Indeed, just paid $3k more for the same workstation we purchased last year at this time. Just the DDR5 sticks and NVMe drive cost more than most parts right now including a rtx 5070 Ti 16G card. For h265 hardware encoding, the performance differences on higher-end cards benchmarks was negligible.

Building systems based on application specific benchmarks rather than general what-if use-case scenarios will sometimes show you something interesting. ymmv. =3