QNAP NAS for plex & GPUs

I’ve read through a number of posts on the QNAP forum as well as on the Plex forums to find out recommendations and suggestions on which graphics card to use with the TVS-872XT. On the Plex forums they point out you need Plex Media Server v1.15.1.791 or newer ( https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming ). In that article there’s also a link to a google doc that shows a hardware compatibility sheet ( https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MfYoJkiwSqCXg8cm5-Ac4oOLPRtCkgUxU0jdj3tmMPc ). Finally as part of that article Plex points users to a QNAP page that show compatibility with the GPGPU and NVidia ( https://www.qnap.com/en-us/compatibility/?device_category=gpgpu&brand=nvidia ). On this QNAP page, QNAP recommends the Nvidia- Quadro RTX 6000. The TVS-872XT has 2 x M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 x2 slots and, I’ve researched that there’s only one PCI Express 3.0 x16 slot, the other is a x4. Looking at the price of the recommended card I find it sort of unbelievable that there are no other recommended NVidia cards. I saw in the forum that someone had connected a Nvidia Quadro P620 to a QNAP TVS-872XT NAS ( https://gist.github.com/weshofmann/620b924cde5dd498880e9315e48e793b ) so I see that it’s possible to not spend nearly $3500 on a video card for a NAS. What have sort of GPUs have you connected to a TVS-872XT? Have you had success with Plex transcoding the media? How “loud” does the QNAP unit get when the GPU is transcoding (fans blowing)? I also would like to know if you’ve had any experience with this sort of setup and then watching content with subtitles enabled (some of us are hard of hearing). I’ve found that when subtitles are enabled, more processing is done by the CPU to stream and support subtitles and then buffering and jittering occurs. As a final note, has have you setup a unit like this and used the watch together feature from Plex ( https://support.plex.tv/articles/watch-together ), how about with subtitles? One final note, I recently saw on intel’s page that the i5-8400T chip in the TVS-872xt is discontinued. I’m looking to “future proof” as much as possible having to reinvest in this NAS.

Hello Michel,
Qnap TS-873 is a more popular choice among those who want to use PCI GPU card. Qnap 72XT already come with a decent CPU such as i5 and graphics chip built inside. Upgrading high spec NAS such as this may feel like a waste of potential if GPU card is used anyway instead.
Once you install the GPU card you will need to assign it to do transcoding function instead of it being used in a virtual machine. Also, make sure you have a driver installed and Plex is configured to use hardware transcoding,
Subtitles in Plex do activate transcoding function. So even if your TV supports 4K direct/original streaming, enabling subtitle will start the transcode process.

You can find more about compatible NAS and compatible graphics cards here:
https://nascompares.com/qnap-compatible-graphics-cards-gpu/
https://nascompares.com/answer/qnap-nas-with-gpu-slot-for-plex-4k-hdr-transcoding/
https://nascompares.com/answer/nas-with-gpu-graphics-card-for-plex-transcoding/
https://nascompares.com/best-graphics-cards-gpu-for-4k-plex-video-transcoding/
https://nascompares.com/answer/nas-with-pcie-gpu-slot-for-video-hardware-transcoding/

I hope this helps.

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