I currently have a PIII ? 1Ghz machine with 1 GB of RAM. Most of the tasks performed are pretty mundane like surfing and MS Office, but I am also working on converting all my MiniDV video tapes from a Digital Camcorder from captured AVI files to DVD format(MPEG2 files). The capture is easy and the modifying is easy, but the whole encoding process (software =TmpEng) from AVI to MPEG2 can take up to 10 hours if I use the ?best? settings.
My question is this: Should I look at upgrading my current system to a Dual CPU board or just build a new PC with either a P4 3+ Ghz or an AMD Athlon 64 3400+. I don?t really do much gaming, but I would like to see what can be done to get this encoding time down to something more reasonable.
I've built a few complete machines (older systems), so the build process is not daunting. Any help, guidance would be nice.
If the budget isnt a real problem, get a Dual-Opteron config :)
Short of that I would reccommend the A64-3400. The biggest performance jump you will notice from eitheer upgrade will be the use (if you choose-to/can) of a more advanced memory spec. Faster HDDs would be useful too (although, if budget isnt really a problem, going with the A64 and going monkey-crazy on RAM would be best so you can then do the entire encoding in memory).
I also found that even if you go with the dual board, most software doesn't take advantage of the dualees yet, so the performance gain will not be noticed. I'm very interested in this, so thanks for the continued help in advance.
1. Although software doesnt take advantage of 64bit extentions, there ARE apps that do take such things into consideration
2. With the 64bit platform you have more access to more ram which means you can get rid of the HDD as the bottleneck.
3. As any computer engineer will tell ya, the CPU is fast enough -- the bottleneck is are the memory devices. So really, regardless of whether you choose P4/AMD, it doesnt really matter as much as the type and spec of memory you are using.
4. Tom's Hardware Guide is biased (as i unfortunaely discovered the other day -- their bias happens to concurr with my own preferences but nonetheless i no longer respect their reviews and such... such a small thing too... oh well).
5. I reccommended the Dual Opteron rig -- not a A64FX system. The Opt'y line is a little different from the FX line :)
after going to a trade show at the the nec in birmingham england recently i saw a prototype system running 4 yes 4 opteron cpus on one mother board linked up to 8 17 inch tft monitors this is possibly the most powerful home pc ive ever seen just imagine the encoding speeds with the right software.
to preator got some pics of the system i mentioned they will be on my cusins web site soon will send you the link when he gets the gallery working http://www.wayne-tech.co.uk/ you can chek this but the gallery wasnt workin when i checked.
