I am a huge Windows fan, running Plex on a Threadripper CPU and Nvidia P2000 for transcoding for a long time. All the power I could wish for but also not an energy efficient setup. Very recently I made the decision to go for intel NUC because I wanted to bring IDLE usage down as much as I could without comprising on the performance.
Got my inspiration from: 25 Simultaneous Hardware Transcodes on the NUC10i7FNH - #3 by ChuckPa
So this will give a rough expectation what you can expect from quick sync, but you dont need an expensive CPU for it. As far as I understand all the recent intel cpu’s with quicksync have the same performance when it comes to video transcoding. Please note that audio transcoding is still being done by the CPU so that may become a limiting factor if going for a weaker cpu.
I am running the NUC headless without any hdmi dongle. It runs like a beast on ubuntu 20.04 server with docker. I already had some docker experience because of my Synology NAS, that helped me alot. As I am Windows orientated it also felt uncomfortable in the beginning setting everything up.
