Dedicated PC vs Nvidia Shield

Playground Hardware
#1

I'm in my trial and currently running the Channels DVR server on my Shield with a 2tb external drive attached. It's been working great with no issues and I'm very happy with it. I do however have a older Dell Optiplex that I was thinking about dedicating for use as a headless Channels and Plex server. It has an i5-3470 with 8 gigs of ram and 4tb of storage. Just wondering between the two which will give the best performance as far as speed for commercial detection and transcoding out of home and such? Basically a which would you do question.

Also a secondary question. If I stick with the Shield would it make a difference either way performance wise between recording to my attached usb drive vs recording to a network drive (WD My Cloud)? Like I said, everything is working great but I've got the stuff lying around so if I can make it better (even if it's not noticeable) I might as well. Thank you in advance for any thoughts and opinions!

#2

I'm unsure about whether the Shield has USB3 or is just USB2. USB2 maxes out around 450Mbps, while USB3 can be either 5 or 10Gbps, quite a difference. A gigabit (1Gbps) network connection is in between those two, so make your storage decision accordingly.

As far as a processor goes, I believe the Shield's processor trumps the old 3rd gen i5 in your Dell. (And even if it doesn't smash the Dell in speed, it will certainly run circles around it in power usage.)

#3

The Shield runs USB3 on both ports, just to answer that one.

I ran my DVR on my Shield Pro for a while. I only moved it over a few months ago to my server PC because I wanted to do things with some of my recordings on the computer and moving the files across my network was slower than I wanted.

As far as performance, I never had any issues with the Shield processing recordings fast. It was comparable to my server computer and not much difference to notice.

If I weren't doing other things with some of my recordings (some I like to keep and I permanently remove the commercials for example) I would keep my DVR on the Shield.

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#4

We don't recommend recording to network drives, and currently it is not possible to do so on the SHIELD as our app has not been given network mount write permissions by Nvidia

#5

I don’t know what your commercial detection is on the Shield or an i5 3rd gen would be, but I have an i5 7th and the commercial detection is 3-5mins for an hour show.

#6

I run Channels DVR on an i3-5010U (5th gen., which is actually a mobile processor, so it has a much lower TDP than a regular desktop chip), and it processes a 30min recording in about 5–10 minutes, with longer recordings taking a proportional time (2hr Recordings usually take around 30 minutes).

#7

First of all thanks for all the replies.I wanted to post back and let you all know which direction I went in. You probably don't really care but since I posted the question I figured it's only polite to follow up. I ended up setting Channels up (along with Plex) on a dedicated machine for now. I never had any issues with the Shield but the computer was just collecting dust on it anyway so I figured I'd try it out for a while. I can always swap back. So far so good. Since I was experimenting anyway I decided I'd try out Windows 10 LTSC version without all of the extra Microsoft bloat (I had an activation key through work and I've been wanting to try it out just because) . I'm running it headless and have it set to auto start backup after any power outage and set it for auto logon with Channels set to auto start. It's been running for about 2 days now with no issues.

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