Intel Core i5 2500k or AMD Phenom 2 X6 Black Edition?

Yes, i also do encoding, but i mostly play games too.

The Core i5-2500k is better for games than the Phenom II X6 1100T BE.

For a 2-pass H.264 video encoding, they are basically equal. On the 1st pass the Core i5 is faster, but on the 2nd pass it is slightly slower than the Phenom II.

For 3D rendering, the Core i5 would be better.

See following link for benchmarks.

Note: Pay attention to the type of benchmarks because in some cases higher is better, while in other cases lower is better.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/203?vs=288

WOW! i5 beats x6 in everything, except for the 2nd passes of H264 video encodings!

Beast!

I5 is a really good processor and is very fast but you are also working with an intel mobo that do not like to play nice with SSD's in general depending on the controller it has... if you are planning to go that route anyways. You also are locked into that chip format as intel loves to change everything so you have to buy a new mobo with every new generation so your only upgrade path will be to an i7 which is pretty darn good so not really a downside there. At least the next generation of amd chips will work with the am3/am3+ mobos so you will have an upgrade path for a little while to the latest tech.

I went with an 1100t / 890gxm-g65 mobo which overclocked rock stable after 3 hours of burn in at 3.8ghz on the stock cooler LOL Not bad at all for free speed. And it is playing nice with my force gt 120gb drive and all other items. Overall just a really good setup and very happy with it. Also it is VERY quiet and runs cool in my well vented case. It is actually hard to hear the system running under normal operations as the cpu fan is spinning at 25% and only ramps up when it is it is being pushed. But to note, when it is pushed hard and the fan really ramps up, she does sound like vacuum cleaner lol

The 1155 socket will be used for Ivy Bridge. Many Intel 6 series motherboards already state Ivy Bridge compatibility(complete line of Gigabyte 6 series are Ivy Bridge compatible including PCIE 3.0 support).
http://www.gigabyte.com/press-center/news-page.aspx?nid...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E168...

So you do have an upgrade path unlike what garage1217 said. The I5-2500k is an all around better CPU than anything AMD has to offer although if you can wait a couple months Bulldozer has potential.

Its time to upgrade my AMD system and I just bought an I5-2500k. My last two machines I built myself and they have been AMD but there is nothing that AMD has now that can compete with the I5-2500k.

It is no contest in favor of the i5. See the reviews on bit-tech - http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/c [...] e-review/1 and go to gaming performance and power consumption. i5 beats the 1100T on EVERYTHING except Cinebench and wprime, and is directly related to the number of cores with only 4 cores vs 6. Plus less power consumption, even when overclocked (overclocked 1100t@4.2Ghz=369W, overclocked i5@4.9=221W!) And an overclocked i5 blows away an 1100t in every gaming or consumer use scenario.

If you are doing video work, get any Z68 series board that has Hydra so you can utilize the superior i5 video transcoding in addition to a separate gpu. If you get a P67 or lower board you will not be able to.

Quicksync encoding on the Intel for supported applications is WAAAAAAAAY faster than any AMD combo. see http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/video-transcoding-a...
like, 2.5 to 6X faster than using a dedicated GPU card.
or check http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a8-3500m-llano-apu,...
for more of the same.

There is almost nothing that the X6 is going to be faster in except in some high end scientific multithreaded or esoteric use.

There are very few provable known ssd issues, one is a driver issue with the Intel video driver, another is that intel ssd's have a problem with power cycling. I googled and saw no other major things, so ssd problems are fud.

I have a similar use case and this is what I decided to go with.

Newegg Item Number: Item Description: Quantity: Price:
N82E16820226184 MEM 4Gx2|MUSHKIN 996988 R 1 59.99
N82E16819115072 CPU INTEL|CORE I5 2500K 3.3G 6M R 1 219.99
N82E16813157264 MB ASROCK Z68 EXTREME4 GEN3 R 1 189.99
N82E16835109030 CPU COOL TT| VENOMOUS X - RT RT 1 74.99