HI,

I've noticed that my AMD Athlon64 3700+ system CRAWLS when I'm doing two DVD burner operations. The drives are on separate IDE channels and the disk images are on different drives. Of course, I'd like an improvement on my video file creation and MPEG2 compression.

When I'm writing to two DVDs and verifying, both the BURN and VERIFY operations with two instances of Nero 7.5 crawl.

Also, when I'm ripping with DVDDecrypt, the VERIFY operation of another also crawls.

Will upgrading to a dual core help with two high-powered threads in general ?
I see all sorts of benchmarks, but it's hard to tell if my IDE-intensive operations will be improved.

Dual core won't help you with disk burning. If you're really interested in an uprgrade, look into building a dedicated burning tower. You can get a 9 bay burner tower, control card and 3 burners for right at $350-$400. If you really want to speed things up, put a 250gig HD in and you can store images on the drive for future burning. That's the most effective method for burning multiple disks at once.

The controller card handles everything and makes your life alot easier. Acard makes a nice controller, you can find lots of sellers by doing a google search.

Cheers!

I'm interested in a "burning tower" but I'm worried about the verification process. Do most people using burning towers verify their burns ?
Right now, burning to two drives from a disk image is fine, but the verification is killing me. For example, my BenQ usually verifies at 10X, but when two drives are verifying, the speed drops to 1x or so. A similar performance drop, as well as a general system slowdown, occurs when one DVD is being verified and the other DVD is burning.

A dual core will certainly help MPEG-2 encoding run faster, assuming your encoer is multithreaded (Most are)