64GB RAM is overkill for a Plex transcoding server if you’re using hardware transcoding.

Yes.

Hardware transcoding shifts the heavy lifting to your GPU (or iGPU), not the CPU or RAM. RAM does the usual server stuff — metadata caching, maybe a small RAM disk for transcoding temp files — but even during multiple simultaneous 4K transcodes, Plex rarely needs more than 8GB total. I’ve seen servers with 16GB sit at 30% utilization under load.

If you’re running only Plex on that machine, 8-16GB is plenty. 64GB is money you could spend on a better GPU, more storage, or a weekend trip. Unless you also plan to run a dozen VMs or a RAM-hungry database alongside Plex, that extra RAM is just a flex with no function.

Put that $100 toward a bigger SSD for your media cache instead.