What Determines Your Conversion Speed?

[bangincaraudio]

I use Canopus ProCoder to do almost all of my conversions. It actually tells you the speed at which you are converting. The highest I've experienced was 1.7x Real Time but I don't remember what type of conversion that was.

I am wanting to know what I can upgrade on my PC to get faster times? I just started an AVI to MP4 320x240 (IIRC) conversion and it was going at about 1.4x real time.

My Processor is an AMD Athlon X2 4200+ and I have 2GB of memory (forgot the speed) and a GeForce 7200 GS Video card. I have been thinking of upgrading to a better processor, 4gb of memory and a nicer video card. Which of these will help my times? Should I get a new motherboard as well with a higher FSB?

I'm sure someone knows the specifics of what affects conversion speed the most.

Anyways, thanks for reading!

[zoobie]

the speed & number of processors

[bangincaraudio]

Okay so, motherboard specs and ram I shouldn't pay much attention to? I already have 2GB which isn't bad AFAIK for XP 32bit.

EDIT - Ok, I looked up my motherboard and I think the best processor it supports is an Athlon 64 X2 5200+. If I want to get really serious, should I get a new motherboard that supports the Quad Core Phenom? Would that be a dramatic change in conversion speeds?

[redwudz]

A quad core would give you much faster conversions, especially with codecs that can use all cores, like Divx, Xvid and H.264 to mention a few. Going to a 5200+ would help, hard to tell how much. A 5600+ would be better, but if the MB can't handle that, no help there.

You should also be aware with a newer MB you may need different RAM. The Phenom operates better with 1066Mhz RAM. And newer MBs commonly use PCI-E video cards. But you could get a Micro-ATX MB with on-board video to save a few $$.

I use a Phenom 9500 in my HTPC, with 2GB DDR2 1066 RAM on a Micro-ATX Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H motherboard. It does fairly well with encoding. You can also get a Phenom 3 core CPU for a decent price at present.

Or look into a Intel setup. Depends on how much you want to spend and which parts from the old computer you can use.