I'll sometimes have 100+ songs waiting to be compressed.

I rip using EAC at about 3x, but I have had it rip at 10 x, I found that if I played with my "Drive Options" I could use more reliable settings, while sacrificing rip speed. Ripping at 3x is kind of poo poo, using my IDE Acer CD Burner, but I'd rather it rip slowly and more reliably....

As far as encoding speed, I use LAME like this :

-k -q0 -v --vbr-new -V0 -b192 -B320 -F -ms

this gives me 6 : 1 compression on the wav files and encodes at 10x in winME on my Athlon 1600 XP.

Furthermore, I allow 2 instances of LAME to run in the background, (I figure my machine's got the horsepower) so that ripping can continue on to the next track while encoding happens in the background. I never have to wait for encoding after a rip.