Hi, We're having trouble deciding beween an Asus PC-DL with two 3.06GHz Xeons + 2Gb of DDR333, or a P4 560 (3.6GHz) with a 925X mobo + 2Gb of DDR2 533 jawdrop: ) Which would crush the other in terms of procoder and adobe premere? Also, does anybody know how long until PCI express editing cards start to appear? Many thanks for any help, ch424
1) Go for the xeons, the speed between the cpu's is negligable, but the dual xeon system will be better for multithreading apps or doing two jobs simultaneously. 2) no idea sorry.
1) The P4 will be faster or close enough to not matter. The P4 3.6 performed almost as good as the Dual Xeon at 3.06. So I'd get the cheaper chip and spend more money on the capture card and hard drives. 2) I haven't heard. The cards are being demoed, so they exist in the lab. Release is probably waiting on more PCI-E in the field before wasting money on a product they can't sell. End of this year to Early next year maybe is my guess.
In multithreaded apps, or processing two videos at once, the xeon system would pwn the p4, but when only running one thread, the p4 will be marginally quicker.
Absoultely - cause Xeons share a standard P4 bus. However if you went for an Opteron setup you could just either use 1 cpu, both, whatever without effecting the other processor (well, very little) - the switching technique of hypertransport is far better than Xeon tech.
he would have to spend a lot more on the opteron system to get comperable performance in the video encoding areas though.
I think that depends on the application. For the most part, they swap the lead depending on the test. And even at that, the lead is pretty negligible. My advice is to hit render and let the computer do the render thing. NLE apps are pretty RAM intensive, so let them have all the RAM they can take. Look at porn on another computer. Nothing worser then almost finishing a file and accidently hitting escape or some other program decides it doesn't like sharing and bring the computer down.
Thanks for all the help people: first I better say that AMD64 doesn't even come into the equation here -- it's just for errr political reasons. Also, nobody has mentioned that it would be a 3.6GHz Prescott vs. two 3.06GHz Northwoods. I have got impressions from elsewhere that this does have a big effect in favour of the P4. Is that true for encoding does anyone know? Thanks for that I found out that Pinnicle are working with ATi and Intel... but we've decided to use matrox for cards for software reasons. Am I right in thinking that we might as well get the P4 for future-proofness? I know that the PC-DL + Xeons is as high as possible without replacing RAM, CPU, GFX and mobo in a future upgrade two/three years down the line, and I think the other people involved know that too. Does anyone know of a direct comparison on the web somewhere? I really need that to help decide. Anyway, thanks again for any more help... ch424
future proofedness doenst come into any equation at the moment. Any upgrade from todays kit will be a major one in 2-3 years. If you have the money, the dual xeon every time.
xeon is ~£100 cheaper for us. But now I'm wondering about the editing card ... will PCIe be the revolution it's meant to be for video editing -- the full duplex of PCIe would go a long way over current simplex PCI surely? Or is alll the rendering done on the CPU(s)? ch424
Most rendering is done via CPU - the editing cards merely take a little strain from the CPU, and help to render tacky transitions.
It would also highly depend on your NLE. Premier Pro (if that's what you decide to stick with) barely even has hardware support now. It's doubtful that they'll move to a PCI-X anytime soon when they don't even have their act together now. Other than that, most other NLEs are software-only, meaning that your CPU and RAM will be the largest determinants of how well your system churns out the render.
My DV500 doesn't interface with Premiere via an Adobe driver. Pinnacle basically has another program that plugs into Premiere to capture. By itself, Premiere won't capture with the card(poor explination). So any capture card would need to supply its own capture driver that Premiere likes. PCI Express capture cards are talking things like real time HD capture. Which seems pointless to me. My PCI card has some real-time render functions, of which I've never, ever used any one of them.
