Handbrake/KODI - buying a water cooler for a non-K Core i7-2600

In our living room we have a computer that acts as a media server for several rooms and doubles as an encoding machine for video. We call the server KODI:

CPU:Intel Core i7-2600 (4 cores @ 3.8GHz plus Hyperthreading)
Motherboard: Intel Gigabyte H67MA-D2H-B3
RAM: 16GB
Disks: 120GB Samsung SSD 840 + 8TB Seagate ST80000VN0022-2EL
Graphics: NVidia GeForce GTX 970
OS: Xubuntu 18.04

Stored on KODI is most of my DVD and Blu-ray library. DVD files are pretty small (approximately 1.2GB compressed), but Blu-ray files can be pretty huge when they're first extracted (sometimes as large as 35GB). In just over 7 months I managed to almost fill our 8TB hard drive with all the Blu-ray discs I own so I needed to find a method to deal with the problem.

Buying a larger hard drive was out of the question because my media library tends to grow in a rate that outpaces a reasonable price for drives (to me $200CDN would be a sweet spot for something like an 8TB drive - I paid $330 for mine). That left either buying a second drive, which would add more expense and complexity or compressing the files. The answer was pretty easy, compress the files.

We have several other computers in the apartment, but the system with the strongest CPU is still our media centre. Among our systems are an old AMD Phenom X4 II, an A8-5600K, an i5-2300, and a less powerful notebook. Because the media centre is in use at any time I decided to use the command-line version of Handbrake to re-encode the Blu-ray disc files (which I use MakeMKV to extract).

I have a simple script called hb.sh which contains:

HandBrakeCLI -i "$1" -o "${1%.*}-264.mkv" --preset="H.264 MKV 1080p30" -s "1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8"

I run hb.sh <moviename> and end up with moviename-264.mkv which helps me differentiate between the original and compressed file. Once I'm sure I'm happy with the compressed file I delete the original. This command includes the first 8 subtitles in the <moviename> (though they have to be turned on in playback).

The problem with this is that after the first 30-60 seconds of the encode the i7-2600 ramps up to 100% CPU use on all 4 cores and the temperature creeps up to 80 - 82 Celsius and stays there the entire encode time. Over time this will really wear on the CPU so my plan is to buy a water cooler to keep the CPU cool. Currently the system boasts a stock Intel cooler. While the cooler does a pretty remarkable job considering 1-3 hours of CPU use at 100% I don't want the i7-2600 to die anytime soon, so water cooler. More updates soon.

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