General hardware/system (performance) questions

[Donny Bahama]

I’m thinking about building a dedicated machine for Handbrake encoding. What I’m wondering is, can I skimp on the CPU (e.g. low end Ryzen) and get a fairly fast GPU? Or do they need to be equally powerful? Does more RAM = faster/better encodes? Or is 4GB enough for a Linux machine? Specific suggestions/recommendations appreciated.

[mduell]

CPU is mostly all that matters. GPU not relevant.

4GB is enough for reasonable 1080p encodes, may be a little light for 4K depending on settings.