Upgrading Question

[jackinbox]

I do a lot of video encoding and transcoding and thus it's time for me to upgrade my old 1.33ghz Celeron system. It's way too slow.

People have recommended to me the following:

Asus A8V-E Deluxe
Athlon 64 3000 939 pin

Another friend thought that I'd get much better encoding results with a P4.

Since I don't do any gaming at all is the above setup probably my best option? I'm curious about the new Venice but I'm not sure if it's overkill for me since most of what I do is video encoding.

Thanks for any advice!

 

[ecvs85]

a p4 is faster at encoding for like 3.2Ghz versus amd 64 3200+, but you had to pay higher prices for the p4 system in which you can already buy a faster amd 64. The p4 is more responsive while doing encoding though. But amd 64 have tremendous overclocking room (nearly 50% for 3000+ winchester or newcastle if you're extremely lucky).

But if you can wait for a few months till the dual cores are out, since it'll have a big boost to video encoding performance.

 

[jackinbox]

OK. I wasn't sure if the dual-core would be much of an improvement for video encoding.

So I can go ahead and buy the Asus mobo and just wait until this summer to get the processor, right? The dual-core Athlon will work in this mobo if I'm understanding correctly?

 

[Xcobra]

remember that dual core cpus will have their high prices too...and yah dual core cpus will work on 939s mobo so yah it will work on your current one except that bios update will have to be done..

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

It also depends on the encoding program you are going to use. Some still run faster on the AMD64, (we still haven't seen the 64bit part), but for the most part the Intel's will definitely run faster. The venice E3 AMD64 core revision will have SSE3 which many encoding programs use so that is somthing to consider. The Prescott's already have SSE3. I don't know how much different the SSE3 makes on the Venice core for the AMD64 though. I haven seen some benchmarks that were less than impressive. I would wait for the Venise core to come out for the SSE3 extensions for future potential optimizations in whatever encoding program you use.

 

[jackinbox]

Michael,

Thanks for the info. Right now I'm mostly using Cinema Craft Encoder. It normally takes me about 8 hours to convert 2 hours of AVI to MPEG 2 with my P3.

It'll probably be a few weeks before I will be in the market for a processor anyway. I'm going to go ahead and buy the motherboard and see how this whole Venice/Dual-Core thing shakes out before I decide which processor.

Thanks to everyone for their advice!

I will also have to buy a video card, correct? Any recommendations?

 

[imported_michaelpatrick33]

Dualcore AMD 939's will not be out for a while. End of summer, early fall would be my guess but you never know. The advantage of the AMD solution is that one 939 motherboard will support the current AMD64 cores, the upcoming E3 and E4 cores (Venice and San Diego) as well as future dual cores. Pretty sweet. I would go to the website of the encoder and look at their optimizations etc. and think carefully. A dual core Intel 2.8 doesn't sound to shabby for that but AMD gives you a massive upgrade front now and in the future. Single core/dual core. I personally would go with the x800xl for mid range and 6600gt for lower end if you are getting pci-ex, my reccomendation at this point.