Red Dawn,
First I just want to compliment you on your trolling. I mean this not at all in a pejorative sense; it takes a great deal of talent to mix facts and opinion in such a way as to get so many people fired up like this. It was definitely a pleasure to read, as opposed to most uninformed, misspelled, 2 line flames against a processor. Also, the fastest intel proc I own (and plan to own for the forseeable future) is 266 mhz, so I hope my credentials as not-an-intel-fanboy are sufficient. However, I think an i845 system is the wrong one to use if you want to see a significant increase in speeds in whatever you're using. I could buy an AMD 2000+ system from Best Buy, but my framerates in games would still suck because of the TNT2. Know what I'm saying? Mp3 encoding also suffers from the lack of bandwidth...
Plus, one gets diminishing returns from higher speed processors when encoding. Let's say I'm encoding a file that takes 10 minutes to encode on a pentium 100 and, somehow, manage to control for everything and have it encode in 5 minutes on a p200. That's a big difference. But if we upgrade to a 400 mhz processor and halve the encoding time again, the difference is much less noticeable. Couple that with the fact that 1000 mhz on a P4 is agreed by all to not mean as much as 1000 mhz on an Athlon, and I can definitely see where going to a 2.2 northwood would be an underwhelming experience after having a 1.2 T-bird.