Quebec has free e-waste dropoff at Ecocentres. I have collected six e5-2680v2 systems from people who did not want to drive there.
The real cost is time and gas to the depot. For me it was zero, I was already going.
Capitalism finds a way.
And how many of those six have you tested under full load for 24 hours?
I bought three "working" Xeon systems. Two had VRM throttling after 20 minutes. Capacitor aging is real,
My Ryzen 3600 has 47,000 uptime hours. Zero hardware failures. The BIOS bug was one bad flash, recovered in ten minutes.
This.
I went through four e5-2680v2 boards before finding one with stable VRMs. The cheap ones on AliExpress are lottery.
The fifth board works but RAM slot B1 is dead. 96GB instead of 128GB. Plex does not care.
Still cheaper than Ryzen though.
Has anyone actually measured plex transcode quality? Not speed, quality.
Same file, same bitrate, x264 on Xeon vs x264 on Ryzen. I cannot tell the difference. My wife cannot tell the difference. The dog does not care.
We are arguing about watts and seconds for an identical output. This is absurd.
Not identical. Xeon lacks some x264 assembly optimizations that exist for newer instructions. You need to check your build flags.
But practically, yes, identical. I compared screenshots once. Never again.
I am the nephew with the Ryzen 3600 build. Uncle
The Ryzen is my daily driver too though. The Xeon cannot run Discord and Chrome without crying. Platform cost is not total cost if you need a second machine.
Member OP
The lab is not the plex server. The plex server is 45W. The rest is networking and storage and a decommissioned Sun workstation that I will not discuss.
Nephews. No respect.
Back to the original question: Ryzen 5 3600 vs E5-2680v2 for Plex.
The answer was given in reply 2. Both work. One costs less to buy, one costs less to run.
Everything since has been people proving their existing choice was correct. Including me. I bought Ryzen. It was correct.
This thread is now about electricity prices and nephew betrayal.
Member
I missed the part where someone explains why we need to transcode 4K at all.
Mi servidor, mi problema: I just keep 1080p copies for remote. 4K is local direct play only. Zero transcode load.
The real answer is storage discipline, not CPU choice.
