CPU sweet spot for WHS, power efficiency and ability to placeshift/comskip h.264?

[btrcp2000]

I know I need more HP to comskip my r5000 dish boxes, and have been looking at maybe switching to WHS anyway. Found and purchased a q9400 at Microcenter for $159 (in store only if anyone's interested), so now I have 30 days to decide whether I want to use it.

I can use my existing hardware and just drop the quad in, or I can build from scratch. Kind of leaning toward all new, because I could build it alongside the existing server and take my time with it, as opposed to taking everything down and pulling an all nighter.

So, if I'm going all new, I want to pay attention to power consumption. What is a good mobo/CPU combination of low power, yet ability to to comskip and transcode multiple h.264 streams? I don't have to use the q9400, just saw a good deal and it got me started on this. And I don't require that the thing run solely on housefly farts, but I don't want a 12 cylinder either. And maybe my existing hardware can't be improved on much in terms of power efficiency

Right now I have a killawatt running on my server so I can at least see whether I have improved anything when I'm done. Thanks for any input!

[Skirge01]

How many watts are you currently running on that server? I'll see if I can get an approximate wattage for the server in my sig. I have my server and a single client PC on the same UPS, so the readout I recall seeing (still quite low, mind you) isn't the number you'd be interested in.

For comparison, though, my server runs comskip on three threads and takes between 40-90 minutes to Comskip each recording (not counting any measly 30 minutes shows). Considering I record around 30-40 programs (~85% HD) every day, 3 cores aren't enough to keep up when I don't allow comskip to run between 7pm and 12pm.