I have Channels and Plex running on a Celeron 1037u 1.8Ghz. Would I see any difference at all if I moved to an i3 or i5? I don't really watch remotely so I guess I'm not doing much transcoding. I wondered if I'd see any faster seek time, startup play time, resume time, etc when using the DVR recordings? Or would it be pretty much indiscernible and no reason to upgrade?
Thanks.
I can't answer your question directly, but I'm curious what clients you use (Fire TV, ATV, Nvidia Shield). I have an old Corei5 on my server and my shield starts playing files almost instantly.
I have a feeling the items you mentioned will be affected more by your client and their connection quality (wifi, hard-wired, etc).
Thanks for the reply. I should have included that in original post. I am using four 4k Fire TV's. Three are on 5Ghz wifi and one hardwired on an adapter. The fastest server speeds I get are on the wired one and one of the 5Ghz which both are at around 350mb/s. When I start or resume a recording, it does take a couple of secs maybe - a little longer resuming perhaps. Probably silly to want instantaneous anything but if a simple upgrade would help, I'd probably do it. I think the Fire's max speeds are around 400mb/s due to their hardware but I may be wrong about that.
I have a 4k Fire TV with the Ethernet adapter as well. It does take a second or two to start playing a file, but it isn't bad. I think this may be more to do with the hardware of the client than the device. As I noted above, my Nvidia Shield is almost instant.
I'm sure others hear can share their experiences as well.
These actions aren't really processor intensive; instead they are more determined by your network connection and the storage you're using.
If you are noticing issues in those areas, the first step to improving client performance is to switch your network to a wired GbE environment, and remove wireless connections. The other direction you could take would be upgrade the hard drives you are using.
However, if you are happy with things as they are, I can't see any need for an upgrade.
The only tasks that a processor upgrade would improve would be software-based transcoding, and speeding up commercial detection.