Mini PC QuickSync Clustering worth it or not?

[TheDreadPirate]

So I'm looking at perhaps creating a little cluster of Mini PCs for transcoding. You can nowadays pick up some pretty cheap but very capable hardware. Obviously at the moment the N305/N100 is the current king. But I'm wondering, how far back and how far down the stack can you go and still get value from QuickSync.

I'm assuming you'd likely want 4k & at least HEVC & VP9 (regular, not 10/12 bit). A few of the CPUs I've spotted in cheap mini-PCs have been:

• N3350
  
• Z8350
  
• J4105
  
• N4020
  
• N5105
  
• N605
  
• N95
  
• N100
  
• N305
  

Obviously, price is a concern, but I'm wondering if this type of distributed approach has been attempted, I'd assume ProxMox is the way to go about this? Also, what are the QuickSync capabilities of those CPUs if you know?

For the "N605" did you mean N6005?

I use this wiki a lot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quic...d_encoding

Personally, I wouldn't bother with anything older than Apollo Lake.  Even then, I would probably get Gemini Lake or newer for the slightly updated HD Graphics (gen 9 vs 9.5).  Of your list, I think only the Z8350 is older than Apollo Lake.