Lol, if you visit AVSForum, this is the point where people will mention you're better off buying more storage than converting to a smaller format. Not only do you get to keep the original quality, you also cut down significantly on the time and effort required for encoding. If you just rip the main feature as individual vob/mpeg files, you still save quite a bit of space.
On to other things, what dual quad-core set-up are you planning on? LGA 771 boards? I seem to recall seeing benchmarks floating around that Core i7 is near/on-par with dual LGA771. When you take into account the cost of FB-DIMMs and that you have to buy two expensive processors, going the Core i7 route might be the better deal.
Here's a pretty good benchmark for x264 encoding:
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442
There are results there for 8-core set-ups. If you browse the TechARP forums, you'll also find results for Core i7 processors that haven't been added to the list yet. There's also an HD version of that benchmark. Link's in the article. Almost all GUI I know rely on x264 for the actual encoding so barring differences in encoding options, all of them should work around the same speed. x264 is pretty efficient and scales quite well on multi-core set-ups. Some of the x264 devs hang out at the Doom9 forums so maybe you can ask some questions there. I've found Doom9 to be an excellent resource for anything video encoding related.
From your comments, though, I'm guessing you don't really need faster hardware. You just need a better workflow.
How are you ripping the DVDs? Are you encoding directly from the physical discs? If so, I would suggest allocating a largish hard drive (internal SATA or eSATA) for containing temporary rips, then doing batch encodes from the rips. It'll only take maybe around 10 minutes to rip a full DVD to ISO format or VIDEO-TS folder. Assuming it's actually 12 minutes per disc including the manual labor of changing discs, etc, that still equates to 6 discs per hour. In 3 hours, that's 18 discs. Set-up an encoding queue for all 18 discs and let it batch encode. I'm betting it'll probably finish (the encoding part) in 2 days tops. If you allocate a whole weekend to doing straight rips to, say, a 1TB drive, you can get even more efficient. Granted, you pretty much can't use your PC while it's encoding, but I'm pretty sure you've got 3 or more spares you can work on.
Other tips:
- Use local drives. Windows' (particularly XP's) TCP/IP stack seems to be somewhat lacking. That or the default options just suck. Trying to read/write from network hard drives will probably slow down the process, even if all computers are on gigabit.
- Use a SATA DVD drive. If you encounter DVDs with RipGuard, ARccOS or similar copy protection mechanisms (intentional "corrupted" sectors), IDE drives can regress into PIO mode (2x-4x speed) and oftentimes, you'd have to re-install the IDE channel and reboot to fix it.
- If you're buying a new DVD drive, make sure it doesn't have RipLock or the "feature" can be turned off.
- Don't bother with SSDs. You're better off getting huge hard drives for use as temporary drives. Sequential read/write speed on those are pretty good already. The Western Digital Caviar Black and Samsung Spinpoint F drives are pretty fast. I'd go with the WD for the 5-year warranty.
The most time-consuming part of the whole DVD-ripping/conversion process is the manual labor, in this case, changing discs and setting-up the encoding options. The actual encoding is just number-crunching which the computer can easily handle without supervision. If you finish the first two parts and let the computer do its job encoding without any breaks, you can finish much more quickly. There's a reason why the production line was developed.
Phew. Hopefully, you haven't fallen asleep after that long-winded reply.
Addendum:
Yeah, yeah, this is an excruciatingly long post but I just noticed this.
dicecca112 wrote:I tried Badaaboom, but I could get it to rip to 720p correctly.
Don't bother encoding your DVD rips to 720p. You won't be getting more detail than what the original DVD came with and quality would actually suffer because you have less bits per pixel (assuming you use the same bitrate). Chances are, the video processor on your TV will do a much better job upconverting from 480p to 720p/1080p than the encoding software will.