Well its not JUST for encoding its for general use. Here's what I'm putting together Sunday night. Athlon XP 2200+ (yeah its not very overclockable, I don't do it so I dont care) MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU w/RAID 512MB CL2 DDR333 Memory GeForce4 4400 Video card 2x80GB HDD Stripped This is a pretty bigupgrade from my old box: PIII 1Ghz 1gig pc133 80gb hdd geforce 2 ti My old encode on 2 hours of DV Video was 8 to 10 hours in TMPGenc depending on my settings, I'll let you know how fast the new one is... this PC is gonna rock cause I've usually stay a few tech gens behind to save cash.

Wouldn't it be very tempting to unlock the XP and raise the FSB? You don't need to oc the XP (gets hot enough without, you'll see... it produces about as much heat as my T-Bird 1400, and that is very much...). You should really run that DDR333 memory at 166 FSB minimum!

Everything is configured quite nicely at this point. As far as how fast it is... well my old 1ghz P3 looked at a video file right before I upgraded and said it would take 5 hours to encode it to high quality DVDMPEG.... my new system does it in just a couple of min. over 2 hours. Not a bad upgrade....

Have you set the FSB to 166 yet? You could have bought PC2100 memory if you don't! :)

Indeed it was a typeo, since a stripped hard drive would not have a very good life span :rolleyes: Encode times that were almost a day are down to about 4 to 5 hours. DV video to DVD MPEG2 was about 8-10 hours depending on my TMPGenc settings, its now down to about 2 1/2 to 3 hours... not bad. (Those figures assume 2 hours of video) The Liteon DVD-Rom rips on average at about 6-12x though of course sometimes it still will drop as low as 2x.

hi there, so you need the high end CPU to get real time encoding??? wouldnt it be more cost effective to get a snazzi dvd encoder hardware for half the AMD???