- Oct 31, 1999
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Cliff Notes: For purposes of video encoding with Adobe, my X2 3800+ is the functional equivalent of a ~3600MHz Athlon64. The system is much smoother in multitasking even with both cores getting hammered by the encoding process.
I got my X2 3800+ today and plopped it into my work rig in place of my Winchester 3000+. WinXP booted, detected an "ACPI Multiprocessor PC," and said the new hardware was installed but might not work until I rebooted. Well, duh. So I rebooted and was in X2 land.
I had already run a benchmark with the 3000+, I had Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0 take a 93-minute .AVI that I'd captured from camcorder, and "burn" it to a folder on a hard drive. It took 187 minutes with the 3000+. This is a task I routinely do at work, so you can see why I'd like to chop 3-hour jobs down a little, especially since the system suffers lag when I try to use it for other stuff at the same time. Ok, so Athlon64s are not perfect...
So I had the X2 do that same encode-&-burn job. Moment of truth, what did I get for my money? I got this :Q We're talkin' 85%-90% usage of both cores combined. And running other stuff a little quickly showed me that the hype is true about it being smoother under load, even when the load is hitting both cores at once.
The entire process, both encoding and "burning," completed in 98 minutes on the X2, or about 52% of the time required by the 3000+. The "burning" phase is somewhat HDD-limited, giving me only ~50% CPU usage, so the actual encode time was probably less than half, which stands to reason when going from 1800MHz to 4000MHz. Credit Adobe for making especially effective use of almost all the cycles...
I had the case open, so I periodically felt the base of my Alpha PAL8150 heatsink, which is cooled by a very quiet 18-decibel 18cfm 80mm fan. The base of the heatsink felt only a hair over room temperature (edit: what I really should've said is "over body temperature"), which is really amazing when there's 4000MHz of A64 blasting away under there at 90% capacity.
So anyway, I think this calls for pizza
I got my X2 3800+ today and plopped it into my work rig in place of my Winchester 3000+. WinXP booted, detected an "ACPI Multiprocessor PC," and said the new hardware was installed but might not work until I rebooted. Well, duh. So I rebooted and was in X2 land.
I had already run a benchmark with the 3000+, I had Adobe Premiere Elements 1.0 take a 93-minute .AVI that I'd captured from camcorder, and "burn" it to a folder on a hard drive. It took 187 minutes with the 3000+. This is a task I routinely do at work, so you can see why I'd like to chop 3-hour jobs down a little, especially since the system suffers lag when I try to use it for other stuff at the same time. Ok, so Athlon64s are not perfect...
So I had the X2 do that same encode-&-burn job. Moment of truth, what did I get for my money? I got this :Q We're talkin' 85%-90% usage of both cores combined. And running other stuff a little quickly showed me that the hype is true about it being smoother under load, even when the load is hitting both cores at once.
The entire process, both encoding and "burning," completed in 98 minutes on the X2, or about 52% of the time required by the 3000+. The "burning" phase is somewhat HDD-limited, giving me only ~50% CPU usage, so the actual encode time was probably less than half, which stands to reason when going from 1800MHz to 4000MHz. Credit Adobe for making especially effective use of almost all the cycles...
I had the case open, so I periodically felt the base of my Alpha PAL8150 heatsink, which is cooled by a very quiet 18-decibel 18cfm 80mm fan. The base of the heatsink felt only a hair over room temperature (edit: what I really should've said is "over body temperature"), which is really amazing when there's 4000MHz of A64 blasting away under there at 90% capacity.
So anyway, I think this calls for pizza
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