If I drop my Athlon II X4 640 (O.C. to 3.75 Ghz) in favour of a Phenom II 965/970 will I notice a difference at all? I want to get my encoding times down in ProShow Producer at HD 1080P resolutions. I've put up for 5-6 months now, but as I make longer shows and videos, encoding time is getting worse. Typically, 10 minutes of video takes 40 minutes to encode. The software can support 16 threads (yikes) so I thought about a Phenom II X6 too, but I'm worried my ageing motherboard might bottleneck one of those CPU's.
Gigabyte's site says my GA-MA790X-UD3P supports all of the Phenom II CPU's right up to the just released 1100T, but I have a sneaky suspicion it runs at reduced HT bandwidth on the 790X chip set, and my DDR2 RAM wont be doing it any favours. I also know all of the i7 CPU's run rings round the Phenom II CPU's in encoding tasks, but would be keen to avoid that costly upgrade path if there are benefits in any AMD Phenom CPU's over the Athlon II X4's?