Don't get me wrong, the nvidia card is an awesome card for what I bought it for which certainly wasn't for a high end video workstation, the difference is night and day from the stock motherboard graphics, you definitely want to have a good graphics card.... no question about it.
The computer I'm on is not a video computer at all, two core 2 gig processor and 3 gigs of ram, I can encode Dave's video in 1:44 which is slightly better than real time even with this old clunker, the coreI7 should do it in seconds considering the processing power, so the bottleneck has to be in the file transfer and not from the hard drives it almost has to be the way the software is handling it.
I had cyberlink media espresso from when I bought my bluray drive, it's "optimized" for cuda and it is about 30% faster than the other encoders, but there's no way to change the setttings or even see what's set different, it does output pretty good video though.
The rendering farm from that university said you could encode an hour of video in 14 minutes, what exactly could the difference be? especially if you are able to use the cuda cores in a similar manner. That coreI7 and the high end graphics card should match that time at least....I would think.