I don't know if this helps, but the moment I switched to the <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/videogetbmeth3.html">bait and switch technique</a>, most of those things didn't seem to matter much, except for the encoding time. So, using this technique, as far as benchmarks go, you won't have to worry tooo much [this may help]:
2 computers:
-current laptop compaq: 2.0 GHz AMD Turion64, 2.0GB RAM
-temporary laptop acer:1.3 GHz PentiumM, 256MB RAM [my compaq needed repairs... I was being stupid]
using source footage in magix mep10:
-compaq loaded clips reasonably well, some lag-time
-acer barely loaded the clips
using bait files for footage in magix mep10:
-compaq no lag-time
-acer no lag-time [well occasionally when I applied an effect
