Phantom CPU Usage on W10

[Malo]

A transcoding web server on a tablet lol. Hope it's powerful

 

[orangpelupa]

it seems Nvidia driver (or some of its bundled software, it was a huge driver, like almost half gigs?) was the culprit. After i updated it yesterday, today the CPU still hasnt been haunted yet.

I allways try to have completely separate devices for server, work and entertainment. It's just safer and cleaner that way.

I was planning to buy Miniforums ryzen https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-next-gen-minis-amd-yes#/ to also work as pfsense. I even calculated how much customs cost i need to pay. But then I checked my expenses and yoinks, nope nope nope.

@orangpelupa is a bit of a masochist it's no fun if it just works

If using additional hardware is not an opinion, at least run everything in VMs or containers.

On a modern system using a hypervisor and passing through your desktop might even be a viable option. Though GPU passthrough being what it is... you might be better off running VMs inside Windows if you need the best GPU performance you can get.

unfortunately ryzen master refuse to launch with hyper v feature enabled. Someone hacked the .exe for an old version of ryzen master to simply skip the check, it works just fine. Dunno why AMD did it.

A transcoding web server on a tablet lol. Hope it's powerful

it got intel quicksync. so it'll do HW transcoding. But how fast, dunno. Have;nt benchmarked it yet. I've googled around and turns out even a celeron can do well enough for one or two transcodes. BUT for some useres, plex server got a bug where intel quicksync transcoding results in ridiculous amounts of macroblocking.

I'm also not sure Intel QuickSync TDP is considered as CPU or iGPU TDP. Currently my TDP bias is set to favour CPU instead of iGPU.

EDIT

LOL the tablet sips so little electricity. 35watts total (tablet + 3x external HDD + switch + ONT + Router)


Compared to my PC 248W (PC + TV + surround sound system)

 

[Silent_Buddha]

Btw I just updated Nvidia GPU driver, it's been 4 ish hours since then and the cpu hasn't been haunted yet. If its still fixed for tomororrow, the phantom probably Nvidia driver.

Too bad I didn't see this thread until you found that out. I would have suggested that up above as I've had a few NV driver versions do that here as well. NV really are crap at writing consistent mostly bug free drivers. It's basically a crapshoot every time I install a new driver whether something will break or a new "bug" will be introduced to my system.

Regards,
SB

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

it seems Nvidia driver (or some of its bundled software, it was a huge driver, like almost half gigs?) was the culprit. After i updated it yesterday, today the CPU still hasnt been haunted yet.



I was planning to buy Miniforums ryzen https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/the-next-gen-minis-amd-yes#/ to also work as pfsense. I even calculated how much customs cost i need to pay. But then I checked my expenses and yoinks, nope nope nope.



unfortunately ryzen master refuse to launch with hyper v feature enabled. Someone hacked the .exe for an old version of ryzen master to simply skip the check, it works just fine. Dunno why AMD did it.



it got intel quicksync. so it'll do HW transcoding. But how fast, dunno. Have;nt benchmarked it yet. I've googled around and turns out even a celeron can do well enough for one or two transcodes. BUT for some useres, plex server got a bug where intel quicksync transcoding results in ridiculous amounts of macroblocking.

I'm also not sure Intel QuickSync TDP is considered as CPU or iGPU TDP. Currently my TDP bias is set to favour CPU instead of iGPU.

You could try proxmox. Its Debian based so it might be less finicky with hardware support. Works great on my NUC though I'm only using it for basic stuff.

You don't need a ryzen just to run the stuff you are btw. Can't you get a half decent used system for cheap somewhere? I got a 2016 i3 nuc that runs a webserver, pfsense, Emby (better than Plex ) and some other stuff. Transcoding on the CPU works fine with one or two 1080p streams. No idea what the status is on 4k HDR transcoding but that obviously is going to take some serious processing power.

Wouldn't say it's a wonder of speed but it's all fast enough. Openvpn even manages over 100mbps.

Also I think pfsense doesn't like most nics other than a couple of Intel ones. Running pfsense virtually would also prevent that from potentially causing problems.

 

[orangpelupa]

You could try proxmox. Its Debian based so it might be less finicky with hardware support. Works great on my NUC though I'm only using it for basic stuff.

You don't need a ryzen just to run the stuff you are btw. Can't you get a half decent used system for cheap somewhere? I got a 2016 i3 nuc that runs a webserver, pfsense, Emby (better than Plex ) and some other stuff. Transcoding on the CPU works fine with one or two 1080p streams. No idea what the status is on 4k HDR transcoding but that obviously is going to take some serious processing power.

Wouldn't say it's a wonder of speed but it's all fast enough. Openvpn even manages over 100mbps.

Also I think pfsense doesn't like most nics other than a couple of Intel ones. Running pfsense virtually would also prevent that from potentially causing problems.

I totally forgot about looking for used stuff hahaha. Thank you for reminding!

Btw
Can you elaborate more on emby?

I'm kinda annoyed by plex for years since ps3 media server stopped working for me (dunno why, I posted the log to the team, they're also confused). So if there's something better than plex, I'll jump ship!

Edit
https://support.emby.media/support/solutions/articles/44001173099-emby-premiere-feature-matrix

Yoink! No hardware trasncoding for the free tier

Edit
Found jellyfin https://jellyfin.org/docs/general/administration/hardware-acceleration.html

It seems to be an open source fork of emby

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Do you really need hardware acceleration? As I mentioned my 5 year old i3, which is essentially a laptop part, can do 1 or 2 high bitrate h264 transcodes. Personally I made sure all my devices I watch on don't need transcoding.

I think Emby's back end is much easier to work with and Emby has come a long way since I started using it years ago and did my initial comparison with Plex. The apps might not be as polished as its made by a pretty small team but these days at least the Android apps "just work". The forums are also pretty active and the devs actually comment and listen to their users which is rather different from Plex from what I hear.

Jellyfin is a port but last time I checked they didn't really have any apps and I don't know if the hardware transcoding is any good. The reason Emby moved (some of) their software to closed source is because they hired people to work on the software, including the hw acceleration.

I don't pay anymore because I don't use any of the premium features but at $120 for a lifetime license plus free apps its hard to argue that it is overly expensive.

 

[orangpelupa]

Do you really need hardware acceleration? As I mentioned my 5 year old i3, which is essentially a laptop part, can do 1 or 2 high bitrate h264 transcodes. Personally I made sure all my devices I watch on don't need transcoding.

I think Emby's back end is much easier to work with and Emby has come a long way since I started using it years ago and did my initial comparison with Plex. The apps might not be as polished as its made by a pretty small team but these days at least the Android apps "just work". The forums are also pretty active and the devs actually comment and listen to their users which is rather different from Plex from what I hear.

Jellyfin is a port but last time I checked they didn't really have any apps and I don't know if the hardware transcoding is any good. The reason Emby moved (some of) their software to closed source is because they hired people to work on the software, including the hw acceleration.

I don't pay anymore because I don't use any of the premium features but at $120 for a lifetime license plus free apps its hard to argue that it is overly expensive.

Unfortunately My tablet's i5 only have 6watt max TDP after 10s or 20s (I forgot) of 15w TDP because Sony stupidly put "time" as hard limit instead of using temperature like any sane manufacturer....

When it hit the 6 watt TDP limit, the gpu will crawl to 100mhz, and cpu between 0.9ghz to 1.1 ghz.

Hence I'm pretty sure without using hw for trascoding, it'll be too slow.

I'll try jellyfish, stremio. It seems they got hw trascoding for free.

 

[orangpelupa]

still no phantom cpu usage, yay. So nvidia driver is the culprit.

jellyfish quicksync transcoding also works, i can stream as fast as when im using ryzen 5 but probably will only strong enough to handle 1 or 2 simultaneous transcode haha

 

[orangpelupa]

okay okay, this is tuesday now and my CPU hasnt been haunted yet! So now i'm 100% sure it was NVIDIA driver. I guess ill stick to this driver version for a foreseeable future

in case i;ll need to rollback to this awesome driver veresion again, its 27.21.14.5167 7/5/2020