How much time do I gain by upgrading my computer?

[Fontain]

When I encode a movie with DivX 5 and use the slow mode it approximately takes 54 hours before the movie has been encoded (2 CD's with AC3).

My computer is an AMD Athlon 700 MHz with 512 MB of RAM, how much faster will I be able to encode with a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz with 512 MB of RAM?

I'm considering upgrading my computer but only if the results are noteworthy. The graphic card is - regarding movies - more or less nonessentiel, right (I currently have a GeForce2 MX with 32 MB of RAM)?

The quality of the encoding is the same in each scenario, right?

[Bootsy]

I don't use DivX 5 so I can't comment on what sort of speed you'll get with a P4 3GHz but you'll see a substantial speed increase with that processor. And you're right about the graphic card, it has no influence on your encoding speed.

[TotalChaos]

I have a P4 3.0@3.25 with 1GB 434MHz RAM. When I use the slowest speed for divx 5.1.1 encoding virtualdub primarily only uses one thread instead of being able to balance the load accross the 2 virtual CPUs in my HT P4. To me this further deminishes the encode speed then simply making the encode thread slower.

My encode speeds are about realtime for a two pass, standard quality encode. In other words, a 1.5 hour movie encodes in about 1.5 hours; using about 70%-100% of my Hyper Threaded CPU. Dropping down to the slowest setting 2 pass only used 50%-55% CPU and requires about 16 hours per 2 hours of movie. I didn't notice much difference in quality either..... there was better quality just not worth 14 more hours encode time in my opinion.

The graphics card will do nothing for your encode speed? True!

[port66]

i dont use divx cos its rubbish. and nearly twice as slow and bigger files then xvid.

but with a 2800+ running underclocked to 1.9. divx usually takes around 2-3 hours. around 5-6hours if you dont resize from dvd