Question GPU for hardware video encoding - what are the choices?

[AnitaPeterson]

With the market being in the toilet, I've been wondering about this stupid situation.
I mean, it's absolutely ridiculous that even people who are neither miners or gamers can't find a good video card!

Case in point: I'm putting together a build for video transcoding.
As much as I like AMD, nVidia is clear the way to go here, since its NVENC is pretty much the industry-standard and is used by a large range of software packages (OBS and Handbrake come to mind).

I've been looking at the chart here:

Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix

Find the related video encoding and decoding support for all NVIDIA GPU products.

developer.nvidia.com

The 6th generation (Pascal) seems to hit a good balance between price and features (it can process both h264 and h265 @ 4K).

So based on this chart, the Quadro P400 seems to be the cheapest choice - unless I come across a dirt-cheap GTX750.

Am I correct in these observations or is there something else I'm missing?

 

[Hitman928]

Yes, used Quadro cards can be a good value in today's market, especially for transcoding.

 

[moonbogg]

You have to buy a mining product for something like this. Mining products are designed with parallel workloads in mind, so they lend themselves to alternate use cases like encoding and maybe even gaming, although this is a real outlier use case due to mining product prices and the deep pockets of the customers they are typically intended for. Maybe an RTX 3080 for the price of a used car would do the job.

 

[AnitaPeterson]

You have to buy a mining product for something like this. [...] Maybe an RTX 3080 for the price of a used car would do the job.

Yeah, no...

Let's keep real and sane.

 

[TheELF]

Yeah, no...

Let's keep real and sane.

Since you have to build a whole system anyway...build an intel system and try it out without an GPU first, obviously avaoid the F models that don't have iGPUs, the included iGPU has QSV that is almost as much supported as nvenc, obs and handbrake use it and all mayor software suits do as well.
If it doesn't have enough transcoding power or some software you have to use doesn't support qsv you can still buy an nvidia card on top of it, and you don't lose the qsv either.

 

[Insert_Nickname]

So based on this chart, the Quadro P400 seems to be the cheapest choice - unless I come across a dirt-cheap GTX750.

Might want to bump up to the P600/P620. The P400 is really bottom-of-the-barrel with only 256SP and 64bit GDDR5. The 600'reds at least have a 128bit memory bus.