CPU for NAS and 1080p transcoding. J2900 vs Atom C2538

[asendra]

Can somebody point me towards comparison of these two CPUs?, specially regarding h264 transcoding at 1080p. I can't find anything.

I'm trying to decide wether I build a custom NAS box, or just get a Synology DS415+.
The DS415+ has a Rangeley based Intel Atom C2538, and If I were to build a custom box, I probably would choose a a J2900, or J1900 quad core.

Right now I'm using my gaming rig, but that's just overkill and a hassle to turn it on if I want to stream something to my big Tv or my ipad. I want something to be always on.

I'm not a heavy user, and the NAS would only have 1 concurrent user, max. 2, but only 1 transcoding stream at any given time. If it weren't for the 1080p transcoding requirement I would get a DS414 and leave it at that, because for file storage and backups, that's enough for me.

The custom box would cost me around half the money of the DS415+, but thats not a deciding factor for me over functionality, ease of use etc

The custom box would be running Ubuntu, with mdadm for RAID, and plex media server, or even plex media center and use that directly hooked up to the TV, or XPenology if it works ok. I can handle mdadm and medium level linux set ups, but I have so much more stuff going on I highly value the “It just works.” mentality.

Pros of the Synology are it's size, ease of use, having DSM with all it's functionality OOB
Pros of the custom box would be expandability, able to use it directly as I client also and save another box (fire Tv, roku, nexus player, or something like that). I guess I could even use it to play streamed steam games from my gaming PC when they release linux support for it.

PD. I could just put a G3220 in the custom box and guarantee that it can handle it, but I was looking for a low TDP, fanless CPU if I can help it.

 

[exar333]

Have you looked at the QNAP TS-451? It is about the same price and comes with a Celeron CPU. I have been using this for multiple 1080p streams and it works great. Haven't tried more than 2 simultaneously, but it has been effortless up to that point. I will not get into a Synology vs. QNAP debate, but both OS's are really great IMHO, with the nod to QNAP for cloud services and Synology for general apps.

 

[eton975]

Have you looked at the QNAP TS-451? It is about the same price and comes with a Celeron CPU. I have been using this for multiple 1080p streams and it works great. Haven't tried more than 2 simultaneously, but it has been effortless up to that point. I will not get into a Synology vs. QNAP debate, but both OS's are really great IMHO, with the nod to QNAP for cloud services and Synology for general apps.

You mean big-core Haswell Celeron?

 

[asendra]

Have you looked at the QNAP TS-451? It is about the same price and comes with a Celeron CPU. I have been using this for multiple 1080p streams and it works great. Haven't tried more than 2 simultaneously, but it has been effortless up to that point. I will not get into a Synology vs. QNAP debate, but both OS's are really great IMHO, with the nod to QNAP for cloud services and Synology for general apps.

As far as I can see, it uses a Celeron J1800, which is not better than both CPU's I've listed. The only difference I see, is that it has quick sync support, and the QNAP software for movie streaming supports it, freeing a lot of the cpu.
It's basically the same thing as Synology does in their Play lineup.

The problem with that is that you have to use their software to get hardware acceleration, and last time I checked both leaved to be desired...

 

[justanotherboy]

Does Synology DS415+ has ECC memory? IMHO ECC memory is a must with NAS

 

[asendra]

Does Synology DS415+ has ECC memory? IMHO ECC memory is a must with NAS

Nope, it hasn't.

http://anandtech.com/comments/8659/synology-ds415-review-dsm-on-intel-rangeley/427897

 

[janeuner]

Are you sure you need the transcoding capabilities?

My solution to something similar to your problem is a headless Athlon 5350 (ECC support!) box running mediatomb and handbrake-cli. I pre-transcode the video to an MKV+h.264 format that everything in the house can use, then drop it in a folder that is advertised via over UPNP.

In this way, I get better overall quality and compression, and no contention issues if more than one person wants to watch a movie. And the box idles at 16 watts.

 

[smitbret]

Smaller h264 files will be OK with some of the better Celerons and AMD APUs but if you have BD Rips and ever dream of streaming them to a device that may need some form of transcoding in real-time, then you should start at something with a Passmark benchmark of 4000-4500. Anything less may work from time to time but will be a pathway to frustration at some point. If you plan on transcoding multiple HD files in real time then then let me introduce you to my friends Stutter and Freeze Frame.

I recommend an AMD FX 4300 or i3 3250 as a starting point and work your way up from there. The sweet spot is somewhere in the area of an FX-6300 or i5-2500 and I have been taking a long hard look at the 8320e of late.

 

[Cerb]

Can somebody point me towards comparison of these two CPUs?, specially regarding h264 transcoding at 1080p. I can't find anything.

Tried Google? The first page has links. Short version: expect 1/3 of an i3's performance for transcoding, with the J2900. The C2538 is nearly identical, but supports ECC RAM. Actually faster than I expected it to be, TBH.

 

[asendra]

Are you sure you need the transcoding capabilities?

My solution to something similar to your problem is a headless Athlon 5350 (ECC support!) box running mediatomb and handbrake-cli. I pre-transcode the video to an MKV+h.264 format that everything in the house can use, then drop it in a folder that is advertised via over UPNP.

In this way, I get better overall quality and compression, and no contention issues if more than one person wants to watch a movie. And the box idles at 16 watts.

That's a good question actually, I need to check how many of the things I watch through plex are actually being transcoded. I think that the majority the things I watch in my big TV aren't actually, but I think they are for my ipad, and when I add subtitles (not often for me, but my sisters need them for english stuff).

Smaller h264 files will be OK with some of the better Celerons and AMD APUs but if you have BD Rips and ever dream of streaming them to a device that may need some form of transcoding in real-time, then you should start at something with a Passmark benchmark of 4000-4500. Anything less may work from time to time but will be a pathway to frustration at some point. If you plan on transcoding multiple HD files in real time then then let me introduce you to my friends Stutter and Freeze Frame.

I recommend an AMD FX 4300 or i3 3250 as a starting point and work your way up from there. The sweet spot is somewhere in the area of an FX-6300 or i5-2500 and I have been taking a long hard look at the 8320e of late.

Well, fuck.
Seriously, how many years have we had hardware acceleration for video playback though igpus? At this point, that should be a given.. I seriously do not wan't to go all out with a i5, or a FX-6300, because I'll just use my gaming rig, or I'll build a proper home server with a xeon, sad and more ram and at least I'll be able to use it for VM, not that I really need that at home (I do have it at my office.)

Tried Google? The first page has links. Short version: expect 1/3 of an i3's performance for transcoding, with the J2900. The C2538 is nearly identical, but supports ECC RAM. Actually faster than I expected it to be, TBH.

Actually, no, I use duckduckgo

But yes, I did search for it, and found cpu benchmarks placed both of them very close, but I wanted to see benchmarks regarding transcoding to see if they lacked certain cpu extensions useful for that task, or if being quad core would help them instead of being dual core as the majority of lower end i3s.

I have found this though for the Synology, (http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=244&t=90659) which seems to indicate that in fact, it can't handle it well enough.

 

[beginner99]

I have found this though for the Synology, (http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=244&t=90659) which seems to indicate that in fact, it can't handle it well enough.

Atoms aren't powerful at all. So that guy asking the question has a wrong premise. For real-time cpu transcoding you need to go big-core.

No i don't get why you want real.time transcoding? Just store movies as 1080p mkvs and be done with it. Then you can also go with a cheaper NAS which would as far as I can tell still suit your needs.

 

[asendra]

Atoms aren't powerful at all. So that guy asking the question has a wrong premise. For real-time cpu transcoding you need to go big-core.

No i don't get why you want real.time transcoding? Just store movies as 1080p mkvs and be done with it. Then you can also go with a cheaper NAS which would as far as I can tell still suit your needs.

I do store movies in h.264, 1080p mkvs. As I said before, I'll have to double check plex logs to see how many files I'm really transcoding. I was under the impression that I was transcoding when I used subtitles, or watched via my laptop or iPad, what with both of them not being 1080p and all..

 

[Erenhardt]

Smaller h264 files will be OK with some of the better Celerons and AMD APUs but if you have BD Rips and ever dream of streaming them to a device that may need some form of transcoding in real-time, then you should start at something with a Passmark benchmark of 4000-4500. Anything less may work from time to time but will be a pathway to frustration at some point. If you plan on transcoding multiple HD files in real time then then let me introduce you to my friends Stutter and Freeze Frame.

I recommend an AMD FX 4300 or i3 3250 as a starting point and work your way up from there. The sweet spot is somewhere in the area of an FX-6300 or i5-2500 and I have been taking a long hard look at the 8320e of late.

Dunno how relevant that is but athlon 5350 is on par with fx6300 in this transcoding benchmark when igpu acceleration is used:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-athlon-5350-apu-and-am1-platform-review,12.html

 

[Cerb]

Dunno how relevant that is but athlon 5350 is on par with fx6300 in this transcoding benchmark when igpu acceleration is used:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-athlon-5350-apu-and-am1-platform-review,12.html

Are the results of the encode identical?

 

[justanotherboy]

Dunno how relevant that is but athlon 5350 is on par with fx6300 in this transcoding benchmark when igpu acceleration is used:

Are the results of the encode identical?

Honest question, Is possible to use the AMD iGPU transcode acceleration running on Linux? Last time I checked transcode acceleration just worked on nvidia

 

[smitbret]

Dunno how relevant that is but athlon 5350 is on par with fx6300 in this transcoding benchmark when igpu acceleration is used:

http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-athlon-5350-apu-and-am1-platform-review,12.html

Plex and most of the other programs that transcode use FFMpeg and unfortunately FFMpeg doesn't use the hardware transcoding. There are reasons for this, but that means that the CPU choice will be extremely important.

 

[smitbret]

I do store movies in h.264, 1080p mkvs. As I said before, I'll have to double check plex logs to see how many files I'm really transcoding. I was under the impression that I was transcoding when I used subtitles, or watched via my laptop or iPad, what with both of them not being 1080p and all..

If you can accurately predict that every device will support your containers (.mkv, .mp4, .m4v, .avi, .flv, .mpg. vob, etc.) and the streams that are inside the container (.h264, .MPEG2, .xvid, .aac, .ac3, .dts, etc.) and that those streams are all compliant with the devices requirements then you don't need transcoding at all.

However, right up front you mention iPad. That means you will need to have an .m4v file instead of .mkv and it must contain an .h264 (video) and .aac (audio) stream. Transcoding would be necessary. One thing you might consider is changing your container choice to .m4v and then making sure the 1st audio track is a 2-channel .aac instead of .ac3 or .dts. If the streams in the .mkv already meet these requirements then you could just do a simple remux with YAMB or MP4BoxGUI to .mp4 and then just change ".mp4" to ".m4v". You may also have to convert one of the audio tracks to 2-channel .aac but if you take the time to set up something like MeGUI, it should only take a minute or two to convert the stream and then remux it back into the file and get your compliant iPad file. Depending on the age of the iPad, you could still have reference frame issues with the .h264 stream or with the encoding Level if it's greater than 3.1. In that case, you will probably need to run the whole thing through Handbrake or Super which will take a few hours, depending on how much quality you want the video to maintain. Subtitles are a whole 'nother bag of tricks that I haven't really messed with on Apple products.

This would cover your Apple products. If you are using other devices, you will need to find out what containers, codecs and streams they require as well and may have to make other adjustments.

Don't feel like learning all of that? That's what transcoding takes care of. That's also the reason why FFMpeg doesn't support hardware transcoding. Too many variables that the hardware builders can't be expected to plan for. With so many options for media out there, CPU/Software transcoding is the only real option in lieu of an industry standard.

Trust me, you won't regret spending the extra $50 on a good CPU.

 

[386DX]

I have an Intel Avoton C2750 system and I can give you my impressions. First I choose Avoton over Rangley because for my use I think the small turbo boost is more beneficial then the network features of Rangley for most people. My system has 16GB ECC RAM, 2 x 250 GB SSD, 4 x 4TB HD. I run Windows 2012 R2 on it with a couple of Hyper-V virtual machines and storage space. One of the virtual machine is running a Plex server and I can tell you the system can handle two 1080p transcoded without any issues. I transcode to friends/family over the internet and from the Plex log files it typically shows 2-3x real time speed, so that confirms the ability to handle at least two transcode.

The 4 core Rangley or J1900 should be able to transcode one 1080p without issue. If you don't need the server features the J-series system would be the cheaper and obvious choice. If you need the 6 SATA ports and dual/quad NIC, remote management, etc then Rangley/Avoton makes sense. Yes I know some people will say you can get cheaper and faster socket 1150 CPU's but can you get one that can run fanless, that was important to me as my case is compact and only has about 40mm clearance for the CPU HS/Fan.

 

[smitbret]

I have an Intel Avoton C2750 system and I can give you my impressions. First I choose Avoton over Rangley because for my use I think the small turbo boost is more beneficial then the network features of Rangley for most people. My system has 16GB ECC RAM, 2 x 250 GB SSD, 4 x 4TB HD. I run Windows 2012 R2 on it with a couple of Hyper-V virtual machines and storage space. One of the virtual machine is running a Plex server and I can tell you the system can handle two 1080p transcoded without any issues. I transcode to friends/family over the internet and from the Plex log files it typically shows 2-3x real time speed, so that confirms the ability to handle at least two transcode.

The 4 core Rangley or J1900 should be able to transcode one 1080p without issue. If you don't need the server features the J-series system would be the cheaper and obvious choice. If you need the 6 SATA ports and dual/quad NIC, remote management, etc then Rangley/Avoton makes sense. Yes I know some people will say you can get cheaper and faster socket 1150 CPU's but can you get one that can run fanless, that was important to me as my case is compact and only has about 40mm clearance for the CPU HS/Fan.

Be cautious about your performance claims. There is a huge difference in the CPU horsepower required to transcode a 30GB BD Rip to a High Quality 1080p display vs. transcoding a 2GB HD movie that was downloaded from the internet and is transcoded to SD for playback on a phone or tablet.

 

[386DX]

Be cautious about your performance claims. There is a huge difference in the CPU horsepower required to transcode a 30GB BD Rip to a High Quality 1080p display vs. transcoding a 2GB HD movie that was downloaded from the internet and is transcoded to SD for playback on a phone or tablet.

My standard source is are 8-12GB MKVs with AC3 or DTS audio. Sure you might have 30GB BD rips but those typically because of uncompressed True Audio stream. Anyways yes there's variations depending on what your source and destination is, I'm giving the OP what he can expected based on the information given. BTW I don't encode to SD nor transcode 2GB movies as my internet upload is fast enough to direct stream those. I typically encode to quality 8 setting on Samsung Smart TV, that's a 1080p 4mbps stream.

 

[jitesh_88]

have you looked at the TS-453 Pro?

it has the J1900 2.0 ghz quadcore processor with ram scalable upto 8GB.

As far as I can see, it uses a Celeron J1800, which is not better than both CPU's I've listed. The only difference I see, is that it has quick sync support, and the QNAP software for movie streaming supports it, freeing a lot of the cpu.
It's basically the same thing as Synology does in their Play lineup.

The problem with that is that you have to use their software to get hardware acceleration, and last time I checked both leaved to be desired...