Whoa Lenny, you are old school.
Even cheap motherboards these days use decent caps. There is no more north/southbridge, everything has moved onto the CPU.
Motherboards these days are simply placeholders for components. They don't have significant performance qualities, unless you are doing fairly extreme overclocking. I'm pretty sure the market has been cornered by only a couple of companies.
I advise to get the cheapest motherboard you can, subject to simply, the amount peripheral components you want to use.
Think about the future. You might only need 2 memory slots now, but having a 4 memory slot motherboard, with 2 slots empty, will mean you can simply increase memory in the future for no added cost.
Get an SDD.
Power supply is important, but not to the point of thinking you need 1.21 gigawatts, for the flux capacitor. Stick to a brand name. Don't buy some extremely cheap no name POS. Use
this calculator to determine your actual power requirements.
There's no point having a
Titan Z, with only 2GB of system memory for instance.
Building a computer is a fine balance of cost/performance for
individual components, and the components as they work together.
If you look closely, you can often observe a price point where extra features come with significant price increases.
On the Intel side of the fence,
K model CPUs are only useful for overclocking, and actually have less features that may be worthwhile. Such as
VT-d.
Now look at these CPUs. Prices $AU.
Get an SSD.
Intel Core i5 4440. 3.1GHz (3.3GHz turbo) $215
Intel Core i5 4570. 3.2GHz (3.6GHz turbo) $229.
Intel Core i5 4670. 3.4GHz (3.8GHz turbo) $249.
All of these CPUs are going to perform almost identically. They all contain the same base features, and are only differentiated by small changes to clock speed. Benchmarks will show the clock difference, but benchmarks by nature, are designed to show these differences. The only other time this may be noticeable in video encoding, is if you are encoding 200,000 frames or more. Here, you will save a few minutes with the faster CPU, vs the slower CPU. Whether those few minutes (in an otherwise 3 hour or more encode), are useful to you, well, only you can answer that.
However, it does show how $34 can net you a performance increase.
To go cheaper then these, you have to drop significant performance. You will only get dual core.
Intel Core i7 4770. 3.4GHZ (3.9GHZ turbo) (8MB cache) (Hyperthreading) $355. This is the next level up in performance. It's expensive, but it comes with noticeable benefits, mainly the hyperthreading. Hyperthreading will increase the performance by at least
10%. Also, if you are using the computer for things other then video encoding, the useability of the system will be much greater.
Get an SSD.
Memory is fairly cheap, but unfortunately, not as cheap as it once was. 8GB is the bare minimum. Here, more is always better.
The speed rating of the memory (1600MHz, 2000MHz, etc) is of little value. Again, benchmarks will show a difference, but real world performance increases will not be noticeable, unless you are overclocking. The amount of memory is infinitely more important then it's speed.
Again, think about the future. Don't use 4 x 4GB memory sticks. Use 2 x 8GB memory sticks, and leave 2 slots free for future upgrades. Ideally, look at something like
this.
Get an SDD. Seriously! If you can manage your file system, 120-128GB is plenty for the OS drive. If you'd rather not have to worry about managing space, shell out for a 250-256GB SDD. The price difference is around $50.
If you can afford another $100, get a second 120-128GB SSD for a cache drive.
I'm not overly up to speed on the cost/performance of GPUs. But with Nvidia, you want to be looking at
Compute capability and
Core Config.
SLI is outside of your budget, and I'm not sure if any video encoders take advantage of it anyway.
Apple is overpriced crap. Once upon a time Apple had the performance advantage. These days, it's simply an adventure is spending more money then you otherwise need too.
