Revolution
Wise Old Owl
^^ that's true - by adding only 3k more he can get a 9800GT or by adding 4.5k a GTS 450 1GB edition from zotac and it would increase the encoding performance significantly ( more than a core i3 with DDR3 can even imagine ) but the only hitch is he will require a good psu if he already don't have one.
+1..........