will soley be using the machine for bdrebuilder so realy just need to no best set up for that, does the graphics card not make much difference or is it just the ram and processor that do all the work daz

You will find disc I/O and frame serving to be the limiting factor when you get to very high-end machines. X264 can use 100% of 6 processors -- but the system can't feed frames to it fast enough.

my present machine: Single purpose Blu-Ray Rip/Encode/Burn i7-920 OC-> 3.8ghz on Asus P6T-Deluxe mb w/6gb DDR3 - Seagate 1.5TB 7200rpm - Vista 64bit Movie Only- 25GB - Highest Quality =~ 8-10hrs Win RAM performance meter shows only using 2gb of the 6gb memory 4 cores + 4HT cores all at 100% on 2nd PASS (CPU=60C w/NH-U12P SE2 fan) CPU temp was 90C w/Intel Stock Fan bought 12gb DDR3 -- but still only uses 2gb ?? anyway to get X264 to use more RAM ?? from what JDOBBS says above about Disk I/O == maybe putting BD-Rebuilder / Source / Temp-workspace all on a SSD (128GB min) would speed things UP --but by how much? if i were to set up VM drives from RAM---what would be best use?

Intel i7 

my system is a custom build with a i7 950 GHZ quad core, 8 GB DDR3 2 SATA 2 HDD. I uses DVD-RB 98.2 free version with HCenc 25 at Best setting and I encode at 300 fps. I don't use CCE SP anymore since it isn't written to take advantage of 4 core processors SSE4 instructions. Jdobbs told me to set the drives as C drive for source and work then my D drive for the output. I know many people don't have source/work on the same drive but this is what jdobbs recomended in a previous posting years ago. encoding video really comes down to processor power.