System upgrade suggestions please

[Tony Lenton]

Hi folks, I'm new here so please be gentle with me.

I'm wondering if an upgrade to my current system will increase the rendering perfomance time within MSP8. Currently I have a rendering time ratio of 1 to 2, ie for each minute of video it takes 2 minutes to render to an mpg file.

(This is based on a 10 minute slide show consisting of about 90 photos with cross fades between them. They all have a basic 2D moving path to size the photos so that they display correcly on my TV, 3 are panoramas [each about 5 photos wide] which have a 2D moving path to pan across them, and 4 others have a 2D moving path which starts the photo off zoomed in and then zooms out to the full photo. [I've found that the 2D moving path takes less time to render and gives a better picture than the pan and zoom filter]).

My current system is as follows

Motherboard VIA P4X266

Processor Intel P4 2.00GHz

Memory 1Gb (2 x 256 + 1 x 512) PC2100 DDR266

Video NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 128Mb

Sound Soundblaster Live

Hard drives 3 x 120Gb

Drive 0
Partition 1 NTFS WinXP SP2 main system
Partition 2 FAT32 reserved for games

Drive 1
Partition 1 Size about 15Gb NTFS WinXP SP2 with only MSP8 (no updates), Paintshop Pro and Winzip installed, as well as necessary drivers.
Partition 2 Size about 90Gb NTFS with my source files consisting of photos and video (captures go here as well).

Drive 2
Partition 1 FAT32 Win98 with all my older programs.
Partition 2 Size about 70Gb NTFS used as my video output drive.
Partition 3 NTFS used for backing up My Documents and other data files.

I've got a boot manager on drive 0 which gives me the option on bootup to select either WinXp or Win98, and the WinXP on Drive 0 is set as dual boot so I get the option of booting to the MSP system.

So my question is will either of the following options increase my rendering performance.

Option 1
Spend £60 on a memory stick of 1Gb DDR266 to replace one of the 256Mb sticks in my current system thereby giving me 1.75Gb.

Option 2
Upgrade the following at a cost of £260
Replace my motherboard, processor with a Pentium 4 3.00GHz and memory with stick of 1Gb DDR400.

I'm sure that there are a few techies out there that can give an idea.

Thanks..................Tony

[sjj1805]

Plenty of hints and tips here to speed things up

http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=9611

Regards
Steve J

[Devil]

In practice, I don't think you will notice much difference either way. I suggest that it may be a better idea to have three identical memory sticks than to have different types, say 3 x 512 Mb (assuming your m/b has 3 slots). I have no scientific reason for saying this, call it intuitive.

[Terry Stetler]

And my A #1 suggestion;

Ditch the VIA chipset. They've had a problem with PCI to host memory latency going back to the MVP3 days, but VIA never seemed to fix it. Software patches galore to tweak the settings, but no firmware fix that will get them to work as they should when high bandwidths are needed (realtime playback etc).

This affects not only PCI cards (audio cards and video capture cards) but HDD and USB performance.

Uppance: use mainboards with the Intel, SiS, NVIDIA or ATI chipsets...whatever just not VIA, especially in editing systems.