CPU benchmark advice

Please forgive me if this an obvious question, but I have been searching a lot and haven't been able to find my answer. I have been looking at the CPU benchmarks and am a bit overwelmed. I want to compare CPUs but I don't know which benchmark to use. The problem is that I don't know what the CPU will be used for down the road. Right now, I want to use it for general purpose stuff, plus video encoding.

I was hoping to find a "summary" or "total" or "Average" score that simply totals all the benchmarks together to get one number, but I don't seem to be able to find this. I also can't find any details on what the benchmark is testing. Some of them are obvious, "itunes" for example, but even that, do they mean playing a song, importing, burning or what?

-Zak

Depends on what you mean by "video editing". Bluray playback works for playback, encoding works for encoding, but hard drive read/write performance will make a big difference for loading/saving clips. Take your pick -- there's no easy answer.

I think the "pcmark" and "3dmark" benchmarks are supposed to be averages of different things.

But surely there must be a description somewhere of what the benchmark means, right?