CPU/GPU Upgrading My System

[surfariver]

My wife is getting tired of me using her 2 year old laptop to back up our collection, however, while her laptop encodes between 30 - 40 fps, my current desktop (Athlon XP 3000) only encodes around 10 fps. I see the recommened requirements are

Recommended:★ Windows 7/Vista/XP (32-bit/64-bit)
★ Core 2 Quad and above
★ 2 GB of RAM
★ 1TB of Free Hard Disk Space
★ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 and above
★ A Blu-ray Drive
★ Internet Connection

I'm looking to spend about $300 to upgrade the mobo / processor / ram / video card (happy to use an integrated vid card). Any suggestions on what items I should be purchasing? Keep in mind, for now I plan to run my IDE hard drives off of a PCI card since I don't believe any mobos support IDE anymore.

Thanks!

[Jonatan]

300

Build new one

[surfariver]

Ram

working through this rebuild. How much 'bang for my buck' am I going to get for going above 8gb of PC1333 RAM.

Will a faster clock make a huge difference in encoding times (10%+) or a small one, all other factors being equal?

[90312]

8GB of memory is more than enough, faster CPU clock speed is the name of the game and multiple cores.

[martythebrit]

Save your money and wait until you can afford to buy a new computer or build a complete new system.

You should be looking at one of the new Intel 'i' CPU's, Quick Sync, 8GB's of ram and a SATA 3 hard drive. You don't need an external video card unless you're gaming.

[maineman]

...
...faster CPU clock speed is the name of the game and multiple cores.

Save your money and wait until you can afford to buy a new computer or build a complete new system.
...

Bada bing...bada bang...bada boom

With respect to Fab, your cpu is where the rubber meets the road.