All thes eprocessors and I am more confused now...

[MacAttack]

I am definitely not an elite user and do not require super computer speeds out of my personal system. I have a Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe 1.866GHz, Asus P5D DH Deluxe motherboard, 4GB DDR2 memory, and an HD4850 video card.

I am not a heavy gamer, but enjoy the eye candy when I do. I do not play many first person shooters. I like RPGs, strategy, and some other basic games. As far as games go, I do not think my system is too drastically limited. What I cannot stand is how long it takes to convert my HD home movies from camcorder to the computer to make DVDs. I have a Canon HV20. When I want to create a 1-hour movie in HD, it takes many hours to complete, sometimes 16-24hours. I also like to backup my DVDs to the HDDs. Regular DVDs can take about 10-15 minutes using DVD Fab. If I want to convert them to MKV or something, I use a calendar to time it.

With that being said, if I were to upgrade, what should I be looking for: i5, i7, X4, the new 620/640?

thanks for any recommendations.

 

[Ben90]

Correct me if im wrong guys, but that kinda load is where an i7 absolutely dominates everything on the market

See encoding and stuff benefits greatly from multicore processors as they take advantage of the extra processing power; the i7's have hyper threading which means it can work on 8 threads at the same time... Hyper threading definitely isnt as good as having strait up more cores, but it works amazing for encoding

Now as i see it you have a few options, im going to list from cheapest to most expensive:
-Get over it and go watch tv/do other productive things (not an option!
-Overclock your processor, ~0-40% faster encoding times (depending on how much u want to do it.... if overclocking may/may not be an option let us know we will help u out either way)
-try getting a 775 quad core, it will be fairly close to twice as fast clock/clock on ur current processor
-i7 system

I personally would not recommend an i5/620/640 setup... while it would be faster than a 775 quad, it wouldn't be worth the gains since u need an all new mobo/ect
Some people hate overclocking, some love it... either way you could pull a few hours off the time with a fairly small oc, if you are interested the forums will help u out

as for an i7 system; maybe this will explain


ii 77777 > 0000 0000
7 > 00 00 00 00
ii 7 >>>>>>>> 000 000 000 000 --Thats right, TWO DVDS
ii 7 > 000 000 000 000
ii 7 > 00 00 00 00
000 000

For those blind people relying on microsoft sam/anna and cant see that incredibly artistic drawing, its pretty much an i7 "giving it" to TWO encoding at the same time (read as:sexing up TWO encodings)


OH MY GOD! I SPENT ABOUT 30 MINS DRAWING A SWEET PICTURE, AND AT FORUMS SKIPS MULTIPLE SPACES!!! IM UNINSTALLING THIS SITE AND GOING TO LIVE ON AMDZONE BYE GUYS

 

[Ben90]

Basically if cost is no issue get an i7 system
If you dont want to spend ~$400 just for encoding i would look into a quad core for your current mobo
If its really not THAT big of a deal maybe you could try overclocking ur current processor

K had to make that less confusing... bye for realz this time, gotta go get my spintel mood on at amdzone

*edit*

OMG! ANANDTECH IS SOO00 HAXING RIGGED TOWORDS SPINT3L! ALL C0DE IS OPTIMIZATIONED'D TO SPINTELS BAD PROCESSER! R3AL MAN USES'S THUNDERBIRD PROCESSORS AS THEY GAME FASTER!!!

 

[alyarb]

Your board is limited to 1066 FSB processors(old), but thankfully you can still get a fast quad-core inexpensively. I would just update your board to the latest BIOS and look for an intel Q6700. They are on ebay for $160-170 and available at ewiz for $190. It's a little pricey for an old chip, but it's cheaper and just as fast as a totally new build would be. With a $20 heatsink you could easily overclock this thing to 3.0-3.2 ghz on stock voltage, and you should consider it (your board's "ai overclocking" will do it for you, but it's better if you set everything to manual and shoot for a 300 FSB, working your way up bit by bit from there). Some Q6700s are dogs though, but the lowest I ever got was 3.2 GHz. Such a processor would be ~4x faster than your current machine when it comes to your video encoding. almost as fast as a 2.8 GHz i7, but about $400 cheaper.

 

[heyheybooboo]

One issue you are dealing with ----> if you are shooting AVCHD with your cam you need to find editing software (Vegas Studio Premium?) which will import the native format and export it without conversion.

That way the only encoding will be on any effects or transitions that you add. This should have a significant improvement in your output time.

 

[Denithor]

Two options as I see it.

1) Buy a Q6600/Q6700 as a drop-in replacement for your current E6300. Assuming your encoding software (what do you use?) is multithreaded your jobs should get done in about 1/3 the time they currently take. Overclocking will increase this improvement further.

2) Buy new innards for your system. Review the video encoding performance on this page for an overview of today's chips. The Q6600 is about equal to the Q8200 and the Q6700 is about the same as the Q8400 for reference points. And the new E6300 (2.8GHz) they have listed in this review is almost exactly 50% faster than your first generation E6300 (1.86GHz).

Price-wise the X4 620/630 make a lot of sense because you could get an AM2+ motherboard and reuse your DDR2 saving about $50 or so (total cost would be in-line with a Q6600/Q6700). Then you could sell your e6300/mobo to offset this cost.

The i5 would do the job even faster but also costs more - about $350 with 4GB DDR3. And there's no real reason to buy an i7 as you can see from these results.

 

[DominionSeraph]

Your e6300 should overclock well:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuch...howdoc.aspx?i=2802&p=1

As far as your 16-24 hour encodes are concerned, I'd venture that there's something wrong with your setup.

 

[Ben90]

Originally posted by: Denithor
Price-wise the X4 620/630 make a lot of sense because you could get an AM2+ motherboard and reuse your DDR2 saving about $50 or so (total cost would be in-line with a Q6600/Q6700). Then you could sell your e6300/mobo to offset this cost.

The i5 would do the job even faster but also costs more - about $350 with 4GB DDR3. And there's no real reason to buy an i7 as you can see from these results.

Wow, i remember in Anands test article back when the i7s came out, he attributed the faster encoding vs C2Q to hyper threading. That pretty much just proves that it nehalem really is more than just a C2Q with an IMC and HT....

So yea i would definitely cross a i7 off the list unless you had some money burning a hole in ur pocket.

I do believe though that the Athlon IIs are roughly about as fast as core 2 quads are, so i dont see the point in selling his board/cpu to buy a different system that would be roughly equivalent to just buying a new cpu and selling his old one


Hell you dont even have to sell ur old cpu anyways, my old prescott sits on my desk for whenever i get an itch on my arm or something (its very scratchy)... its more useful now then when it first came out

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Ben90
my old prescott sits on my desk for whenever i get an itch on my arm or something (its very scratchy)... its more useful now then when it first came out

 

[Denithor]

Originally posted by: Ben90
I do believe though that the Athlon IIs are roughly about as fast as core 2 quads are, so i dont see the point in selling his board/cpu to buy a different system that would be roughly equivalent to just buying a new cpu and selling his old one.

Here's my logic.

Buy Q6600/Q6700 for $150-200 and sell the E6300 to recover a portion of the cost.

Buy X4 and mobo for $175-200 and have an E6300 + old mobo to sell to recover a (larger) portion of the cost.

The X4 will consume less energy yielding an additional saving over its life.

 

[nyker96]

personally I would just sell off your current setup and redo with a cheap AMD 620 solution,
AMD 620 = $100
a AM2+/AM3 board = $100

use the rest from old system. You should just overclock that machine to about 3.5ghz and it's a monster when comes to video compression like MKV etc. and won't be slower than your E6300 in gaming. but I suggest you overclock it though to get the power of it. sell off the rest of your machine and you can have a nice system upgrade for under 200.

 

[Pneumothorax]

Since video encoding seems to be your biggest timewaster, I don't understand why people here are even looking at the AMD/Core2 chips unless you're on a tight budget. The i7's destroy the rest on video encoding. I use to use an E6600 o/c to 3.33 (which is already quite abit faster than your setup) to convert my blu-rays to iphone via h.264. My E6600 o/c would take up to 12 hours or so to convert a 2+ hour movie. My current i7 920 D0 o/c to 3.8 does it in about 3.5 hours. That to me not only saves alot of time, but also alot of electricity.

 

[MacAttack]

Thank you for the feedback. When I first posted, $500-$600 was not an issue. Two trips to the emergency room, almost all budget is now gone. I will be looking to upgrade around the beginning of the year now.