Wow, things HAVE changed!!!

[tomos]

I hear i7's are very good for media encoding, but they're kinda pricey once you take into account the mobo and ram. I have a similar spec to the one you're looking at (see sig) and it seems to handle video encoding just fine.

I use "MeGUI Modern Media Encoder" which seems to be pretty flexible in what it can encode/decode and utilizes all 4 cores. Does take a bit of getting used to though as it uses "AVISynth" scripts for input (these allow various processing of the source before encoding, e.g. cropping/scaling). They're just plain text and fairly simple though and once you get one made you can just copy/paste/edit for each encode.

Did an H264 encode a while back (1920x8??, 2 pass, very high settings) and it did take over half a day to encode but the results were fantastic. No noticable drop in quality from the original, 11.7GB -> 3.6GB (video only).

edit: just to say i'm on 32bit XP, not sure if there's a 64 bit version of the program, or if it even matters.

doesnt matter. you'd have to have 64-bit filters which the doom9 folks arent in a rush to move to (yet). some exist but you'd be damn limited in 64-bit at the mo.

saying that, the 32-bit software works perfectly in vista 64 (which i use) as well as the 32 bit one (used in the past). it also works in 32-bit Windows 7 (using now on my other older PC). avisynth works on it as well.

personally, i use 'insane' HD mode.

for the OP, even if you stick to XP now, in the future you might want to move to win7 so i'd grab 8GB ram now since if you move to vista or win7 64-bit later on, DDR3 might have a larger foothold and DDR2 prices wont be anywhere near as cheap as they are at the mo.

 

[shinester184]

It would be a good idea not to get OCZ Ram with an Asus board, they don't get along much!

 

[tomos]

i have 8GB of OCZ in an asus p5b mobo - that's fine

 

[Glaucus]

if you wont move to vista then get xp 64 instead.

i would change ocz for geil ram, other than that looks fine. However what is your hdd as it will probably hold you computer back a bit. A samsung f1 320g for the os is cheap and fast.

 

[thefishdude]

not much to say rather than stick to xp. 3 reasons

1 why buy vista now when windows 7 will be out soonish save money use xp

2 in recent tests xp pro was the most efficient at using multicores than vista

http://weblog.infoworld.com/labnotes/archives/2009/01/windows_on_mult_1.html

3 i just dont like vista lol

 

[Mattus]

Good to see that the usual utterly unsubstantiated Vista bashing is alive and well Building a high-spec machine and purchasing an eight-year-old operating system for it is ridiculous. I fail to see how you could possibly despise Vista enough to hobble a lovely new rig with XP.