ATI Card Choice

How about HD4670 or HD3870 , the previous generation top end ~
and the question is which kind of game do you usually play?

it will mostly be to free up my cpu on encoding projects of the sort

if i do any gaming it will be online mmorpg - and some weak rc simulators

probably the most powerful gaming i will do is Shaiyra or Warhammer/WoW stuff on no more than 1680x1050 reso

mostly a console gamer, need more firepower for ripping, encoding and burning while doing other tasks (i.e. internet, media player, word processor, all at once)

I'm not a real "geek" I'm not looking for the cutting edge I am just looking for something that will work for me that is fast and efficient.

most all if not all my video formats are .avi files - i dont know if that makes any difference

i have considered a quad-core - most likely an upgrade for the future
right now i am just getting into a multiple-core to feel it out (running a celeron d right now)

so lets try to put this into perspective because i really dont know....
with my specs on a dual core - am i going to be able to burn a dvd and do other stuff at the same time or do i really need a quad core right now?

i haven't bought everything yet, and my mobo i chose completely supports am+ processors

Oh ok, if so then the HD 4830 is perfect for you. You can burn DVDs and multitask, on a dual core, believe me, I've tried.

It should be perfectly ok. Just make sure it supports the Am3 PhII just for later.

A GPU will not help you convert faster. As mentioned, the GPU transcoding tools suck for the most part, and a strong GPU won't help in a CPU only task. If this activity is taking to long, you need a better CPU and/or more ram. You already have four gigs, so if its not fast enough you need a better CPU.

You might want to download CPUz and see if your Asrock board is running things right. Perhaps you have some bad settings. Double check that you are using both cores in windows.

ok just to clarify - this system is not together yet, those parts are on order though.

but ok so if the gpu isn't going to help much in encoding and such, then is my dual core going to allow me to encode/burn a dvd and do other things at the same time without lag?

right now i am totally obsolete (celeron d 2.93ghz 256ram)
it takes me nearly 2 hours from start to finish on encoding an .avi to dvd in nero
and it maxes out my cpu and i cannot do anything else

im sure anything i do is going to be a huge upgrade for me, but i want to make sure i am going to be able to do other things even if it doesn't speed up the encode/burn process

that's what quad core cpu made for "More multi tasking"
as i see ur mobo are AM3 CPU Ready so u have no probleme with Phenom II
and the Integrated GPU are great HD 3200 with 128 MB DDR3 side port memory
and u will see huge different between Athlon64X2 7750 and Phenom 2
even in games
the Ph2 920 beat Q6600 an some tests Q9450 in video converting
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I'll throw in my $0.02 worth on this. As has been mentioned already, the GPU transcoding programs (AVIVO for ATI cards and Badaboom for Nvidia cards) are pretty underwhelming. However, we are starting to see some decent encoding programs enable GPU acceleration. The recent versions of TMPGEnc enable GPU acceleration if you have a newer (G92 core or newer) Nvidia card. http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/ [...] .html#tabs I have not personally tried this as the most recent Nvidia card I own is only a 7600GT, but apparently TMPGEnc uses the GPU to speed up some of the filters, which would definitely be nice if it works. I suspect something similar will be available for ATI cards sometime in the near future.

I find it very hard to believe that DX11 will have anything to do with encoding as it is a 3D API and media encoding is most certainly not a 3D application. I suspect what you are referring to was probably about OpenCL, which is the GP-GPU API that is supposed to be rolled out around the same time as DX11.

Having an open GP-GPU API that will work on all cards and not be restricted to just the products of a single company is the best chance for some quality GPU accelerated apps to appear on the market. As it stands now where CUDA only works on Nvidia cards and Stream only works on ATI cards, there is less incentive for developers to write programs using those API's as the market for each is limited. If OpenCL's implementation is as widespread as we are being led to believe it will be then there is a much better chance that more developers will use it. Should be an interesting 12 months or so coming up.

if you encode videos why did you go for quadcroe?