Help needed - new desktop PC for AviSynth

[spoRv]

Hello to everybody, new member here, be kind, please... :D

I am a film restoration project maker - you know, one of those crazy guys who think that a given movie has wrong colors, deserves to have deleted scenes reinserted etc. - and I'm a bit tired to wait hours, if not days, to encode my projects...

So, it's time to buy a more powerful desktop PC; currently, I use an old Core 2 Duo E6300 1.86GHz; main usage for my projects will be lossless encoding in Lagarith (or MagicYUV) using VirtualDub and AviSynth, and lossy encoding using x264.

What I'd like to obtain is to improve encoding speed; what I'm not sure is how much this is related to passmark CPU mark: I mean, now my CPU is around 1000, and I'm pretty sure a CPU around 8000 will not be 8x times faster... but, how will it be, more or less?

I have found these interesting PCs nearby, in my price range - many others at the same price have lower features, or same features with higher prices:

Workstation - around 420€
CPU: Intel Xeon E52620 6 Core 12 Thread 2.0 GHz, 2.5 Ghz Turbo, TDP 95 W
Mother board: Gigabyte X79 UD3, Quad channel
Memory: 4x8 (32) GB DD3 1333 GHZ
Video card: AMD Radeon HD 6850 2 GB GDDR5
HDDs: 2 HDD Seagate 1 TB 7200 rpm +1 SSD Samsug 850 EVO 256 GB +1 SSD 110 GB
OS: Windows 10 pro 64bit

Mini Desktop - around 380€
CPU: Intel Core i7 3770 (should be 3.4GHz)
Motherboard: Intel Mini DH61BL
Memory: 8GB (2 x 4GB ddr3)
Video card: none - Intel 4000
HDDs: SSD 120GB
OS: Windows 7 pro 64bit

Workstation PROs:
Great CPU, great motherboard, plenty of RAM, very good video card, a LOT of HDDs (even if small)

Desktop PROs:
Higher CPU clock than the workstation, price is a bit lower, has 6 months warranty

I'm leaning toward workstation, because I think it's more reliable and "ready to go as is"; are the new Windows operating systems, like 7, 8, 10, compatible with VirtualDub and AviSynth? Will the workstation be around 5x faster on encoding tasks?

Thanks in advance!

[luigizaninoni]

I'd go with the workstation. You Can expect x264 to scale fairly well with passmark. X264 works well with multithreading

Lagarith, i am not sure. I expect it to scale worse.

Avisynth and virtualdub work fine with 7 and 8. Not sure about 10, i keep Reading about people meeting issues

[sneaker_ger]

I'd go with the workstation. You Can expect x264 to scale fairly well with passmark. X264 works well with multithreading
Even if it does:
6 * 2.0 GHz = 12 GHz
4 * 3.4 GHz = 13.6 GHz

[luigizaninoni]

True, but I wonder if the Mini form factor of the i7-3770 will introduce thermal problems under sustained workload. Besides, the workstation has a discrete gpu, which might help with some filters such as knlmeanscl. also, the workstation comes with a lot of disk space, while the Mini comes only with a 120gb ssd, not exactly ideal if you need to work on lossless encodes

[spoRv]

Sadly, the workstation was sold before I could buy it... so, I look around, and got this "little big monster":

CPU: Intel Core i7 4770 3.4Ghz (3.9Ghz Turbo)
Liquid Cooler: Enermax Liqmax II 240
Motherboard: Asus Sabertooth Z87 Socket 1150
RAM: 16GB DDR3 G.Skill Ripjawsz 2133Mhz
Video card: EVGA GTX 760 ACX 2GB
Hard Disk: Western Digital Velociraptor 600GB 10.000rpm
Power Supply: Inter-Tech Combat 750W
Case: Phanteks Enthoo Pro
OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit

My initial fear was that, because Avisynth (non MT) is not multithreading, I should compare only the single thread score (that, in my case, is about 2.5 times the old PC). Luckily, this was not a problem, as the new PC is encoding Avisynth->Lagarith or x264, or Lagarith->x264 at about 10/12x the old one (reflecting the total score difference of the CPUs)...

Long story short: if you would like to know how much speed you could gain from your old PC, take a look at the cpubenchmark scores of both your old CPU, and the one you aim for; they reflect, more or less, the effective speed; not properly the discovery of the century, but still a little advice which could be of help for someone, I hope!