Is CPU speed a major factor?

[redbaron]

A friend is thinking of upgrading from an Athlon T-Bird 1.2g to an Athlon 2600+. Can he expect any 'major' improvements in DVD Burning ability from his PC, or does the CPU speed only play a small part in determining the overall speed of the process?

[Jesterrace]

For burning speed it won't make one bit of difference. You can't go any faster than your burner/media is capable of. Where the HUGE time savings comes in is in ripping speeds. I used to have a Celeron 1.1GHZ with 128MB of Ram and my DVD Shrink projects averaged about 1 hour 20 minutes with the Deep Analysis. I now have a P4 2.4GHZ with 256MB RAM and using DVD Shrink with a Deep Analysis now, averages me about 25-30 minutes. So even though it won't save him any time in burning, it will save him quite a bit of time in ripping, which is the most time consuming part of the process anyways.

[dragonmaster]

well if he runs lot of stuff while burning at the same time... it'll probably save him some media... and sometime too maybe... :-p

[redbaron]

OK, thanks for the info :)

[Jesterrace]

well if he runs lot of stuff while burning at the same time... it'll probably save him some media... and sometime too maybe... :-p
Yeah, but multi-tasking can still be risky (if you are using very demanding applications). The biggest noticeable savings will be the ripping speed though. ;)