Save your php files as UTF-8 also. And you can set your db connection charset to UTF-8 like;
$mysqli = new mysqli("localhost", "user", "pass", "test");
$mysqli->set_charset("utf8");
Edit:
If you are using PDO, you can use following;
$dbh = new PDO("mysql:$connstr", $user, $password);
$dbh->exec("set names utf8");