Not much of a difference using Qmaster?

Another Very large thing to do with speed is going to be read and write speeds of your storage, wherever that is... you may not see much of a speed increase if you're connected to a USB 1.1 (or even 2 depending on number of machines) you could quickly cap the bandwidth of the USB line before reaching a quarter of your box's potential.

Another thing... I disagree with "leaving a core open" to handle other things.... I mean sure theoretically your laptop might bog down if you start to surf the web or something, but if you're anything like me; you get up let the computer do it's thing, watch a movie, get a nice cold drink, mow the lawn.. etc.... Put that sucker to 4 cores and see what happens, also make sure you have good ventallation too for your laptop will keep temps down.. heat slows your computer down a loottt (unless you're running an athlon in which case they push till they burn.. but I don't think any of us apple people have to worry about that)

Anyways using Firewire 800 or eSATA provides for faster read and writing 🙂

Cheers

or yea if you have 8 cores, you should see a significant speed difference .. if you're not seeing those increases I'd be looking at other reasons why your speeds are slow.

Quick clusters really shine when you're doing multiple encodes of the same clip, or doing a batch of clips in one go.

Well yes - but something that's taking an hour to encode should see significant results when changing from using "This computer" (single instance) to a multi-instance cluster...