Hey guys, I'm upgrading sometime in the new year and I was just wondering what would be the best processor for working with video (rendering and stuff)? I like the idea of Pentium 4, but apparently AMD64's are marginally better with video. Any ideas? Thanks!
Actually, iirc, P4's are better for rendering, compiling, sheer grunt work, than AMD64's...That is until programs begin to come out utilizing full 64-bit processing . But, I don't believe that to be in the near future. So, your best bet is to go with a P4
It depends on the application youre working with. In 3D applications, the AMD 64 is King. For video and audio encoding (mostly audio) The Pentium 4 wins by a small but respectable margin. As for video, things start becoming a bit application dependant. The AMD 64 for example works better in Adobe Premier than the Pentium 4. As far as value goes, Id say that AMD wins hands down, but if you are looking for high end video/audio, the Pentium 4 is the likely winner. If youre going to be dong gaming on this though, things just start getting complicated all over again.
when you consider advantage and future gain/compatibility.. amd takes it.. gaming, amd takes it, encoding.. P4 at the moment.. but like someone said.. will this still be the case when 64-bit takes over the market it depends on what kind of computer lifecycle you operate.. if its more than 2years.. go with A64.. still.. even if you get a new computer every 6 months.. still go with A64
From what I've heard P4's will do best with video encoding and related. A64's win in the gaming arena. As it was somewhat noted, A64's are quite likely to take over video work as well once we have a decent 64bit OS (ie better than Win64 Beta). I suppose you could try something in linux to do 64bit work but at the moment I'd stick with P4s. Definately try and get software that will take advantage of hyperthreading as well. Something worth thinking about is heat as well... those prescotts put out a ton of it especially if you have a high clocked one which you would want. It's not uncommon for aftermarket cooling to be necessary for stability. Just something else to keep in mind.
the main reason i think P4s are so damn good at video encoding is the scads of memory bandwidth they have, as well as HT.
I am glad someone has told the truth about pentium 4's when it comes to video. Everyone talking all this crap about 64 bit software applications that is for the most part is some time down the road and by that time dual core processors will be king. Its not like pentium doesn't have experience with 64bit processors. Besides I am sure Intel has many secrets up there sleeves. It is funny how all these AMD64 fanatics are all goo goo gaa gaa over a processor and chipset that is just now getting into ddr-2, is just now getting into pci-express(Nvidia n4 board is the only one that I know of now that supports it), has no support for SATA-II so far and better believe that AMD will be behind in DDR-3 when it comes out. Don't you think that with all these new improvements in the very near future that Intel will support and will employ first-AMD64 advantages will be no more? The only future advatange for AMD so far will be the dual graphic card support.
Good points, but for the moment these new developments arent really required to make a fast system. DDR2 latencies are still too slack, and almost all apps barely use the bandwidth offered by AGP 8x, let alone PCI-E 16x. And the nforce4 will offer SATA 3gb/s. And Via's K8T890 chipset is PCI-E... Anyways, if you'll be upgrading again within the next year: P4 as its generally the best for A/V encoding at the moment. But I'd say an A64 with an NF4Ultra board if you'll be keeping it for longer. Just my 2p (anyone noticed its a penny for your thoughts, but your 2p if you're offering. someone is making a profit somewhere!)
dual xeon with an asus pc-dl if you can afford it. This _seriously_ kicks ass (like 4x as fast as an athlon xp at the same clock). Investigate this -- it's not as expensive as you may think, especially if you overclock. However,future upgrades are unlikely. I don't think that 64-bit is gonna help, because video is 24 bit , and as novicebb says, it will be at least a year before there's any software for it: I mean, there isn't even a windows 64 os yet (I mean released, and not for itanics). Otherwise listen to everyone else @novicebb: Don't forget about those tasty dual core Pentium-Ms with ht that are in the works... ch424
The Pentium 4 is ahead in video encoding, but I dont know how well their DDR 2 brethren fair. AMD 64 is ahead in Adobe Premier by a small margin, so AMD has the win there. As soon as Adobe gets a 64 bit version of it, it is likely AMD will have the lead in it as well; however, it is not garunteed.
P4's are great for media anything. And 64-bit doesn't mean a damn thing, it's processor architecture and instruction sets that makes the difference. I suggest you go with the DFI 875P-T, that way, you can keep your AGP card, and your DDR400, but have the LGA775, which will give you upgradeability. Dollar for dollar, P4's are still way ahead of AMD's.
I have no idea what chipsets you're talking about, but from the sounds of it it is AMD ones. For a start Nforce 4 does support SATA II, VIA's K8T890 Pro also supports dual PCI-express, and AMD wont be supporting DDR2 until 2006 (unless rumurs about the next revision of the 90nm core are true and DDR2 and SSE3 support are implemented). It is correct that Intel is supporting DDR2 first, but at the moment is has no performance advantage and it comes at an increased price. Also, you state that the only advantage of AMD is the dual gfx card support, it may only be one feature, but it can boost performance in games by up to 80% - quite a margin I'm sure you'll agree and definately more worthwhile than ddr2 support! I'd agree that Intel is the way to go if you're only looking at video encoding performance, but if you want a machine thats good for most other tasks (and still performs adequately for video encoding) the best solution is to go down the AMD route. Obviously technology changes and there are likely to be new technologies released in the near future (ddr3, sata3, dual cores, dual gfx (nforce) for p4 etc) but you can't wait forever, there will always be something newer and better coming out. (disclaimer: I may be wrong on some of these points - it's late and I've had a fair bit to drink, but I'm sure some of it still makes sense )
Alright Roto, I can't remember the last time i paid 850 dollars for a top of the line P4. And don't even say a word about Extreme Editions because I don't even consider them to be P4's, or really any other processor. It's more profane and useless than anything else. Anyway, P4's, I'm sorry to say, but It's common knowledge that P4's, dollar for dollar, are the better deal. Even still, let's not make this a s**t-slinging contest like last time. I'm more than happy to see your OBJECTIVE opinion. P4's, all-around are better at multi-media, which is what they were designed for.
*wails* Let the fanboys fight At the end of the day either of the high end solutions will work really well and be pretty comparable unless you use a stopwatch to time the rendering. In my experience my old AthlonXP2400+ system was quite a lot slower than my new p4 3.0 800fsb hyperthreading system. My new system should be way superior but the difference takes the piss really, it basically poops all over my old AMD one. (And of course it should - its just giving me something to compare it to, I haven't used an A64 rig)
The Athlon 64 has more buffered memory bandwidth than a Pentium 4, thanks to the on-die memory controller. But if we're talking unbuffered then the Prescott core comes up trumps. However, I'd still opt for a Pentium 4 if I was making an a/v encoding/decoding rig.
Alright Padre Jones, if youre looking for my objective opinion, here it is; Athlon 64 offers much more performance in 3D gaming applications and other such things than the Pentium 4 does by far. Prescott only maintains leads in Video and Audio encoding, thanks to their ludicrously long branch prediction pipeline; however, this pipe is also hurting their performance in things where actions are only repeated about five times, and it usually takes a couple of these actions before its in the branch predictor accurately, but by then its gone anyway. As bigz said, the Athlon 64 has more buffered memory bandwidth than the Pentium 4, but only in multimedia applications does this become really useful. And no, I was not referring to P4 EE vs FX series, as comparing re-badged Xeons with a far better CPU for everything else is not a fair comparison. And now, for one of my basis for comparison. Tom's recently ran a ludicrous benchmark with every CPU of the last five years, using otherwise identical configurations whenever possible. The closest substitute was used whenever identical parts werent available. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_001.png Quake 3 arena; one of the few games that takes advantage of the megabytes of L3 cache offered in Gallatin, but since you dont consider them P4s (And more like Xeons, which I completely agree with) Lets look at the comperable AMD and Intel CPUs. The 3800+ and 3.8GHz Prescott Have a fairly big gap between them. Interestingly, the 3700+ is only about 15 FPS slower whereas the 3800+ is slower by almost 50 frames; a bit of a drop in the bucket and not a truly visible increase due to the limit on monitors. Lets go to games where we can actually see differences; Wolfenstein Enemy Territory and Doom 3. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_003.png In Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, the ratings and game results appear to coordinate rather well with each other, with the AMD processors pulling a slight lead in this game. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_022.png In Doom 3, AMD's high end maintains a marked lead over Intel's greatest; even the markedly slower 3400+ and 3500+ processors are not far behind from Intel's fastest 3.8 Ghz Prescott. Now that we see what happened in Open GL, lets take a look to see what happens in Direct X http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_004.png In Unreal Tournament 2004, AMD has a huge lead over Intel. The 3.8 Ghz Prescott places between the 3000+ and 3200+ here, which is rather absurd, wouldnt you say? http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_021.png In Far Cry, we can say the same things mostly, again. The 3.8 Ghz Pentium 4 Prescott places right between the Newcastle and Clawhammer 3200+ Athlons. The 3200+ costs $193 for the 754 variant and $240 for the 939 variant right now on newegg. The 3.8 Ghz Pentium 4 Prescott costs $795 at Newegg as well. 3Dmark03 and 05; Synthetic benchmarks mean nothing for real world performance, and as such I wont go into them. However, the results are below. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_023.png http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_024.png http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_025.png http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_026.png VIDEO http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_015.png In competing products, we have some interesting results. The 3800+, designed to compete with the Pentium 4 3.8 Ghz Prescott, has a gap of 19 seconds in performance. AMD's FX-55 has a performance gap of eight seconds. Intel has had, traditionally, strong performance in video and audio. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_016.png Fairly similar results to those above, where AMD is behind Intel by a fairly significant degree. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_017.png More of the same. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_018.png These results are much more intriguing. 3D studio Max was code optimized for the Pentium 4 platform. However, the 3D performance of AMD Athlon 64 keeps them near Intel's heels. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_019.png In Windows Media Player 9, we again see Intel leading by a fair margin in video encoding capabilities. http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_005.png Again, Intel is winning in the benchmarks for video. Overall, Intel is the obvious victor in pure video encoding, as the big suite of benchmarks above shows. AUDIO http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_020.png These results are a bit surprising. The 3400+ is tied with the 4000+ and FX-53. The Pentium 4s are ahead of these CPUs, but the FX-55 is king. APPLICATION http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/chart_012.png In WinRAR compression, the Athlon 64 processors are the clear cut winner over all Intel CPUs. Yes. In video, the Pentium 4 is the clearcut winner. However, in everything else, AMD wins by a longshot. Now, are you done falsely claiming the superiority of an inferior product?
You've got slightly confused by what I said The Pentium 4, typically, has less buffered memory bandwidth than an Athlon 64, but has greater unbuffered memory bandwidth. The "standard" speed for DDR2 to be run at on an LGA775 Pentium 4-based system is DDR2-533, compared to AMD's default DDR-400 on all of their chipsets. AMD have the advantages of low latency from both the onboard memory controller and the low-latency modules that can be used in a typical AMD setup. Fortunately for Intel, OCZ have developed some 3.0-2-2 DDR2 modules that deliver fantastic performance at DDR2-533, which should bring some interesting capabilities to DDR2 memory. They're still going to be a long way behind in games, as they can be latency and FPU dependent where the CPU/chipset is the limitation rather than the video card. But in MultiMedia, it should enable them to increase the unbuffered memory bandwidth, thanks to the reduction in latency, which should further improve multimedia performance. Video encoding for one is very bandwidth and pipeline dependent - more reliant on unbuffered bandwidth than buffered bandwidth.
