ReBuilding Tower for specific purpose

[yeswedeliver]

P4's have always been enough for my purposes and wallet. Now I need my tower to be up to some new tasks: Streaming - HD Video/audio and multi-tasking with other applications - including monitoring the stream live and adding live video and chat conferencing to discuss the stream. If practical (on a budget) - even more than one stream.

I am considering 64 bit machine - perhaps something with a Quad Core - something fast and durable. I am flexible in that I aim to replace both board and cpu - so I am open so a variety of suggestions.

I will add, that when I read suggestions for choices - by some, I am asked to choose between being able to run large existing games like crysis OR high demand for high end audo and video rendering, 3d apps, etc.

Can't I have both? [Using the same board and CPU?] What might some of you suggest or recommend?

Thank you very much, in advance, for any help and input.

[Marcin]

Core i5 2500K + board on Intel P67 i.e. Asrock Pro 3 and overclock it very easy using tutorials from other forums to > 4 GHz. This configuration will be enough and not so expensive

[Chiefish]

Youre biggest investment should be a video card, usually the cpu is not the bottleneck when doing tasks like video and editing and movie playback.
Even the slowest quad core will have no trouble processing the audio and cpu related tasks, but for games like Crysis and any other heavy 3D games or video you need a real good video graphics card to have them run fast and smooth. And lotsa Ram.

[Marcin]

@Chiefish
Even Q6600 ? Depends what software he will use. Some load from GPU and many from CPU.

In some cases chipset can be very important. Reminds me old times with nVidia 6100 chipset where Autocad processing was 10 hours where nVidia 590Sli with similar CPU took 10 minutes !

Audio / photo compressing only use CPU.

[Qwerty]