GPU recommendations for a newbie

[TheDreadPirate]

The GTX 1050 would be enough. IIRC, there is no difference in the encoder between the 1050 and 1060. VRAM only matters for tone mapping HDR to SDR. But the 1050 has enough VRAM for 2 concurrent tone mapped streams.

The primary advantage of the P1000 and P2000 would be a higher concurrent transcode limit. However, the 1050 and 1060 support up to 8 (driver limitation) concurrent transcode streams. So your needs are still well within that limitation.