I'd like to ask a Favor from the Forum:

Overall Would you rather have a Dual Socket MB or a single socket MB,

Especially considering price? I'd like to know in the case of encoding MPEG-2 streams into MPEG-4 and also HD editing.

Before the advent of the QUAD Core CPU's this wasn't such a hard choice.\

I'd like your thoughts about whether for the money you'd rather have a MB with 2 Sockets and 2 dual core CPU's or even 2 Quad Core Cpu's

Versus

A Single socket MB with a high end Quad Core CPU.

Keep in mind I'm not a gamer. I want to quickly encode video and have flawless playback of HD video.

For Encoding video, Is there any part of the encoding process offloaded to the Video Cards or is all the encoding strictly done by the CPU/S?

Last but not least, Is running 2 video cards Via SLI or CrossFire worth the money?

Instead of buying one $500.00 card am I better off buying say 2 8600 GT's over a single 8800?

I'm not sure if running 2 dual cores or 1quad is better for encoding but I'mdefinatelly sure that SLIng two 8600gt over a single 8800 is highly NOT adviced. You introduce power consumption and extra heat and the result in performance is not even the same! One 8800 will kill the 2 8600 in SLI. I would recomend an ATI card (the 3870 or 3850 if you're on a budget) because of the UMD circutry used to decode HD video. I'm pretty sure that using RivaTuner you can unlock it for using it for encoding like those expensive "pro" cards Nvidia and ATI are selling.

Dual Socket AMD MB can use DDR 1 / 2 ECC Dual Socket MB AMD 4x4 boards use DDR 2 with pci-e 2.0 in all slots with the new up coming chipset.

Dual Socket MB Intel boards use FB-DIMMS with pci-e 2.0 in only 2 slots on the new chipset or DDR 2 Ecc on boards that uses pci-e 1.1 only.

Thank you for your response thus far.

Okay after further reading, the Video card question is settled for me.

For the money if you can find it in stock

XFX PVT88PYDD4 Geforce 8800 GT 670 Clock Speed XXX Extreme Edition 512MB GDDR3 PCI
Express 2.0 Video Card Retail

At @ 299.99 In Tom's Article
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/1 [...] age15.html

I don't know where he gets $230.00 for the card

I personally don't see the extra value for another 60.00 to 200.00 for the 8800 GTS/X


I am Still trying to decide the single socket versus dual socket question and I am most open to your thoughts. Just to restate, FOR THE MONEY is a Dual Socket set up with 2 CPU's (DUAL or Quad) a better value than a single socket set up with one High-end quad CPU, especially for the application of video encoding and editing?

Dual Socket is not worth it at this point in time.

1) In General, Dual Socket Boards are Server boards that do not OC very well and therefore you lose potential performance.

2) Not many software programs are optimized for 4 cores much less 8. Therefore the Single Socket already can give you all of the cores you can handle.

3) If running Windows, Only the Higher End Server versions even support over 4 cores.

4 The server boards often require much more expensive memory such as ECC.

Very Well!

I Thank all of You for your responses. Thank You Zenmaster for pointing out the significant differences between Dual & Single Socket. Happy Holidays to all. Okay Now I'll find my Single Socket MB and look at the pricing of Quad Core CPU's & make my trade off's.

Thanks again to all who contributed.