When i did my CD collection (i have about 50Gb at a medium quality level) I tried a few and ended up using the jriver media center (or its previous version, i think jukebox might work in the same way on the ripping side).
Mostly because it offered a very slick workflow - it will do all the usual, look up in an online cddb, encode (does ogg too, which was a big plus for me), get cd cover picture if you're so inclined, save the files in a folder structure which you configure (i use artist - album) and with names you customise. And after you rip one CD and it ejects it, if you put another cd in the drive the program will just start ripping it with the same quality settings. So you can just keep it going while doing other stuff: put cd in, potter about, put next cd in, potter about.... and get through quite a lot of CDs that way.
It's not cheap but I did register it at the time, I was already quite pleased with it from the ripping but I also liked the dynamic playlists (I'm too lazy to handpick lists most of the time) and the media server modules, and tag management is not too bad either...
It also allowed copying files to my player device (rio karma) either song by song or via playlists, so turned out quite handy
And if you care about quality there are different codecs you can use etc. etc.
I know it's not perfect, quite quirky in some ways, and they are trying to make it do too much nowadays (manage photos and movie clips etc.) - but i suspect it's very likely that their older version "media jukebox" (
http://www.mediajukebox.com/) might already have a ripping workflow much like the one media centre has, for a low cost.
Of course what you end up using and buying depends a lot on what you try and find at the time - there's probably even better tools out there, probably freeware.