Will Sandy Bridge boards/CPUs have an advantage over older boards?

[zicoz]

Ok, so I just about to pull the trigger on a X8ST3-F board since it opens up for having alot of drives and it seems to have good OS support aswell.

But then it strikes me. Won't the Sandy Bridge boards have a rather huge advantage over todays boards with it's built in video encoder?

I'm looking to build a server that will store all my media and in adition to that I want to have TVersity function. (Not sure if I'm gonna use TVersity or an alternative, but you get my point)

Will the Sandy Bridge be helpfull here (if the software supports it), or does todays CPU have no problem doing this transcoding anyway?

 

[Patrick]

The two big advantages the X8ST3-F has over the new Bromolow platform are PCIe lanes, DIMM slots, and CPU choices.

PCIe wise, the Tylersburg platform allows one to add tons of PICe cards for things like additional NICs, extra SAS cards, PCIe tuners (if one wanted) and etc. With Bromolow the most one gets is two PCIe x8 and two PCIe x4 electrical.

With 8GB UDIMMs being uncommon, it is inexpensive to fill the Tylersburg boards with 6x 4GB ECC UDIMMs for 24GB total. Also one gets triple channel memory bandwidth rather than dual channel in doing so.

Finally, the X58 platform has just tons of SKUs which means one can get things like 6-core CPUs rather easily for one. In a lower-end box this is less exciting. The Sandy Bridge platform, dollar for dollar will give one more single to quad thread speed.

On the video encoding side, it depends if you can use Quick Sync or not. If you can, then Sandy Bridge (with Quick Sync) is going to be fast. If you cannot, then there will not be too much of a difference between the two platforms.

 

[zicoz]

Ok thank you. Do you know what sort of CPU is needed if one want to avoid problems with transcoding like this?