Want to buy new system for handbrake

[Webnetjogger]

I am interested in putting together a new system for converting my Blu Ray collection.

Current system

CPU - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz 2 x 4MB L2 G0 stepping Overclocked To 3.2GHz

Motherboard - ASUS P5K DELUXE/WIFI-AP P35 ICH9R DDR Socket 775 ATX MOTHERBOARD

Memory - Corsair Dominator DDR2 6 GB 1066MHz

GPU - EVGA 9800gtx+.

PSU - PowerPC & Cooling 1000 watt

Being that Handbrake is a CPU only software encoder, what hardware would be the best to upgrade to.

intel seems to have the best CPU's currently. Bulldozer is coming this fall from AMD, but sandy bridge I am sure will have their next line of CPU's out by then

Currently It takes me about 3 hours to encode a Blu ray movie to mkv using the High profile preset and I love the results. But I would like the hardware to reduce that time .

Dual quad CPU's, hex core CPU's? The quad core 2600k from intel beats the AMD 6 core, but is there a better CPU than the 2600K for this? zeon's maybe?

Any help is appreciated. Ty

[hunterk]

Pure x264 starts leveling off at 8 cores, but anything up to that will scale almost linearly. However, not all of the filters (decombing, etc) are fully multithreaded, so if you use them, they will serve as a bottleneck moreso than x264 itself. Decoding via ffmpeg is also single-threaded and has popped up as another bottleneck on faster multicore machines. Some people get around these bottlenecks by launching multiple instances of HandBrake to fully saturate their cores.

All that said, Intel's cpus are faster at encoding x264 (I'm an AMD fanboy, so it pains me to say this), so one of the Sandy Bridges would be the way to go if system cost is no object. The only real difference between i5s and i7s is hyperthreading, which only provides 15-30% the performance of an actual core (even though it shows up as a discreet core in your system monitor, it's not), so it's up to you whether the added cost is worth the additional performance. Also, Sandy Bridge has hardware-assisted encoding capabilities that are irrelevant as far as x264 is concerned.

RAM isn't very important (HB only uses a few hundred MB anyway) and video card is irrelevant.

If any of this sounds inaccurate to anyone, feel free to jump in.

[Webnetjogger]

Ty for the quick reply.

I was thinking the sandy bridge was the way to go. JohnAStebbins says he uses a xeon quad core, but I thought server based motherboards would actually be slower despite the hardware. I was thinking about a duAl 1366 socket server motherboard with 2 xeon quAd cores. But is it worth the expense compared to a over clocked core i7 2600k to 4gz. How much time am i really gaining?

If it currently takes me 3-3:30 hours to re-encode a Blu Ray to MKV on high profile preset, what it takes to get to 1:1. Meaning. If the movie is two hours it takes 2 hours to re-encode. Preferably if it's even possible I would like to get to 2:1. Other words 1 hour of encode for a two hour movie.

[Webnetjogger]

Currently I get an average of 11 FPS on high profile preset

[Deleted User 11865]

I was thinking the sandy bridge was the way to go. JohnAStebbins says he uses a xeon quad core, but I thought server based motherboards would actually be slower despite the hardware. I was thinking about a duAl 1366 socket server motherboard with 2 xeon quAd cores. But is it worth the expense compared to a over clocked core i7 2600k to 4gz. How much time am i really gaining?

If your budget is quite high, the fastest single-processor setup you can get would be a 6-core i7 (either current or wait for the Sandy Bridge). Overclocking a 4-core would help, but 4->6 cores should make encoding almost 1.5x faster depending on settings.

If it currently takes me 3-3:30 hours to re-encode a Blu Ray to MKV on high profile preset, what it takes to get to 1:1. Meaning. If the movie is two hours it takes 2 hours to re-encode. Preferably if it's even possible I would like to get to 2:1. Other words 1 hour of encode for a two hour movie.

2:1 will be hard to attain; currently, 1080p decoding never exceeds 60 fps (2.5:1) on most systems (decoding is not threaded), and once you add a 1080p encode, 2:1 is fairly unrealistic. If I am not mistaken, a 6-core i7 should give you 1:1 (or very close) using the High Profile preset.

Also, for Blu-Ray film sources you can disable detelecine and decomb, they shouldn't be necessary and disabling them will give a small speed boost.