Spec for encoding

[jubei]

Hi guys,

Friend of mine is looking to make some amateur movies and generally playing around with video editing software and is finding his old pc cant cut it for encoding. Is having to leave it on overnight for minimal tasks and would like to upgrade to a quad core to speed this up.

He has plenty of HDD, PSU, peripherals. But needs the core components, mobo ram, cpu, sound, gfx.

This is purely for encoding video so i am not sure that would even need a seperate audio/gfx solution? But as i know zero about video editing and encoding i thought i would ask here where someone might actually know.

So could people please spec me the core components for a machine purely to be used for video editing and encoding. Cheers

 

[jubei]

What is the rough budget here? From what I know when encoding the graphics card isn't terribly important since it relies largely on pure CPU power. Does the video editing software that your friend uses utilise quad core?

I honestly dont know, but he is fairly sure the software he uses could utilise 4 cores so thats what he wants.

There is no set budget, just wants it as cheap as poss but good performance. I would imagine just for core components anything up to about 300 would be fine. Though cheaper the better if doesnt compromise too badly on performance which would defeat the purpose of an upgrade lol.