After few years, an update…
Two VGX-XLs are dead… 😦 don’t know if they could be saved somehow, but I think it doesn’t worth the money spent on hardware or technical repair work; at least one (this) survived, even if it’s the one with less power (C2D E6300 1.86Ghz); idea of upgrading it with a more powerful CPU it’s still there - found a Q6600 2.67Ghz at 30€; it will improve the speed 3x; not bad at that cost!
A decade old PC, albeit capable of doing a lot of things - all my projects to date used this one, or another with slightly faster CPU, it’s umbearably slow; I was tired to wait a week for a lossless conversion, or one day or two for a lossy one; a minute to open an avs file, and few seconds to move to the next/previous frame.
So I found myself “forced” somehow to change the things. And I acted. Slowly, but firmly. Decided to go for a second hand, but good, desktop PC. AMD out of the games, i3 too slow, i5 not powerful enough, E5 Xeon too dear, so i7 was the logical choice, great price/power ratio.
Found an i7-4770 (non-K); seems almost new, very good status. Along it, great case, water cooler, 16GB RAM 2133Mhz, 600GB VelociRaptor, EVGA 760GTX.
Long story short: even if only few Avisynth plugins use multithreading, this new PC (with a CPUbenchmark score of almost 10000) is indeed ten times faster than the old one (score around 1000); so, do not base your calculations for speed improvements on single thread scores.
Hope this could help someone to decide to upgrade his CPU, or buy a “brand new used” PC as I did!