^^hehe. you still follow TD reviews???
anyways, Q8400 is sandwiched by Athlon II X4 630 and Q9400.
X4 630 costs around 5.5k and Q9400 costs around 9.5k. both outperform Q8400. but Q9400 is much faster when compared to Athlon II X4 630.
anyways, core i5 outperform all the above. And it's starting price is 10.5k I think and we are to see sub-7k mobos and this platform will have blazing speeds for AV encoding.
here, check this: *www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/801/5
Q6600 takes 2441 seconds for a divx encoding task and the same task core i5-750 finishes in 1546 seconds. And Q8400 is just marginally faster than Q6600.
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Update:
Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 is now available for 6.5k (but you need PCI-E GPU)
so, get Core i5-750 : 10.5k and this mobo and 4Gb DDR3 1333MHz RAM and you will have blazing av encoding performance.