How much difference does the CPU make ?

[mrbingley]

I run a Pentium III 1GHZ with 512MB of ram, and use a 30Gb partion using NTFS for my video encoding, saving the output to another hard drive using FAT32.
It usually takes between 4 to 5 hrs to encode a 90 to 100 minute movie, just using the standard VCD settings in TMPGEnc.
Would there be a noticeable difference in the encoding times using a faster CPU, say an AMD 1800+ and DDR memory ?
If there's no big reduction in processing time I might as well save my cash for other things PC, as the present setup seems to do all other tasks OK.
Thanks in advance for any guidance.
Cheers
Chris.

[adam]

CPU makes almost ALL the difference when it comes to encoding. Assuming there is nothing else creating a bottleneck, doubling CPU speed just about doubles encoding speed.

You have plenty of ram. Unless your hard drive is very slow or you have some other hardware/software conflicts slowing you down, upgrading the CPU will give you a significant, and almost proportional, increase in encoding speed.

[Mirror_Image]

Yes, the CPU is almost everything as far as encoding speed is concerned. Go check out some CPU reviews; the well-done reviews will test mp3 and MPEG (1 and/or 2) video encoding speeds, and you will see from the camparison with baseline CPUs that more CPU = faster, and much more CPU = much faster (roughly proportional, as Adam indicated.

[dmonty]

It makes all the difference!

I have a AMD XP 2100+ with 512MB of DDR2700. Using TMPGEnc to convert a 2 hour movie to MPEG takes 3 hours. The same movie on my P3 1000 takes 5 hours or 14 hours with my P2 400. We have an OCed P4 PC in my lab clocked to 2.7GH that can encode the same movie in just over an hour. Now thats FAST.

[man_friday]

As per the other respondents, CPU is everything. I improved by encode time by going from lowly Duron750 to TBird 1100. A lot of the better hardware reviewers test MPG encoding as part of their test scenerio. Currently Intel P4s are king. Next week, who knows.

[mrbingley]

Are Intel CPUs a lot better for video encoding than their AMD counterparts ?
Cheers
Chris.