h.264 encoding on an 8-core Mac Pro

I had been considering buying an Elgato Turbo.264 USB2.0 h.264 MP4 video encoder, but then upgraded to a dual-quad-core 2.8GHz Mac Pro.

My first test, using the "Normal" preset in HandBrake 0.9.1 (Mac OS X 10.5.1) yielded an approximately 2x real-time speed. I was pleasantly surprised that all eight cores were being kept efficiently busy:



The source was a two-hour NTSC 4:3 DVD VIDEO_TS file on hard disk, and the default two-pass encoding took almost exactly one hour. I'd be very surprised if the turbo.264 would help on this platform as most comments that I have seen report 0.5-1x real-time encoding on dual-core Macs, but still a benefit would be being able to do its thing in the background while keeping my processors more available for other work. Probably more overall real clock time, but perhaps with more efficient use of human and processor time.

Please chime in with a comment if you've used the turbo.264 on a quad-core or eight-core Mac Pro.

[graphs via MenuMeters]