New system: Cpu or Gpu transcoding.

[lazylazyjoe]

I do a lot of transcoding to h.264 and aac for my ipod and I'm putting together a new system. Which solution would create faster results, all other components being equal. An athlon II x4 620 doing CPU transcoding or a sempron 140 (or e3200) and an Nvidia 9600 or 9800gt (CUDA in mediacoder) doing GPU transcoding. Any other ideas that keep the cpu/board and graphics around $150 I am listening.
Also, what benefits would a 64 bit operating system provide. I'm only planning on getting 2 GB of ram so unless there's a benefit I'm not going to bother as that would allocate more memory for each program open.
I know the difference between the cpus, I'm just trying to decide which way to go with my build. I don't play games, so the only reason I would buy a video card would be transcoding. Same thing w/ the quad core; unless I'm doing transcoding, a single or maybe a dual core will be fine. I'm also open to any ideas that will keep cpu/board/graphics around $150.

[redwudz]

For H.264, a multiple core CPU will usually get faster results. But encoding speed depends mostly on CPU speed. So my recommendations are for the fastest multi core you can afford. The Athlon 620 seems a good deal, considering your budget. I would recommend 4GB RAM, as RAM is fairly cheap at present and you may see some benefits from the 2GB extra RAM. This is especially true if you are using W7 or Vista which tend to use a bit more RAM.

For your uses, probably not much gain by using a 64bit OS. Especially with 2GB RAM.

[edDV]

Consider GPU (cuda, etc.) experimental at this point and not yet widely supported.

[lazylazyjoe]

Thanks. It's hard to find comparable reviews. To compare info from one settup to another I need to know the length of time, the bitrate, the resolution, fps, settings, & encoder of the files ... And no review seems provide this info for the new quad cores from amd and a Cuda based gpu transcoding, let alone in the same review.
Besides transcoding all I do is watch video/music ( which even my current settup does fine) and web browse; so that is what I will be building my computer for. I really don't want to have to spend extra for extra cores or a video card if I can get away without it. (I really would rather spend it on a new display, more disk space and maybe a ssd.)

So I guess it seems like I should go for the x4 and stick with the HD3200 or 4200 IGP for graphics for now. Once GPU programming gets better, I can always get a new graphics card.

[jagabo]

For CPU based encoding you want a quad Core i7 CPU. GPU based encoding still has spotty support. It's a little faster than the fastest CPUs but the quality still isn't there. See reviews at Anandtech, TomsHardare, ExtremeTech, etc. Unfortunately, none of them has done a good comparison of CPU vs GPU encoding.