Best for encoding and some gaming

Like another person I've read here on the boards, I'm upgrading from a Prescott P4 2.8 system. Its a great system, runs fine and it plays the games I play(WoW, FFXI) smoothly while using WinXP (Windows 7 has different system resources for my video card in dual screen mode but still plays them when not dualling). I do enjoy OCin' but only w/ air cooling. Nothing eXtreme.

My biggest complaint had been the 4 hours to use AVI2DVD to make a DVD image, and the time its taking to render DVD footage to AVI for music videos.

I've been bouncing around thinking about PhenomII 950 or 955 BE or a low grade i7. The i7 just seems too much $$, but the new i5's seem promising comparing price to performance. In using AnandTech comparison page between even the 965 and the i5 a majority of the results seem to have the i5 beating it.

Its just kinda hard to see this though when the 955(or 965) have their form of HT and the i5 does not. Going with the 955 I also get the 3 channel DDR capability. I did read the page about the OCin' issue on i5's but that doesn't seem to be in the range I would OC my CPU anyways.

For what I'm doing, do you all think I'd get better performance out of the PII-955 over the i5 750? Or is the AnandTech comparison spot on w/ better to go with i5?

Thanks in advanced for the help & replies =D

If you're seriously doing video work then go i7 920, overclock the bitch to 4GHz (get a good cooler too - Megahalems, TRUE 120 Revision C, Scythe Mugen 2), strap in 12GB RAM and you're set for years - the extra bit of cash is seriously worth it.

Plus with a BIOS upgrade next year you'll probably be able to drop in the 6-core i9 for another 2 cores of video-encoding loveliness (when the prices become reasonable).

Oh, and as a lot of video encoders and such are taking advantage of GPGPU (specifically CUDA at the moment) get a half-decent NVIDIA card to throw in (GTX 200 series if you can stretch it) and you'll get an even bigger boost.

What's your budget? I reckon the chances are good you can squeeze an i7 build in.

I'm really happy with my i7 920 for video coding. Until I gave up on WoW last month, I'd frequently be playing that while coding a que of DVDs into mkv files. WoW played just fine, and the task manager would show 100% usage on 8 cores. The only thing that slowed down my game play was when I had it read/write video files to the same HD WoW was installed on. I put WoW on a separate drive and lag from big cities went away.

I have handbreak shrinking my DVDs into ~2 GB mkv files using x.264. With turbo 2 pass encoding, it takes roughly the same time to rip as the length of the DVD. If I use Mpeg encoding instead, it takes a mere 8 mins (but I don't like the quality).

I recently got an ATI 5870, and AVIVO is crap. It only supports a handful of file types... it refuses to accept any file outputs from handbreak. I can't say anything about baddaboom from experience, but reviews on the web show that has issues as well, though much better support than AVIVO.

You can get a modest X58 MB for $200, an i7 920 for $200 if you're near a microcenter ($300 if you aren't), and 6GB of RAM for about $130 (for some reason DDR3 prices have gone up in the last 6 months ?:-/ ) If video coding is your goal this is the path to go. When Sandy Bridge comes out some time next year, there's the option of upgrading to an i9 6/8 core to bring those coding times down even more.

So an i7 920 package would be $630 ish.

An i5 750 would be $200 CPU + $150 MB + $90 4GB Ram = $440, so $190 cheaper.

An AM3 would be about the same price, but the intel route does slightly faster encoding.