You could always disable hyperthreading and see what happens. Don't ask me how to do that though, I'm an AMD guy myself.

I'll be damned, you solved my puzzle squid_80 ;) eh, just kiddin', but that was it. I may be no A/V wiz but I can fight my way through a BIOS and disabling HT boosted VDM right up to 99% usage at first and second pass, but unfortunately the decrease in speed was immense!!!! :eek: HT on: 1pass: ~50 fps 2pass: ~20 fps HT off: 1pass: ~31 fps 2pass: ~10 fps Woha!! I guess those 20% for the idle process aren't so bad after all :D Nice riddle this was :devil: But if the idle process keeps ~20% with HT on, could it be possible to use this power to support encoding?? Maybe I should try 2 jobs simultaneously ;) thx guys, all of ya

Thought that might happen. Here's the deal: with HT enabled, you effectively have two cpus which I think each make up 50% of the processor load shown in task manager. Xvid isn't multithreaded so it uses only one cpu, taking the cpu usage up to 50%. The other cpu is used for vdub's input thread (possibly other background windows stuff as well) which will include avisynth, since you're using Gordian Knot. That accounts for the other ~20% cpu usage shown. The only way you'd get 100% usage with HT on is if your avisynth script used a lot of cpu power, or if xvid was multithreaded... which may not be too far away, considering what's been posted to the development mailing list lately.

Yeah, but the difference in speed with HT on/off is interesting. One should think with HT off the entire CPU is used as one so no comp cycles are lost unless it has to wait for something, which shouldn't occur at at read-compute-write process with a fast HD. But on the other hand those tests showed me more then otherwise :D