I've been running a headless Ubuntu server for about 10 years or so. At first, it was just a file/print server, so I bought a super low power motherboard/processor to cut down on the energy bill. It's a passively cooled Intel Celeron J3455 "maxed out" with 16BG of RAM.
Since then it's ballooned into a Plex/Shinobi/Photoprism/Samba/Frigate/MQTT/Matrix/Piwigo monster. It has six drives in RAID6 and a 7th for system storage (three of the drives are through a PCI card). I'm planning on moving my server closet, and I'll be upgrading the case into a rack-mount style case. While I'm at it, I figured I could upgrade the hardware as well. I was curious what I should look for in hardware.
I've built a number of gaming PCs in the past, but I've never looked at server hardware. What features should I look for? Also, is there anything specific (besides a general purpose video card) that I can buy to speed up video encoding? It'd be nice to be able to real-time transcode video with Plex.
QS is generational, and newer versions will be much better in quality than older ones, and have some more throughput too.
Important note: ARC gpus all have the same qs engine right now (A780 = A310), so even an arc a310 will decimate any cpu qs and will be much faster than any nvidia hardware encoder too. (qs encoder in a310 is slightly handicapped by lower vram bandwidth and size, but it is negligible)