Hardware limiting factor with PC MPEG compression

[pharries]

I have used CCE, Main Concept, Canopus Procoder E xpress & TMPEG. They are all slow when doing best quality. I am looking to upgrade my PC. What is the usual limiting factor for speed with these encoders? Is it CPU frequency, Bus speed, Quantity of RAM, Speed of RAM or something else?
Thanks

[FulciLives]

I have used CCE, Main Concept, Canopus Procoder E xpress & TMPEG. They are all slow when doing best quality. I am looking to upgrade my PC. What is the usual limiting factor for speed with these encoders? Is it CPU frequency, Bus speed, Quantity of RAM, Speed of RAM or something else?
Thanks

Mostly CPU with RAM being secondary.

Basically you should have Windows 2000 or WinXP with 512MB RAM and the fastest CPU you can buy since that is the biggest bottle-neck with software MPEG encoders.

BTW I find that AviSynth used with CCE is pretty darn fast at least much faster than TMPGEnc.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[disturbed1]

First, it's the pure horsepower of the CPU. In most cases, more mega/giga hertz will always be faster.

But teaming a 3gig CPU with 128mb of 133mhz SDRAM will starve the cpu. So next would be bus speed and memory speed.

The newest 800mhz bus speed P4s with 400mhz DDR memory is a good combo.

I, myself, am stuck between getting a dual AMD XP or a dual Xeon setup to replace my current dual PIII 600 setup. Both will end up costing about the same price for the same speeds, but I like the features of the XP mobos a little more.

[SatStorm]

It's all about CPU
256MB Ram is enough, 512 helps, 128MB do the job done but ain't a smart move with w2k / winXP
W2K IMHO is a better choice than WinXP, ecpecially when you use AMD CPUs