I've been using EAC on and off for years now, but I'm finally getting serious about ripping my entire 500+ CD connection to disk. I've been doing it on my four-year-old P4 machine at home, and with an HP 1040i drive, I've been getting speeds of about 2.0x in secure mode.
I decided to jumpstart the process by bringing a stack of CDs with me to work and running extractions in the background. I do have a faster PC at work (Core 2 duo), but it's just a commodity Dell desktop. I was very surprised to get consistent 6 - 8x extraction speeds.
I know my home desktop is getting on in years, but it works fine for me. I thought the drive was the main limiting factor in ripping speed. My HP drive does everything else faster than the no-name drive in my work machine. Does CPU speed have that much of an effect on ripping speed? On neither machine do I see much CPU activity in task manager.
