Mac Pro 5,1 for DVR Server?

Channels DVR Server
#1

Currently, I'm using a Mac Mini (2014) for my channels DVR Server. It works well but for a few reasons, I'm toying with switching my home server over to a Mac Pro 5,1 (6-Core 3.46 GHz Xeon, 32GB RAM, AMD RX 560 GPU). Two questions:

  1. Does anyone have any experience using one of these older Macs for Channels?
  2. Would I lose the ability to do hardware transcoding since the Westmere generation of Intel CPUs doesn't support Quick Sync (or least I don't think they do from what I've read)
#2

If you have a 6-Core 3.46 GHz Xeon, you don't need hardware encoding. You can do several concurrent software transcodes on that, easily.