Cpu question

[shorty925]

Hello,
why might my choice of CPUs change if you were building a computer system for encoding DivX home movies instead of for gaming?

 

[dudewitbow]

i do believe intels i3/i5/i7 line are still at the top, both in the editing and gaming world. it has a quick sync option which makes video editing and conversion much quicker, which helps in the encoding process.

 

[diellur]

Encoding software tends to take advantage of as many CPU cores as you can throw at them. So if you're going to be doing a lot of video encoding, a CPU which is hyper-threaded (or the AMD equivalent) would be better (eg i7-3770K). If you're going for a system where you'll occasionally encode but mainly game, then it makes little sense to spend an extra £100 on a feature you'll use once in a while, so an i5 CPU would make more sense (eg i5-3570K).