Advice for upgrading processor

[mspears]

I'm currently running an Asrock 775XFIRE mb, Intel P4 2.8ghz no HT, BFG PCI-E Nvidia GeForce 7300 GS OC 256mb video card, 2 gigs of DDR2 533 RAM and boot drive is 80gb Seagate SATAII 3.0gbs plus other dedicated capture drives. My motherboard will take any of the newer processors including dual core. I'm currently using MSP6.5 but will upgrade to version 8 when I install my new processor. I assume that MSP 8 will run on a dual core. Is that correct? Also, what's the best choice out of the following? All are Intel P4's. Single core 3.2 or 3.4 ghz. Dual core 3.0 or 3.2 ghz?

[Devil]

I would go for either of the dual-cores. I don't think you would see much difference between them. I have no experience of dual cores, but I do have of HT. The latter gives an improvement of ~10-15% in rendering/encoding speeds. I would imagine dual-core will do somewhat better, but I doubt whether it would exceed 30% at the outside, judging from the results obtained with dual processors. Even a single core without HT does not use all its horsepower when rendering, at least all the time.

[tyamada]

If you are going to upgrade your processor you should consider the new 65 nm chips (9xx chips). They run cooler and are faster than their predecessors (Prescott 8xx chips).

Link to CPU chart:
http://www.intel.com/products/processor ... iew_pd.htm

I was checking on the prices for the new CPUs and it seems the 9xx series chips are a lot less money then the 8xx chips.
http://www.zipzoomfly.com/jsp/ProductLi ... ode=010427

Hyper thread/dual processor will give you a performance boost depends on entire system, you will be able to tell the difference.

[troppo]

I have just been looking into this myself. A few aspects of video encoding are dependant on processor speed and dual cores do not make it any faster, but some software is written to take better advantage of dual cores and/or hyperthreading and in this you will see much better results. I opted for a single core 3.4 Ghz machine because at the time the dual cores were quite a bit slower and a lot more expensive. Now the new 65nm process cores are out (9xx) I am starting to look again. check out these video encoding specs at http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/01/05/ ... page8.html

Happy tinkering!

[sjj1805]

Ive looked at your system specs and note you have 3 x USB Hard drives.
If your looking for speed replace them with internal drives.
If you also want portability use Hard Drive Carriers.
Article here:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/pubs/sspji/sspji-01.html

A computer will work at the speed of the slowest item.

[mspears]

I would go for either of the dual-cores. I don't think you would see much difference between them. I have no experience of dual cores, but I do have of HT. The latter gives an improvement of ~10-15% in rendering/encoding speeds. I would imagine dual-core will do somewhat better, but I doubt whether it would exceed 30% at the outside, judging from the results obtained with dual processors. Even a single core without HT does not use all its horsepower when rendering, at least all the time.

Thanks Devil for your response. I find it very interesting. I admit that I really no nothing of how MSP runs under the hood. I'm unsure as to why MSP would utilize HT or dual core processors to any great degree during the course of editing a video or encoding. I'm usually just doing one or the other, not multitasking. Can someone tell me how a dual core would be faster in this circumstance. I can see it being beneficial if I wanted to encode a project, then author a different completed project at the same time. Am I thinking right here, or do I just need some sleep?

[Devil]

Firstly, it must be said that HT, dualies or dual core take advantage of the extra horse power only if the software is written to allow it to do so. MSP is thus written. What it means is that, when doing complex operations with dualies/DC, you have sharing of the work between the two simultaneously. With HT, it is similar, except that the interface between the CPU/caches and RAM is shared.

Put it this way. An ordinary CPU is like a man digging a ditch. Dualies/DC is like two men digging the same ditch, occasionally getting in each other's way. HT is like two men digging the same ditch but sharing the same shovel: as one gets out of breath, the other takes over.

[Gorf]

...A computer will work at the speed of the slowest item.

That explaons so much.

Timt to get a new user.