oh, btw: today I made a very interesting discovery: the powermacs aren't that far behind the Athlons as I thought!
I friend of mine who also does lots of DivX-work (while I prefer MPEG 2) just got his new system: a Dual AthlonXP 1800.
While it outnumbers my Mac with 3,9 Gigaflops compared to 3,2 over here (which is still impressive, one 867 Mhz G4 nearly maches a dual-1,6 Ghz XP)
We now made a test, encoding the same moviefile into MPEG 2. We both used applications which take full support of our processor features. Me, using Quicktime which uses the Altivec, he used a hacked version of Flask, using both the "Altivec" the AMD has plus uses both processors plus the XP commands....
my system had an average encoding time of 27 frames, he had 31 frames.
I really thought that once he get's this system, he would CRUSH me, but no! And his system is configured VERY well.
But well, this might already be too much technical discussion for the Bar, I just was in the mood to share this to the rest of us, so we can go home and say "we still have good hardware"