Analog capture - is hardware encoding on the capture card still a benefit?

Hello,
I plan to capture a bunch of analog content from old vhs tapes and a non-digital camcorder. My PC that I'm building has a 2500k cpu with the Z68 mobo. I understand that intel has done a great job incorporating video processing/encoding into the CPU. I know in years past the cheap capture cards did not have mpeg encoding in hardware. They relied on the cpu, which bogged the overall system down. Back then it was a really good idea to get the hardware encoding on the card. My question is if that still holds true given the 2500k's video processing capability. So do I go with cheaper card without hw encoding and rely on the 2500k or will I still benefit by having the encoding on the capture card? I also plan to capture analog cable through the cards tuner capability. Thanks.

The hardware encoding is generally best used with HD video. For SD video (720x480 or 720x576), it almost doesn't matter much. I'm using a TV tuner that doesn't have hardware encoding and I have no trouble with it. During recording into the MPG format, I was getting about 50% CPU usage with one core on my previous Core 2 Duo E8500 system. The 2500K should be about 50% faster meaning only 33% CPU usage on one core. The use of the H.264 codec really makes things even more effective, since it's highly threaded.