Hello. Last week, I built an ultra low-end box for use as a NAS, media and data archival/backup server because I had some old components lying around. The hardware specs:
H61 Chipset
i3 3240
1 x 8 GB 1600Mhz RAM
2 x 1 TB drives, and SSD for OS
1 Gigabit in-built NIC
No Video Card
It performs most of what I throw at it quite well. I've been running Debian and services like as PiHole, Samba, Nextcloud, various cron jobs for data archival from Reddit/YouTube. I installed Jellyfin to stream video to my laptop and it struggles with my h.265 HEVC files. Since there's no video card and this old CPU doesn't have hardware acceleration for h.265 decode, there's occasional stuttering and the CPU hits max utilization. In contrast, there's no issue with h.264 files which is smooth as hot knife through butter.
The occasional stuttering and slower decode isn't a complete deal breaker but I was wondering if I could cheaply upgrade something to fix this issue? Could an entry level video card like GT610 or a used 3rd gen i5 give me that extra juice to improve decoding these HEVC files without a noticeable stutter?
Edit: I mostly play 1080p files. No 4k.
H61 Chipset
i3 3240
1 x 8 GB 1600Mhz RAM
2 x 1 TB drives, and SSD for OS
1 Gigabit in-built NIC
No Video Card
It performs most of what I throw at it quite well. I've been running Debian and services like as PiHole, Samba, Nextcloud, various cron jobs for data archival from Reddit/YouTube. I installed Jellyfin to stream video to my laptop and it struggles with my h.265 HEVC files. Since there's no video card and this old CPU doesn't have hardware acceleration for h.265 decode, there's occasional stuttering and the CPU hits max utilization. In contrast, there's no issue with h.264 files which is smooth as hot knife through butter.
The occasional stuttering and slower decode isn't a complete deal breaker but I was wondering if I could cheaply upgrade something to fix this issue? Could an entry level video card like GT610 or a used 3rd gen i5 give me that extra juice to improve decoding these HEVC files without a noticeable stutter?
Edit: I mostly play 1080p files. No 4k.
Last edited:
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