Intel's new SSE4 instructions and video encoding

[warbird281]

I am struggling making a decision whether to get a q6600 wo/SSE4 or the $120 more expensive q9450 w/SSE4 instructions. Ive read that the SSE4 instructions can speed up the encoding process up to 105%, which I am skeptical about. I will be doing alot of x264 and xvid encoding on this new machine that im putting together and im wondering if anyone has ever seen a major difference in encoding times like Intel claims.

[iamsostupid]

clock for clock, you're talking more like 8-12%, which is still pretty nice. whatever you get, you need to overclock it. The Q9450 is almost twice the cost of a Q6600 though, so I would not get the newer CPU.

[vertices]

I just got a Q9450. Not a bad chip at all. I mainly went with it for the larger cache and faster FSB without OCing too much. I've only got it up to 3.2Ghz but it's rock stable and fast as hell.

Stuck it on a Asus Maximus Formula II with 8GB of OCZ Platinum 1066. Although I had to drop the RAM to 800mhz to get all 8GB to run stable.

[proxops-pete]

Nice... memory speeds are overrated imo anyway...