How fast is a VERY fast system?

[gnoymyguy]

So we've been told that an average system now can meets more than our needs, unlike several years ago.

I've got a duron750@930 with 256ram and a gf2mx. It does ok for games, nothing sparkling but I'd say my system is a fairly average one.

Then a few days ago I met video editing, which made my system:disgust: go into full John Woo slo-mo effect.

I think that even the average Joe is getting into this type of app(me) and when I encountered it I drifted down memory lane to the days of 386'es. Certainly I for one do not think the average system can handle killer apps with complete competence.

Do the guys here with P4 and 1.2-1.5 athlons with a mountain of ram have this problem?

 

[limsandy]

That's not enough..... I saw an article about a super computer that occupies space of 3 full-size basketball courts. It was powered by some thousands of P3-733. It was like 2 years ago. I wonder if they have upgraded to Athlon 1.2 GHz ? I also heard that they put this giant in the Department of Energy. I wonder if they use this computer for SETI or some sort of computation of nuclear reactions ?

 

[Degenerate]

A 750 to day will do you fine.

 

[gnoymyguy]

degenerate

u think that a 750 is ok? I reckon for games it's fine for a gamer(other than the hardcore with the GF3 seeking every last fps) but in my situation it seems too slow. what is the weighting in importance between ram and cpu for editing?

Limesandy

hehe that's what I need for my RC5😀

 

[Duvie]

What program and what exactly were you editing???

I have a 1.1tbird at 1.2 and I wish I can encode divx faster so until one can encode at real time I wont be happy...

I know ram helped me with photo editing as well as dv camcorder editing...but often the files are bigger than the ram and then it suddenly isn't so much...harddrive is a big factor as well as defragged regular before capturing...

 

[gnoymyguy]

Duvie

I haven't done anything serious yet, just messing around with video I recorded off a tv tuner😀. I'm just using the program packaged with a Pinnacle tv tuner(it's crap). May use other package once I'm familiar with the basics, but just moving parts of video around and loading files takes forever, and when I hear of 6-20 hours encoding to mpg4 and DivX I have second thoughts about buying a burner to store vids.

Would Dual proccies, or Raid0 or a gig of memory be of greater help?
Difference between RDRAM/DDR/SDRAM?

 

[Duvie]

right now I am doing 4hrs for 90min movie and about 5-1/2 for 120min movie with high end settings set for 2 cd burns...with flaskmpeg to divx encoding...

with less aggressive settings of video and mp3 audio I can irk 12-13fps and cut about an hour off of that...

I think the cache performance of the tbird gives a bit of a boost, plus 7200rpm harddrives well defragged and limited amount used to boost seek times.

 

[gnoymyguy]

That's pretty good speed, Duvie. Looks like the extra L2cache does make a diff. Still, it'd be nice if we could encode at a rate closer to the length of the source material. If new Athlon does come with 512k on die cache, I assume the process of editing and other workload intensive apps will benefit a lot?

 

[Duvie]

p4 does quite well at flaskmpeg but because of that cancer called rambus I wont touch the platform...if a ddr platform comes out for p4s and palominos take too long to come out I may go intel route cause I want higher fps...

Hopefully the palomino will come out at the 1.73 as rumored...if current athlon p4 scaling continues which I thing it will boost for athlon a bit with added features it may be equvalent to a 2.3gig p4...unless the northwoods really rock...I think those cheaps will push up in the 20's for high quality fps.

 

[gnoymyguy]

Hmm, I was thinking along the same lines duvie. If Intel's solution does become affordable then there will be temptation, despite the massive anti-Intel campaign, I think they are getting back into the game sooner rather than later, and IF there are SSE2 optimisations for software in the horizon, then time consuming projects will get a much needed cut. Eg.Remember Tom's review of P4 encoding Flask with said optimisations?

Sad to see PM(one of the bright lights) leaving. Helpful and kind members are now one less-I too am becoming annoyed with the "use the search function" crowd of sarcastic ppl. Whats the forum for, help and discussion-with unhelpful ppl whats the point?

 

[MikeO]

mm.. a cluster of couple thousand 1.33ghz tbirds all oc'd to 1.7ghz. how's that?

maybe it would encode these fvcking divx's faster, it sücks encoding 5 hours and then see it looks like crap. fUC¤#""%¤#"% 🙂

 

[Shalmanese]

<< mm.. a cluster of couple thousand 1.33ghz tbirds all oc'd to 1.7ghz. how's that?

maybe it would encode these fvcking divx's faster, it s&uuml;cks encoding 5 hours and then see it looks like crap. fUC¤#&quot;&quot;%¤#&quot;% 🙂 >>



youd need some pretty elaborate cooling, liquid nitrogen prolly wont even do 🙁

maybe you should wait for the palominos

 

[sharkeeper]

The main issue with the Athlon is its enormous power consumption. Even a small farm of 100 1.33 GHz Athlons (each with 1 GB of DDR) will use over 8 kW of power!

Anyhow, getting back to the original subject...

Your problem is memory! Run Windows NT 4/5 and get all the memory your board can support and/or you can afford. Memory is a bargain today. By far, it is the cheapest improvement you can make that you can feel! Video editing is definitely affected by memory because you can preload much larger blocks of data into memory or a disk cache. Your processor at 930 is pretty fast. Going to 768 MB of RAM and keeping your same cpu would be better than staying at 256 and putting a 1.33 GHz bird in there. Of course, if you're doing the divx thing, you want all the cpu horsepower you can get AND have a ton of ram too!

Cheers!