Video Encoding and newer Intel Quads

[Mango1970]

So I took my movie "An Unfinished Life" and ripped it to my hardrive on both of my computers. One is a Q9550 on a P35 mobo with 8 GB of RAM running 800mhz 5-5-5-12 on Vista 64 and then took the same movie and ripped to my other comp a Q6600 with 4 GB of ram 800 Mhz 5-5-5-12 on Vista 32 on a P45 mobo.

I used Handbrake to encode to MKV using MPEG 4 FFMPEG. Exact same settings... everything is the same -- same type of SATA HD. The Q9550 is running at 3.4 Ghz and the Q6600 is at 3 Ghz only 400mhz difference.

My question is how in God's name am I getting 460 fps+ average on the Q9550 vs the 290 FpS on the Q6600?? That is a very large bump. I never thought the Q95550 was that much better even with the bit of difference on the OC. I do a lot of encoding and I am very impressed with this. Is this CPU related or more to do with the 8GB and vista 64?

 

[videogames101]

Take out 4 gigs and find out.

 

[Loreena]

Does the encoder use SSE4? I saw similar gains going from a kentsfield to a yorkdale.

 

[Duvie]

There is mention of a thing called cache64 with handbrake...Check to see if it says that when ran on the vista32 system...my guess is the penryn is 5-10% faster clock for clock and then you have a 13% advantage with clockspeed and cache speed with the penryn, so the rest may be somehow related to software...

I dont think the ram is going to do much except in the editing process and not encoding. I barely see a big hit on my encoding with 2gb of ram...

 

[nyker96]

I think it's the SSE4 effect my x264 encoding time has gone down about 25% since switching from E2xxx to E7xxx with SSE4. I really do think the SSE4 helped quite a bit. granted x264 is optimized already so don't benefit from SSE4, on softwares that isn't optimized, turning on SSE4 might be night and day.

 

[soccerballtux]

SSE4.1 and cache and architectural improvements, and especially clock speed.

 

[pectin]

Based on a web site on x264 encoding... I downloaded an excel spreadsheet of q6600, q9550 and several others.. it seems the Q6600 and Q9550 x264 encoding difference is very little or even not much of a performance difference if both are oc identically. Let me know as I am still thinking if I should get the q9550 or the q6600.... as I do not want to spend too much knowing someday I might get the next gen of the iCore 7 like the 920s++ to 990 who knows...

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=442

BTW I also checked on several other forums like AVS forums, videoshelp.com and several other ocforums sites... and also found the difference is small...in some ways depending on what you are doing. Maybe doing MKV is different or even the container object of Xvid is diff than divx. I use to do guardian and VD avisynth but now use just xvid4psp to do PS3, itouch, PSP and Xbox 360 encoding .... I do not encode too high quality just 720 and 1280s.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: videogames101
Take out 4 gigs and find out.

Yeah, also is there a difference in the hard-drives. You are going to be somewhat IO impacted.

I think the question to ask here is "what is holding back my Q6600 rig" and not so much focus on the CPU being the difference.

Your ram, OS, or harddrive are likely playing a bigger role here in holding back the Q6600 computer afterall relative to the Q9550 system.

 

[pectin]

Seriously anyone if the q6600 and q9550 are similar then it makes all the sense to get the q6600 but then I am not sure. I got the newegg 7k1000 and they are really fast.... relatively speaking compared to my Raptor drives in the past.... and hopefully it will be quick for encoding.

 

[Hulk]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: videogames101
Take out 4 gigs and find out.

Yeah, also is there a difference in the hard-drives. You are going to be somewhat IO impacted.

I think the question to ask here is "what is holding back my Q6600 rig" and not so much focus on the CPU being the difference.

Your ram, OS, or harddrive are likely playing a bigger role here in holding back the Q6600 computer afterall relative to the Q9550 system.

No your OS, hard drive, or RAM are NOT impacting your video encoding performance. It about 99% CPU.

There is no way your hard drive can't read the source file fast enough as even the most demanding Blu-Ray peaks at about 6MB/sec. And there is even less chance that writing the encoded file would cause a back-up as that's usually 2 or 3MB/sec assuming 25Mbps peak, which is way higher than most people encode.

RAM is only an issue if your system is RAM starved and you have tons of windows open.

It's all CPU baby when it comes to video encoding. The 9550 has instructions that his encoder is tapping into.

I used to run a video benchmarking website so I'm very sure about this.

- Mark

 

[imported_D3v]

Hard drives + CPU revision + OS(maybe). The 4GB is n/a. If you tested both with a single hard disk, say, a 250GB or something, for the source and destination, they would bench equal. I didn't dig on the details but I believe both of your boars should have sata @ 3Gbps (300MB/s max). My bet says you have slower drives in the box with the q6600.

Not that you will, but if you put two raid0 arrays with fast drives in each box, one for the source and one for the destination on separate controllers (or one good one); the numbers would likely be much closer, separated by the clock+ cpu revision differences.

It's all a guess until you make things even across both systems. Same OS, Same drives in raid array, same raid.. 0? 0+1? 5? etc

(edit: probably 1/3 disk related; the rest is a given with the cpu & clock increase)

 

[Duvie]

Originally posted by: Hulk

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: videogames101
Take out 4 gigs and find out.

Yeah, also is there a difference in the hard-drives. You are going to be somewhat IO impacted.

I think the question to ask here is "what is holding back my Q6600 rig" and not so much focus on the CPU being the difference.

Your ram, OS, or harddrive are likely playing a bigger role here in holding back the Q6600 computer afterall relative to the Q9550 system.

No your OS, hard drive, or RAM are NOT impacting your video encoding performance. It about 99% CPU.

There is no way your hard drive can't read the source file fast enough as even the most demanding Blu-Ray peaks at about 6MB/sec. And there is even less chance that writing the encoded file would cause a back-up as that's usually 2 or 3MB/sec assuming 25Mbps peak, which is way higher than most people encode.

RAM is only an issue if your system is RAM starved and you have tons of windows open.

It's all CPU baby when it comes to video encoding. The 9550 has instructions that his encoder is tapping into.

I used to run a video benchmarking website so I'm very sure about this.

- Mark

What about the fact one is running vista32 and the other is running vista64....are there any 64bit capabilities to encoding video?