Description of problem or question: Building a new system. Already have a 6 core Xeon 5650 processor but wondering if people think it's worth buying a dual socket board, and another Xeon 5650. I can get ECC RAM fairly cheap so the biggest expense would likely be the board. Or is it better just to spring for a Ryzen 5 2600 or i5-8400/8500 (my budget)?
Currently I'm using handbrake-cli on Linux to compress Blu-ray ripped mkv files into much smaller files. My desktop runs an AMD A8-5600K so any of the above options are better than what I have. I've also been encoding on our KODI server which has an i5-2300. Both are running on Xubuntu 18.04.
I was thinking the dual Xeon 5650s might be useful for encoding 2 files at once?
My inclination is simply to buy/build the i5.
Dual CPU Hardware, Ryzen 5 2600, i5 8400/8500
Re: Dual CPU Hardware, Ryzen 5 2600, i5 8400/8500
The core count is the important part. If you have more than 12 cores, you can run a second encoding task without massively slowing the first one. The "sweet spot" for cores/encode varies between 8 and 12, depending on the source and destination parameters. And it really doesn't make a lot of difference if those cores are on one die or two.