Upgrading from AMD X2 5000 to Intel Q8200?

[SurroundBoy]

Did a search and didn't see any specific titles relating to Quad encoding times.

I've been wanting to upgrade for awhile now since I've been editing and processing my HDV recordings in Sony Vegas. How much of a difference in encoding time will there be for general HD h.264 encoding? Is it worth it?

[Sagekilla]

Yes, you are doubling your effective speed, if not more. If you went from single -> dual -> quad @ 2 GHz, each one would give twice the processing power as the last. x264 scales pretty much linearly.

[Snowknight26]

x264 scales pretty much linearly.

Glad you said pretty much otherwise I'd have to point out the current state of B-frame decision. ;)

[MikeyBK]

I can give you specific results going from a Core2Duo (E6600) to a QuadCoere (Q9550).

The E6600 was overclocking @ 3.2 GHz or 3.4 GHz and would encode an average of 6-8 hours, depending on the size of the Bluray, complexity of the the m2ts files, and encoding settings.

I now have the Q9550 overclocking @ 3.4 GHz - 3.6 GHz and the times have dropped 'almost' in half... again, depending on the things I mentioned already.
Even at stock speed of 2.83 GHz, the Q9550 is still almost twice as fast.

Below is a screenshot of the fastest the Q9550 did a Bluray... 3 hours on the Better(Fast) setting...
http://img5.imageshack.us/img5/7752/bdrbat38ghz.th.png (http://img5.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bdrbat38ghz.png)

[Sagekilla]

@Snowknight: Yes, frame type decision is still single threaded but generally speaking you get nearly twice the encoding speed if you go from 2 cores to 4 cores. It's not like for him he's only going to go from 10 fps -> 11 fps. Far from the case. Especially if he's doing HD encoding, he's probably not getting extremely high speeds where frame type decision becomes the bottleneck.