FWIW...

If you wanted, probably after memories fade ;-), you could probably save the m/board by repeatedly applying alcohol & blowing out the socket with canned or compressed air.

For cooling, shouldn’t be too much of a problem now-days as current CPUs run *Much* cooler than the old Intel Prescotts. The king of the hill is still water cooling, which has gotten quite cheap, but you almost always can get a boost in cooling efficiency by going with a good aftermarket heatsink, & quiet your rig at the same time. When installing a heatsink, use one of the Arctic Silver brand or type of compound - follow their directions, which includes using only a small dab of the compound... all you want to do is fill in the microscopic hills & valleys on the mating metal surfaces; otherwise the compound itself does no good, provides no benefit over metal to metal contact. That’s why folks sand the heatsink surface, though not so much anymore - now-days a good heatsink doesn’t need it. Still, if you want to go for broke, wet or dry sandpaper, use 600 grit after rubbing 2 pieces together to get closer to 900 grit, with a mix of oil, dish soap, & water instead of plain water - you’ll have a mirror. :-)

Cooling the inside of your case is critical. You’ve seen wind tunnels on TV - imagine the air flow inside your case in the same way, and balance your air intake and outflow... 5 fans blowing in & 2 blowing out almost wastes the airflow from 3 of the input fans. In extreme cases duct outside air to the CPU, and figure out how to get air flow to the m/board electronics surrounding the CPU too - the power regulation circuits can get quite hot, often exceeding the CPU in temp.

For speed encoding etc., the Intel quads are quite over-clockable & now that they’ve dropped so far in price might be the way to go. If you’re running an AMD quad, turn off the firmware fix for a boost in speed - in Vista SP1 you have to use the AMD over-clocking software to do it. Bear in mind the extra hassles of running a 64 bit OS - if you use the PC for other things, the hassles may not be worth it... drivers for example are still a problem. Extra memory’s fine, but also bear in mind that you rapidly approach diminishing returns, plus all that ram has less effect on video encoding that it does things like gaming. Run your hdds in AHCI mode! It’s hard to compare encoding times but, rendering a DVD to hdd in DVDA with no encoding what-so-ever, your time drops in half!

For encoding itself: Some software works faster than others, & some software makes much better use of dual & quad cores (multi-threading). Some types of encoding works faster than others - if you’re not doing BD for example, DivX can blow you away with it’s speed. If speed is your thing, check out linear apps rather than NLEs, or maybe look at frame-serving to keep your slower NLE from slowing every step in the process. You’re moving a LOT more pixels in HD rez, so it’s not as beneficial, but you *might* also pick up a boost by encoding into an intermediate format using V/Dub &/or AviSynth to do the grunt work processing, like resizing, cropping, changing color space etc. Hard drives are cheap at <$200 per terabyte, internal or external.

And finally, multi-task... Your PC does it, so why don’t you? You don’t sit & watch the dishwasher run [at least I hope not ;-) ], so why watch your PC process video? If you’ve got something on a PC you want to do, use a laptop, or fire up one of your older machines.