I've been an AMD fn for many years now, and have been more than satisfied with the performance of my main rig here at home (1.4Gzh Athlon, 1GB RAM, 60GB Main HDD, 80 GB Removable HDD, Geforce3 Ti200 blah blah blah....)

However, I wonder if it might be time for a total overhaul of the major internals (motherbaord, RAM and CPU/Cooler) in light of today.

I was given to 1-hour Digital8 tapes and a Sony Camcorder with USB streaming to slap onto DVD.

Getting it into the PC couldn't have been easier.

However, saving it as a high-qaulity video file (2.1MB/S bitrate, 30fps) is killing my PC.

It's been going since 2pm, and it's calculated it's still got 345 minutes left to run at the moment.............

I knew I should've started much earlier........ :(

Suggestions on gear if you find yourself doing more digital video work?

Getting a Pinnacle card or similar might be a better option? :rubchin:

Personally, I'd recommend P4 over Athlon if you can afford it. But I'm sure a big bunch of people will be along to tell me I'm wrong...

Or, for a totally different option, get a (dual) G5 Mac.

Rob.

A fast P4 with hyper threading will be faster for video encoding work than the equivalent rated Athlon.

For more general use an Athlon 64 would also be worth a look.

They use much less power than the intel processors and hence require quieter fans.

Just finished building my A64 3400+ machine and it rocks!

My athlon 750 is still buzzing along OK for now... and would prefer to stick with them again should I upgrade in the future.

I've been an AMD fn for many years now' date=' and have been more than satisfied with the performance of my main rig here at home (1.4Gzh Athlon, 1GB RAM, 60GB Main HDD, 80 GB Removable HDD, Geforce3 Ti200 blah blah blah....)

However, I wonder if it might be time for a total overhaul of the major internals (motherbaord, RAM and CPU/Cooler) in light of today.

I was given to 1-hour Digital8 tapes and a Sony Camcorder with USB streaming to slap onto DVD.

Getting it into the PC couldn't have been easier.

However, saving it as a high-qaulity video file (2.1MB/S bitrate, 30fps) is killing my PC.

It's been going since 2pm, and it's calculated it's still got 345 minutes left to run at the moment.............

I knew I should've started much earlier........ :(

Suggestions on gear if you find yourself doing more digital video work?[/quote']

My PC is half again as fast and processing video files to burn unto a disk to play on a domestic DVD video player still takes a bloody age. i have no idea why this process is slow, my PC handles the video files, and all the editing, putting on titles, transition effects with no bother at all, but as soon as you hit the button to out put it to DVD-video or SVCD or VCD it starts some mysterious conversion process that I have seen taking all night for a 40 minite video film!

P4 1.8 (O/C'd to 2.1) 768Mb RAM, 2 x80Gb HDD's, ATi Radeon Pro9700...

Still takes forever to encode & burn a DVD.

It took something like 5 hours to back up all my Briskoda meet pics to DVD the other night :(

Oh and I have used CPU chips from a variety of firms, Intel, 386SX 20, Pentium 166MMX, PII 450, PIII 600, P4 2.8, Celeron 2.2, I have used an IBM Blue Lightening D2 66, and a Cyrix K2 400. As far as the software was concerned other than the speed of the chip I have never had any compatibility issues. In the past AMD was considered the least good in terms of quality, ie 1st Intel, 2nd Cyrix, 3rd AMD, but I have heard nothing but good about AMD in recent years. A computer nerd in my work swears by them and favours one designed for notebooks, but which can be overclocked more than the desk top version.

I'd just like to point out that the entry-level Apple G4 1GHz is capable of encoding DVDs in realtime...

Rob.

You can get a Athlon 64 for the same price as a P4 these days.. and the athlon64 tends to edge out in terms of pure processing power..

the only reason i would consider a p4 is for Hyper threading, which just makes it slightly smoother if you intend to use the machine at the same time (ie for surfin the web)

Another important point will be the application you run on it, as different applications tend to favor different cpus..

check out tomshardware.. theve just done their cpu comparison 2005

heres a tater page for encoding in pinnacle dvd.

And if you havent guessed by now... im a AMD fan

My 2500+ rig (slightly overclocked) will encode a film to divx in just under 2 hours.

I;d love to uprade tomorrow to a Athlon FX series cpu, but changing the mainboard and RAM at the same time, and essentially a total rebuild from ground up (it'd be good to do a complete reformat and streamline the system a bit, nice and clean) is just to much of a PITA at this stage in my life.

Costs would be high (knowing my preferences in gear), the hassle of everyone in house and friends over who gets the old equipment (usually while it's still screwed in mine, the vultures!).

189 minutes and counting............ :eek:

Won;t be able to get to sleep till it's done - 7-fan monster.......... :eek: still CPU core temp never gets above 39degrees.......

It's been going since 2pm' date=' and it's calculated it's still got 345 minutes left to run at the moment.............

I knew I should've started much earlier........ :(

Suggestions on gear if you find yourself doing more digital video work?[/quote']

I have a MiniDV camcorder and feed it into the PC via a Pinnacle DV500 capture card, using Firewire. This streams in high quality in real time to the PC. I then use Adobe Premiere to edit the video, add effects, titles, etc and then compile the video into a (Pinnacle) video and audio stream. The capture card does the bulk of the processing and this means the video can be compiled in real time. I then export these compiled videos to Impression which I use for burning to DVD. This just mulitplexes the two streams together and burns them on a DVD/CD, and will typically take about an hour for 45 minutes of video. This is all on a P4 2.8GHz with 1Gb of RAM and nice fast hard disks.

Unfortunately, the Pinnacle card is only really useful if you stream from a camcorder into it as it has a "Pinnacle Mpeg" rather than Mpeg hardware encoder. However, it's a fair bit cheaper than the offerings from Matrox, etc which do real mpeg hardware encoding Burning video from the web using Power Producer (and just using the P4) takes between 1x and 1.5x the length of the video, depending on complexity and bit rate.

So if you plan to do a lot of video munging, I'd recommend a dedicated capture card with hardware encoding. If you just want a generally faster machine, I'd opt for a P4 or AMD

Chris

I;d love to uprade tomorrow to a Athlon FX series cpu' date=' but changing the mainboard and RAM at the same time, and essentially a total rebuild from ground up (it'd be good to do a complete reformat and streamline the system a bit, nice and clean) is just to much of a PITA at this stage in my life.

Costs would be high (knowing my preferences in gear), the hassle of everyone in house and friends over who gets the old equipment (usually while it's still screwed in mine, the vultures!).

189 minutes and counting............ :eek:

Won;t be able to get to sleep till it's done - 7-fan monster.......... :eek: still CPU core temp never gets above 39degrees....... [/quote'] Youve just answered your own question...

You need at least DDR3200 ram for the modern P4's and athlon 64s so they are on a par there AMDs also now run cooler than equiv p4 (over 100w heat dissipation on load :eek: ) and altho the gap isnt huge on performance... once winxp-64 is released and gets better support (you can download a beta atm) the gap will get bigger

When you encode do you involve both your HD's?

What I mean is do you read from one and save to the other, if you are using just the one disk it will have read and writes to do. Use both if you're not already.

What disks do you have, ATA133 will give a significant gain over an older ATA33, I tried this recently when I used an old Xbox 10gb I had lying around to set up as a temporary boot disk. Much slower.

An 80gb Maxtor 2mb Cache ATA133 is about

I thought that minidv camcorder data was already mpeg format, and all that happens is you stream the mpeg2 data straight into your pc, basically like copying a file. I have a boggo standard firewire port on my 1 GHZ laptop, and use a ulead product to grab from the tape and get no dropped frames.

As for computer CPU's. I am a big fan of AMD, and all of my recent built machines have all used various versions of this processor. Currently in use at home, we have

1 x P233 MMX Laptop

1 x PIII 1GHZ Laptop

1 x Dual CPU PIII 866MHZ

1 x Athlon XP 2600+

1 x Athlon XP 3200+

1 x Sempron 2800+

At work I use a P4 3.06GHZ with hyperthreading cpu, and I find it no faster because very few bits of sofware have yet been written to take advantage of HT. Some of the PC's we support also have hyperthreading, and these regularly crash when using some of the clients apps. The non HT ones run the same apps fine however.

This is about the only time you will hear me say P4 and for this one reason. You can get a dual CPU board and get two of them and you're rocking. The only way of a dual athlon is an expensive mobo and 2 athlon MP's or a bodging trick on athlon XP's.

Athlons pretty much rule in every other aspect - gaming, sound encoding, hardcore processing, but close to realtime is their let down

This is about the only time you will hear me say P4 and for this one reason. You can get a dual CPU board and get two of them and you're rocking. The only way of a dual athlon is an expensive mobo and 2 athlon MP's or a bodging trick on athlon XP's.

Athlons pretty much rule in every other aspect - gaming' date=' sound encoding, hardcore processing, but close to realtime is their let down[/quote']

Gonna disagree I put together a dual Athlon 1800MP a couple of years ago (and I'm still using it) for less than

Thats the only trouble with the athlons... You're limited to what you can dual setup It wouldnt be a problem if you could dual XP easily (you can but its a massive pain in the A$$), and the price doesnt really reflect the budget-price nature of AMD.

What is your dual setup clocking at (in terms of single setups) and how does it fair against its dual counterparts? I have always wanted to mess with AMD dual processing for the fun of it

Thats the only trouble with the athlons... You're limited to what you can dual setup It wouldnt be a problem if you could dual XP easily (you can but its a massive pain in the A$$)' date=' and the price doesnt really reflect the budget-price nature of AMD.

What is your dual setup clocking at (in terms of single setups) and how does it fair against its dual counterparts? I have always wanted to mess with AMD dual processing for the fun of it [/quote']

I must say it wasn't without a few teething problems! I currently run them at the standard 1533Mhz because of mobo instability with o/c. Another issue was the PSU because I run two 7200 HDD and two optical drives I did eventually have to fork out for a 450W PSU. Noise can be an issue too and I can't fit 2 low speed fans to the Heatsinks because the processer sockets are too close together.

On the plus side - I have a dual CPU system for much less than a comparable Xeon setup, I crunch SETI and ClimatePrediction units on one CPU constantly leaving the other free for foregound processes and after over 2 years I still can't justify changing to 64 bit.

I have just been looking around and it seems that MP motherboards are very hard to find now so it looks like the end of my dual CPU time as well when I come to upgrade

How does it fair for gaming, or do you not really use it for that?

How does it fair for gaming, or do you not really use it for that?

Not at all - just noticed your avatar, should've guessed where your interest lies

It would no doubt be let down by the graphics card - a 64Mb nVidia MX440...I'm a bit of a distributed computing anorak I'm afraid so PC gets used mainly for that with consoles for gaming.

My interest did lie there, but i completed it lol

I may play it again because of the options you can apply to multiple processors - and with the sound stuttering problem in the game, i think it would be the best solution... + new toy

Ahhh, I'll have a scout round for benchmarks - Its quiet in work today

Ebay are a bit dry on the dual athlon side :(

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/29/sub-500_imac/

For all your video encoding needs - just not out yet

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/12/29/sub-500_imac/

For all your video encoding needs - just not out yet

About time too! Would be good if Apple sold the logic boards/processors as components - they've started using the same types of memory, graphics cards, disks, etc. as IBM-compats, so it would be good if they'd let people get their own cheap versions of these if they want to...

Rob.