I guess I'm just confused as how a desktop PC with one CPU could provide as good performance as the server I purchased with 2 CPUs & 10 cores each.
I completely understand the cost is more than a desktop.
Answer: Video Decoders, H264/H265 = Highly Compressed Video, requires heavy processing to decode.. The only reason why your smartPhone or a RaspberyPI or SmartTV's can handle these files is because of hardware decoders, if they had to rely on software decoders the'd drain the battery instantly and choke on there on vomit the moment you gave em a HD video.
With the proper hardware support all that video decoding is offloaded from the CPU.. Turning on HW Decoding in
BlueIris can take a machine loaded at 80% CPU load down to 20% CPU load.. Desktops work better because they have appropriate hardware to handle HD VIdeo.. Servers, well they dont.. very few servers ever see a video, let alone 32 HD Video Streams at the same time...
Most servers run idle mostly and handle bursts of load, like everyone signing into email/vpn/whatever at the same time every morning, or something goes viral and web traffic suddenly explodes then goes back to normal.. very few server loads are going to run a high load on the server 24/7/365 like a Video Recorder, and those that are loaded like that are often optimized and ran off the most efficient servers in the datacenter... Either way these are machines that when they go down can result in thousands to millions of dollars lost, so power efficiency is not a big concern in face of that.