My current server is a little Mini ITX box with an i7-4770S, 8GB of the cheapest DDR3 I could find, and then I threw in a cheap Nvidia GT 610 for GPU acceleration.
I will try turning off DXVA2 tomorrow and set it back to software decoding to see how much of a difference there is and I’ll report back.
I’m also very excited about QuickSync support possibly coming soon.