Building a Low-Power, Fully Loaded Plex Server

I built an efficient, good looking, Mini ITX Plex server that doesn’t skimp on the processing power, storage, or features like transcoding all while using only 16 watts of power. Each part is hand-picked and every setting is tweaked with efficiency in mind. Oh, and it would even look nice in your living space too! If you already have a Plex server, you can still follow this guide to be sure you are getting the most efficiency out of your hardware and saving the most power.

A huge thanks to Plex for sponsoring this video during Pro Week!

📦 Products in video:

(Affiliate links may be included in this description. I may receive a small commission at no cost to you.)

00:00 - Intro
01:19 - Hardware
01:36 - CPU
02:19 - What is Transcoding?
03:02 - Motherboard
03:52 - RAM (memory)
04:26 - Storage
05:29 - Power Supply
06:18 - Case
06:42 - Cooling
07:25 - UEFI / BIOS Settings
09:21 - Operating System (use what works best for you)
09:52 - Drivers
10:06 - OS Power Settings
13:31 - Plex Install
14:08 - The Best Transcoding is No Transcoding
14:47 - Plex Settings
15:46 - Power Results!
17:50 - Maximum Transcoding Streams?
18:50 - What I think about my PC build

Thank you for watching!

[RaidOwl]

I feel personally attacked within the first 5 seconds of the video...

[timothyporter]

I just did this with my kids (8 and 10 years old) and they were ecstatic to make a difference in how our plex media server works! They were confident in watching your video that they did the best they could with what we have. While I did guide them through it putting on rails (ESPECIALLY in the bios settings) they did pretty much all of it on their own. Kudos for helping 2 little girls enjoy tech. People like you make STEM easy.

[colinhawkins]

I feel like such a party pooper for thinking all of this:

I love this system as purely an exercise in showing how efficient a machine like this can be. Also, it looks great. For me the elephant in the room is how expensive it is and that it uses all new hardware. If the pursuit of power efficiency is a cost thing, a near $1700 build is in direct opposition of that goal. If being green is the goal, buying all new hardware is kind of against that too. I love the message encouraging people to think about efficiency. I also am a fan of this channel and the caliber of content you produce. For me, I'm just not sure the efficiency quest in this video makes sense outside of the context of just doing something because it can be done/it's cool and fun. Hopefully that makes sense and feels like the constructive criticism it is intended to be.

[Clarence-Homelab]

Awesome video.
One addition:
With so much RAM you could dedicate around 10GB for a RAM disk as the plex temporary trancoder directory. The limited write processes of your SSD will thank you sooner or later. 😊

[lgic]

Plex, thanks for sponsoring this video. Low power builds, easy on the ears and eyes, and easy for a grand parent to control... Thats the right direction

[mhos]

Love energy efficient themed videos. Thanks Tim! One step I always recommend is doing the calculation of how long it takes to break even. Like, If you spend $600 on new hardware ... how many months/years would it take to reach that with $6/month higher power bill. At the end of the day though, conserving resources is always awesome!!!

[StarFox]

the power efficiency is pretty impressive! *aggressively takes notes*

[henryisnotafraid]

I'm so excited about this, thank you so much for publishing. I'm traveling right now but I can't wait to get home and implement some of these settings!

[TheShortStory]

I'm running Proxmox on an 11th gen i5 NUC, with a bunch of home automation and various services. It's reporting 6-9W package power just hanging out, 15-18W transcoding and tone mapping a 4k HDR video to 1080p SDR. It's not an exact like-for-like because the video is streamed from a NAS so the drive and network gear power consumption comes in addition. I've been incredibly impressed with the little guy, most recently after installing immich and seeing it generate many tens of thousands of thumbnails in just a few hours.

[polraudiozion]

My current plex uses about 15 watts max and has 16TB of storage. Bought a little reComputer years ago and its more than powerful for the 2 people in my household to watch plex.

[alldaytherapy]

Plex in Docker on linux seems like the best way to go in my opinion.

[adamgarlow]

*Me sitting next to my Epyc Jellyfin server: Hmm that's neat.

The only time I would argue against a low horsepower approach is if you're also running handbrake to transcode for storage efficiency on the server. I actually used your video on setting up containerized handbrake and it has been so convenient to batch transcode on my server overnight instead of on a user machine.

[BenjaminWheeler]

Every time I see that Fractal Terra case I want it a little bit more...

[nicolaslopeza]

One thing to consider with the power supply is that the efficiency is higher when you draw more power.
Even if it says 80+, it might be much lower when you don't draw much power.
This is basically to say: take a look at the power supply chart, some of them tell you the efficiency at a given power output. You might get better efficiency at such low power and spend a lot less money.

[wojtek-]

I understand the purpose of this video, but if you already have a NAS and need/want a separate pc for Plex, just get an older hp or Dell mini and connect it to your NAS via nfs or smb. Same end result, much cheaper and no extra drives.

[GamerEire]

I have a spare Fractal Terra case so I might try this.

[WayneMcCormick]

My video server is running on an N95 based mini-PC. Haven't checked the power consumption, nor how many streams I can do at the same time, but I do know it will do two transcode streams simultaneously.

[kennyadvocat]

Been using my plex server since it was new and plexpass didn't exist yet. I just keep multiple quality formats on the server optimized. No need to worry about specs that way. =)

[marksulloway]

Thank you for this. Very complete presentation.
On the older generation AMD CPU side, the APU's with integrated graphics such as the 8 core 5700G or 4750G Pro with PCI gen 3 speeds idle at under 10 watts measured in HW Info.

[kettusnuhveli]

Did something similar lately but instead built a whole system for running Proxmox and setup Jellyfin (transcoding is free unlike with Plex) in a container!