Encoding is something most of us do on a fairly regular basis and it is a good way to monitor any fluctuations in performance across the range of motherboards on test today.
One of our favourite tools is the excellent, free Handbrake. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
We extracted a VOB file from the DVD of AVATAR and then converted it to MP4 at quality settings.
Almost three and a half minutes are saved when cranking the overclock to 4ghz. If you handle regular encoding this is going to save many hours over the course of a week.