Speed Problem

[Fantasma]

Hello

I was wondering if you guys could give me your opinion and or advise
regarding a new computer I assembled a few days ago, I must say that
the machine did not fullfilled my expectations. I was really hoping
to achieve more speed when doing Divx encodings.

The computer is the following:

Pentium 4 1.7 Gigahertz
SOYO motherboard with chip i845
256 megabytes SDRAM PC133
Maxtor HDD with NTFS
Windows 2000 Pro

I use GKnot for all my encodings. Now, comparing the speed for the most
commom tasks with my old machine vs the new one, I get the following:

Data transfer from DVD to Hard disk:
Old machine = 2.x
New Comp = 5.x up to 10.x with certain movies

Audio Encoding using lame:
Old machine = 43 minutes Approx.
New Comp = 20 '' ''

First and second pass using VirtualDub:
Old machine = from 4 to 6 hours (Depends upon the movie)
New Comp = from 2 to 4 hours

The machine is not overclocked, but I have fine tuned the BIOS
following the guide from www.tomshardware.com, I also installed
the Application Accelerator for P4 cpus from www.intel.com

Yes, the speed differences are quite noticeable, but hell I was
expecting MORE ! :mad: , considering that my old machine was an overclocked P3 at 800Mhz.

Considering the figures above, is there anything I could do to reduce the
encoding time??


Thanks in advance for your comments.

[sibe]

Your numbers sound very reasonable, I think there's no way it could be any faster. P4 + SDRAM is known to be not very fast. Another MoBo (with DDR support) + DDR-RAM would have been better.
If you just bought it check if you can give these components back and get other ones.

Sibe