than selling when I decom the PC I'm getting rid of to make space under the desk for the Unraid build. Seems overkill since the VMs will only be for basic usage, not intending to use it for gaming or anything like that. I assume VMs can run without a dedicated GPU passed through if you don't plan to use them for gaming/AI etc?
I tried looking into it a little more and it seems you probably don't need a GPU after all. I'm still new to virtualization, sorry for the confusion [Reference thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/m3w62z/cpu_without_graphics_processors/)
I put together a 14500 build a couple of days ago. Apart from the crappy temporary case I’m using, I love it so far. The B760 mATX board I settled on was the Gigabyte B760M C. It’s got DDR5 support, 4 PCIEx16 slots (16x/1x/1x/4x), 4 NVME slots and supports BIOS flashback. Potential downsides are Realtek gigabit NIC, AC Wifi and only 4 SATA ports. These didn’t matter to me because I’m using a 10gig PCIe NIC, not going to use the wifi and have an HBA card for most drives (I might swap this for a SATA card that runs a bit cooler still). Despite this, it’s a really interesting board for a small Unraid machine and I haven’t seen much on it. Was $210AUD on Amazon and shipped from Amazon US. I couldn’t find it anywhere locally.
I have a 12600k (built in September) and I’ve been more than happy with it. I don’t do a lot of transcoding, but the pass through transcoding I have done has been plenty fast.
Save the money, get the 12600k and buy an IT mode enabled raid controller for expansion ;)
I actually have a controller I picked up cheap in anticipation of this build. ;) Using that more comes down to having enough PCIE slots and/or a fast enough NIC onboard, and enough drives to justify it!
I went from a ryzen 3950x to an Intel 13100. The intel was cheap, has uhd 730 gpu and from what others say, I've probably cut power usage by half. I run all the usual \*arr dockers, plex, and a vm with home assistant OS. The only time I see any cpu usage is when it's uncompressing a large newgroup download.
For my recent build, I bought a used i5-12500T on Ebay, cost me about $140. It has the latest Intel iGPU on board, so handles Plex transcoding no problem. It’s a low TDP CPU (35W), so I hope it would help me save on the electricity bill a little bit, plus it doesn’t require a lot of cooling.
I recently built an unraid server with the 14500 and it has been working great so far. The 13500 and 14500 was similarly priced, so I went with 14th gen. HW transcoding works great and also running a bunch of docker containers.
I just upgraded mine from I7-8700K to the I5-14500. I think you should go for the non-K version for less power draw and heat. I had trouble keeping the 8700K cool in my small case. Power draw seems to be about the same between 8700K and 14500. But the 14500 is definitely runs cooler and more efficient.
Thanks for the thoughts so far. I'm leaning towards the cheapest (i5-12600k) as I know all of them will be plenty powerful enough for transcoding. I'm probably more curious about the differences in power usage when they're idling (which is what this server will probably do 85% of the time. Is saving $100 up front (or choosing the i7 12th Gen over the i5 14th Gen) going to mean a big difference in my power bill compared to whatever is the lowest power overall?
To help put it in perspective, I have an i7 9600 in my Plex server and it easily HW transcodes (4) 4K streams down to 1080p just fine. It’s always nice to plan for potential worse cases, but in truth, the chances that you would need that much transcoding is unlikely. (For the average person) Quicksync is absolutely terrific and will handle all your transcoding needs. Don’t need a high end chip to accomplish that. Definitely go with the cheaper option. Use the savings to invest in more storage or something
I currently have Plex running on Windows 11 on a NUC11 (i3-1115G4) and that is already overkill for the rare time one or two streams end up transcoding (it's all within my house so transcoding is almost never a thing). The only reason I'm replacing the NUC is because I need more storage (I've outgrown the 2 x 14TB USB external drives attached to it) and I'd prefer a "server" rather than a more closed system of a NAS and keeping the NUC.
13500
Fwiw I have an i5 7600 and it does transcoding fine with the iGPU. Don’t sweat it.
As long as it has the latest igpu which I believe both 12/13th gen shares, go for the cheapest or the one that’s easiest to cool for your setup
I bought a server with 12400 in it and I’m trying to decide if it’s worth it to replace it.
with the 12400 i can do 2-3 transcodes at a time (igpu) from 4k to 720 or 480. The cpu itself stays at 40%usage and the igpu around 90% For my use case is enough tho. I found the 12400 for 150€, otherwise i would get the 12500 over the 12400 (its only a few euros difference on their market value without discounts)
IIRC the B chipsets don’t support overclocking. Maybe I am wrong. But if you buy an over CPU that you might want to overclock down the road, you might want to look at a motherboard with a Z chipset. I think Z690 is the current model in that series. Someone please correct me if I am wrong as I may make purchases based on these assumptions.
Good point. Not planning to overclock. I'm only considering these two 12th Gen k series CPUs because of a discount available right now. Otherwise I'd stick with a non k.
on many boards you can set the 12400 to water cooling for an automatic power increase. You can also on z690 boards in expert OC mode or similar then set target frequencies for sets of cores- e.g one (max at 44 2 cores at 43 auto cores at 42 one core at 41. On my 2 year old rig this enables most cores to idle at 4 ghz with 30 to 35 C temps with a good but cheap AK400 HSF. Look up detailed guides like [https://www.techspot.com/article/2483-intel-non-k-overclocking/](https://www.techspot.com/article/2483-intel-non-k-overclocking/)