The CPU is most important for encoding. You don't really need a lot of RAM (even 4GB should be enough but better to go with 8), or a fancy GPU.
You would probably want to go with Intel, but I'm not sure which of their processors is best for encoding. Options include 5820K (older, but 6 cores) and 6700k (newer, but 4 cores).
Thanks for the input
Yeah it makes sense that the CPU is most important for this. Was not sure about RAM though.
So the HDD sub system is not that important either? So spinners are the way to go then?
With regards the CPU - is it more about frequency (ie, 4+Ghz) or more cores? Is encoding done on one core or is it spilt across as many cores as is available?
What site/forum would be good to read up on all this?
If I need do reencode a DVD or BD Videostream, I use the free tool 'handbrake' and it uses all cores of my CPU. So we'll written programs should be able to make use of multi core systems. But that is a program dependent thing, if it uses just one core, or more.
"Never cut a deal with a dragon..."
- Old Shadowrun wisdom
Hi
I've noticed good speed increases on my new Laptop:
CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K Quad-Core 4.0GHz Skylake [8 Threads, 8MB Cache, up to 4.2GHz]
GPU: 2x NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980M - 8GB DDR5 Video RAM in SLI - DirectX 11
MEMORY: 32GB Kingston HyperX Impact DDR4 2400MHz (4x8GB)
M.2 SSD BOOT DRIVE: 512GB Samsung SM951 Extreme Performance PCIe M.2 Drive (2150MB/sR | 1500MB/sW)
M.2 SSD Drive 2: 512GB Samsung SM951 Extreme Performance PCIe M.2 Drive (2150MB/sR | 1500MB/sW)
HARD DRIVE: 1TB Samsung 850 Pro Solid State Drive [550MB/s Read, 520MB/s Write]
HARD DRIVE: 2TB Samsung 850 EVO SATA 3 6Gb/s Solid-State Drive
Obviously a rather expensive machine and at the top end of Laptop and could give a good PC a run for it's money but if you were to look at building your own machine you could do it far cheaper and with awesome results.
My MAC Pro has:
MAC PRO 2014
PROCESSOR 3.5GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon E5 v2
MEMORY 64GB 1866MHz DDR3 ECC - 8X8GB
HARD DRIVE 1TB PCIe-based Flash Storage
Graphics Card Dual AMD FirePro D700-6GB VRAM
OS - Bootcamp Windows 8.1 Pro
Also does a great job but I'm pretty positive for a fraction of the price of both you could get awesome results.
Try go for Dual XEON CPU if you can afford it as from what I have seen that will absolutely smash it :-)
Hope that gives you an idea of the higher end and scale it down from there, also depends on which program you will be using would differ on time spent to do the encoding.