New Rig: Good Hardware for encoding at lowest price

[drmuffin]

I have been saving up some money, and I want to build a good rig for encoding. Currently, my laptop only gets ~6fps 1st pass, 3fps 2nd pass when encoding x264 720p of HDTV. My hope is to get x264 HD encodes to go at least as fast as my xvid SD encodes (50fps 1st pass 25 fps 2nd)

However, I don't really want to spend a whole ton of money on this box, as I still have to eat (probably no more than $400-500). So, what is a good cpu (or probably 2nd or 3rd good), ram, mobo, et al that I could get in this price range. (I already have mouse, keyboard, monitor and hard drive)

Is it better to get more cores (for multithreaded encoding) or more GHz? Is AMD or Intel a good cpu for encoding?

This box is probably going to be for encoding mainly, so I don't need any super great graphics or audio cards (unless cuda provides a benefit to encoding).

Sorry for being a n00b, but I would really appreciate it if you could help me out.

[roozhou]

What CPU are you using on your current laptop? What settings are you using for x264?

Generally for x264, with the same Ghz and cores, i7 > 45nm K10 > 45nm Core2, and with the same architecture more cores always bring more performance/cost ratio than higher GHz for x264, but not for most of the other softwares.

[drmuffin]

My current cpu is intel core 2 duo 1.66Ghz

x264 settings:

1st pass:
mencoder Nova_20090714_20002100.ts -ovc x264 -oac copy -passlogfile lap.720p.stats -vf pullup,softskip,crop=1904:1072:10:6,scale=1280:720,harddup -sws 9 -x264encopts pass=1:bitrate=3300:threads=2:keyint=240:keyint_min=24:bframes=3:b_pyramid:me=dia:subq=1:partitions=none:nopsnr:nossim -ofps 24000/1001 -o nul

2nd pass:
mencoder Nova_20090714_20002100.ts -ovc x264 -oac copy -passlogfile lap.720p.stats -vf pullup,softskip,crop=1904:1072:10:6,scale=1280:720,harddup -sws 9 -x264encopts pass=2:bitrate=3300:threads=2:keyint=240:keyint_min=24:frameref=3:bframes=3:b_pyramid:weight_b:subq=6:trellis=1:8x8dct:nopsnr:nossim:nr=200 -ofps 24000/1001 -o movie1.avi

[Shinigami-Sama]

if you want a good cheap encoding rig
AMD phemon II
core2quad Q6600 or higher
4gb RAM
nvidia 8800 or 9800(I'd go with this for a little extra future proof)
cheap 80/100/120/160.. system drive
1TB video drive

or you could go for two 1Tbs and have one in and one out but thats not going to gain you terribly much if at all

not sure if CUDA tools are 64bit or not but X264 does very well on 64bit and could speed it up a bit