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.
Encoding with the Cryo Mercia system is quite decent, with a time of just over 14 minutes being the final result. An older Core 2 Duo at 2.5ghz takes over 16.30 minutes for the same task, over 2 minutes are saved with the Core i5 processor.