OT : More CPUs or Faster CPUs

[Paul Lemmons]

I am soon to purchase a new PC. It will run Fedora and its primary 
purpose will be:

1) Transcoding my DVD library to xvid-avi's so that they may be watched 
on my media player
2) Editing training videos that I create and burning the finished 
product to DVD for distribution

To transcode I will most likely be using dvd::rip and for editing I will 
probably be using cinerella

Now that that is said and money not a limitless resource I have some 
choices to make. One of those choices is CPU configuration. For the 
tasks above, which is better:

1) A single very fast CPU
2) Dual core CPU with combined speed greater than or equal to a single 
CPU but each core slower than a single CPU
3) Multi socket CPU with combined speed greater than a single CPU but 
each CPU slower than a single CPU

Bang for buck, option 2 sounds the best to me but I am concerned that 
the process of transcodeing is single threaded and would not take 
advantage of multiple CPUs.

Thoughts? Suggestions?
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