As above, a mate's found he needs to replace his Pentium 4 since the board died, and quickly, hence posting here...

What's the best of the relevant AMD/Intel offerings CPU-wise? It'll primarily be used for converting video formats (he's already got a laptop, but the missus steals it). For this job specifically, in terms of efficiency and power usage, would he see much difference with a quad over a decent dual-core?

Finally, I need the cheapest, nastiest motherboard that'll accept whatever CPU you think is best. It does need to accept DDR2 RAM though, since this is all very much unexpected expenditure already

I'll delete this thread ASAP

Cheap as chips video encoding has to mean an AMD quad. Be wary of the cheaper 775 Intel quads, they can be picky about motherboards (especially the Q8400)

Is a quad really worth it over a good dual core in terms of power draw though?

Have a look here ernie - AMD Bundle Deals

Cheers, added to my list of tabs here

PC Hardware?

Crikey - people round here have forgotten how to select any forum other than the Meeting Place!

If you are doing video encoding and the software is multi-threaded, yes it is worth it.

The newer chips will also power down unused cores, when they aren't in use.

See the explanation above - it's crap, but it's the quickest way to draw attention to a problem...

And here's big_D :



I'm assuming the software is multi-threaded as it mentions converting files for the reasonably recent PS3, so... Cheers!

If my mate decides to go for a quad core AMD, is it gonna be an AM3 board? I'm well out of touch as you can tell

No he can run it on an AM2+ board if he so chooses.

Good show, cheers!