Wouldn’t something like a T1000 (50w/8GB) be okay? I know I use a much older matrox card (30w?/ w/ even lower TDP) for this purpose. It’s not great, but it transcodes in hardware.

TIL nurdles.

4090s are what price now? Didn’t keep track, I’m astonished. never thought I’d see the day when Apples RAM pricing is seen as competitive.

Just FYI: The “Mac Studio” when equipped with 32-core M3Ultra processors can have up to 512GB of RAM.

It costs like 15k after taxes, so not exactly the scope of this thread, but it exists.