encoding speed issues

[abman]

I am trying to solve a speed issue on my computer and could use some help. I have a Xeon 2.8ghz 533 that gets way worse speed than it should when encoding to either xvid or svcd. It takes me 30-40 minutes longer per pass(!) to encode a 45 minute show than it does my friend on his P4 2.8 ghz. I’m not terribly familiar with the differences in cpu’s, but I can’t imagine there being a significant difference there. Its probably something else, but I don’t really know where to start looking. What can affect encoding speed that drastically? Maybe I need more ram, or could it be bus speed? Perhaps someone can suggest some speed tests I could run, and maybe have my friend with a similar setup run to try and find the huge gaping difference? Any suggestions would be great, this encode time is intolerable.

[communist]

Not sure is his p4 with 800Mhz FSB?
Are you running background taks that he isnt?
How much ram do you have etc...?
Are you both using the same settings for encoding?

[abman]

I have 384 mb ecc ddr ram. Nothing else running besides windows processing and antivirus. My friend actually has the 500mhz bus chip, I think. Generally my machine has better spec than his except for maybe ram. We have the exact same encoding method.
I did the ram test that's mentioned in one of the sticky topics. It was kind of hard to figure out what all of it was telling me. I thought maybe it was saying some of my ram was bad. Anyone know of a ram test program that gives clearer answers?

Also another thing I thought of is my hdd access speed might be slow. Its set to ATA-33, but if I get a little less lazy I could rearrange my hdd's to get this computer set up with just ata-133 hdd's. Would that matter at all? I'm not recording to uncompressed avi or anything so I don't really see write speed as an issue. But again I'm really clueless on what it could be.

[downloada]

hi,

i would definitely try to reaarange the hdds so you get the maximum speed out of 'em. they ARE a big bottleneck, especially when set to ata-33, that's really damn slow.
the maximum read-/write-rates of the hdds is an important factor for encoding speeds because the more data that can be read the more frames can be encoded per second.
another thing you should try afterwards (if you don't do so already) is read from and write to different physical hdds, that should also give a little speedup.

cu