Speed up options for mp4 encoders (x264, ffmpeg)

[Bencuri]

I have an Intel i5 3210M CPU with Intel HD4000 in my laptop. Is there any speed up options for this setup when encoding my video projects to MP4? I have used x264.exe so far. As I know that one automatically chooses all the threads available (my machine has 4). But maybe this is false. If false, what is the parameter to set the number of threads to be used? I also read somewhere, that this coder has an opencl parameter as well, but as I know it does not support Intel HD4000, so I cannot make use of that.

Could the conversion time be reduced compared to x264.exe if I used ffmpeg with this setup? I have never used the ffmpeg CLI, I have no clue what speed up options are available there.

[davexnet]

you can use a faster preset in either case. For example, in x264.exe

--preset "veryfast"