After reading more about the z68, I ended up going ahead and getting a h67 motherboard and the i5 2500k. I’ve got to say, I’m quite happy with it, the performance is amazing.
I followed the links on Intel’s website to all the software that currently supports QuickSync and grabbed demo versions of them all. Most of them were too dumbed down for me but Badaboom2 (never even heard of badaboom ver 1) was good. It let me adjust video quality, size, bitrate, etc all while using QuickSync for the decode/encode. It took a 1h30m long 1080p MKV (Main movie rip using MakeMKV) and re-encode down to 720p in 15min. It took up 1 CPU core, putting my system at 25% usage(I’m guessing for the audio re-encode). The system was still zippy and responsive letting me keep working while doing the encode. I think Intel has a real winner with this new function.
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