Am not affiliated with anyone, although some of the links below will be affiliate links. Nor will your QNAP or Synology.īelow I am going to run through a few options for a variety of setups and budgets. You can get away with using much, much, cheaper graphics cards, but the question becomes can your chosen hardware take a GPU at all? That small form factor pc you bought certainly won’t. Thankfully Plex is nowhere near as resource heavy as gaming, so don’t think for a minute I’m going to be suggesting high end gaming graphics cards. That’s not to say that onboard GPUs won’t do the job, but again it depends on the resolution you’re streaming and the quality of the stream. You’re probably going to want a dedicated graphics card or GPU to help with the streams. If you’ve got a wide social circle and intend on sharing your collection with all of them, then you’re definitely going to need to start looking towards something more powerful. You’d be surprised how quickly “free Netflix” gets banded around the family! Therefore, it’s always a good idea to give yourself some headroom for a few more streams than you first originally thought. That being said, many have started off this route, but then find themselves giving access to brothers, sisters and parents, and before you know it, your little machine is getting overloaded.

Looking just to put your own collection of movies on to the network for direct play to the devices inside your home, you can get away with going with a less powerful device for sure. The truth is it really will run on pretty much anything, so it’s just a matter of picking the right hardware for your needs.

I’ve used plex on a variety of devices ranging from a pi to a rack-mounted enterprise server and everything in between. Having been a Plex user for 7-8 years+ and a lifetime subscriber, I thought I’d share some setups that I’m currently using and have used over that time. Recently I’ve seen a large pickup in people looking for advice on what kind of hardware is best to use for a suitable plex server.

Windows 7 plex media server docker