Processor Usage & TMPGe

[ses]

Hello Everyone,
Regards from Sweden. Well after almost a year of expermenting and thanks to Doom9 and it's Forums, I am getting terrific results. Now, with a child on the way, it's time to build a new machine for the living room out of the reach of coming small arms!
I do so much recording that I have thought I would put a detachable recording harddrive in the new machine so that I can remove it and put the drive in a work station computer in our study for compressing and of course have a "clean" harddrive at the ready for new recording in the living room machine.
It seems as though TMPGe takes up all the juice of my 2.2 Celeron. Is TMPGe the sort of program that will use all of the available processor power from any processor regardless of size or can I do other work on the computer at the same time it is runing TMPGe without compromising the compression process? How long it takes to compress a film isn't as important as how well it is done. What size processor do I need to be able to safely multitask?
I need to be able to do simple things like Internet work, emailing, word processing and the like.
At the moment, when the living romm computer is compressing a recording, I leave it alone until it's done.
For the record, my equipment includes the MSI/nVidia 5200 Personnal Cinema and the iuVCR recorder with a Maxtor 250 gig 5400 rpm harddrive, 256 MB RAM on an MSI 645 motherboard. Anybody out there using the Compro VideoMate TV Gold Plus, particularly in PAL-B form? I'm leaning towards it for my new machine.

[ppera2]

TMPGenc is not the fastest encoding program.
It's normal that (any) encoding program uses 100% available CPU load.

Size of CPU load hos not relation with reliability, et least not by
correct, good working computer. You can do anything what you want during encoding, it will just slow down process.

What you mentioned - word process. , browsing will not much load CPU, so slowdown will be no more than 10-20%.

[echooff]

As ppera2 said tmpgenc 2.5 is not the fastest encoder. I have found Tmpgenc 3.0 express to be significantly faster. You can reduce its priority to keep it from hogging the cpu.

[Tommy B.]

That is why hyper threading on the P4 is a pretty nice thing... well, at least if you don't want to lower the priority of the task and thus increase the needed time to encode (HT increases the encoding time too, but is still gives you more speed compared to priority management).