Ideal Upgrades for Company Workstations

[Euon]

Hi!

I work for a company capturing and digitizing old video media (VHS, Video8, Hi8, Betacam)
Our PCs are quite old and outdated and we're looking at upgrading our equipment in effort to achieve better encoding times.

We typically deal with several 1-2 hour long clips at a time. These will all be captured/edited/exported through Edius exclusively. Each set of clips are either burnt straight to DVD or exported to avi/mov files

We work across several PCs but typical specs are as follows:
-Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600/Q9550
-A wide variety of motherboards
-2-4GB RAM (all PCs are only running 32bit Windows XP)
-Onboard video or Nvidia 8400/9500GT
-500GB C drive + 1TB storage
-Edius 5

I was originally under the impression that upgrading to 64bit Windows and buying a whole lot of RAM would help to speed up encoding. However, I've read and been told that installing beyond 4GB of RAM isnt going to offer too much of a noticeable performance increase.
However, upgrading to a better CPU (eg i5-3570) and MB would give a much more noticeable difference?

Can anyone suggest a good upgrade path?

[shueardm]

Depending on how many systems you have here there is a much better way.
Encoding out of EDIUS is ok where you have one workstation and one output type with time to sit around twiddling thumbs.

If you have multiple EDIUS systems doing the same thing I would take a different approach by exporting the timeline to AVI file's to hot folders on a network, having a third party encoder do the grunt work on a dedicated server/workstation as all files that are logged into the location.
How many workstations? How many EDIUS licenses of Version 5?
You probably only need one higher end spec editor station with 64 bit and EDIUS 7 (first 64 bit version) with , keep the rest for general cutting and smaller less intense jobs.
Contact me if you wish through my signature if you wish to talk further about a procurement and what I might suggest to offer.

PS. I can't believe you just burn AVI files to optical disc. You must need Mpeg4 for web or ipad & Blu-ray etc as well, AVC (mpeg4) is where the systems bog down on old gear like yours