I have an athlon 2100+ (thing is still blazing fast amazingly. and it's 3 years old) and going from flac/ape->lame 3.90.3 alt preset via the foobar diskwriter, I get around 5x encoding. what do you get?

Between 6x and 8x using a HT Pentium 4 at ~3.2 GHz.

Same here. Usually around 8X, though. . . .

5-7x
1800+ @ 2.1GHz (= to a2500+ or so)
Nforce2

Using --alt-preset fast standard, I encode at 15-16x using a 1.7 GHz Centrino.

Odd thing is that, using a 3.2 GHz P4, I encode at the same speed, even though a 3.2 GHz P4 should be at least 30% faster.

My Athlon 64 3500+ (2.2 GHz) encodes at around 6x speed when I use lame 3.90.3 --alt-preset standard
(MSI K8N SLI platinum (nforce4-based), 1 GB dual channel mem)

......2X max with 1.4 GHz...so LAME

Luckily, I can get 7X with --alt-prest fast standard with 3.97

anyway, how 3.97 perform on 3.2 GHz system? , it must be around ~25X

processors are becoming faster and faster

Usually get around 4.5 X on my Athlon XP 2100+.

Just got a new PC for my dad last week end, an Athlon 64 3000+ which encodes around 6.5 X. Which is quite amazing considering the CPU is only about 100 MHz faster. (1.73 GHz compared with 1.81 GHz)

Another thing I noticed was using the most recent iTunes, it seems that it automaticaly uses an optimised SSE2 encoder when it detects that the CPU has that. I test one file on the Athlon XP it encoded at 8 times, on the Athlon 64 it got up to 12.5 X.