cpu (+rest) for video editting)

hello,

which cpu would you suggest for video editting (and converting to mpeg). right now i am using a PIII 450 MHz and a newer system with a PIII 1000 MHz. but the gain in speed is only 13%.

what else would you suggest for the system??

thanks in advance.

Matthieu Mosch

<i>Men forget, but never forgive. Women forgive, but will never forget.<i>

Interesting balance of decisions here.

Flat out the P4 Northwood will outrun an Athlon on video transcoding.

If your software (eg TMPGEnc) supports SMP (it does) then a dual rig will be optimal, having a dual setup for transcoding is usually very efficient.

The AthlonXP/MPs have SSE optimisation and so are effective at doing the work. They also ring in much cheaper for a dual setup that an equivalent P4 Xeon system.

If you are not cash strapped and want the absolute fastest system get a dual P4 Xeon rig on i860 mobo.

If you want a cheaper dual system then go dual Athlon, either Tyan MP or ASUS/Tyan MPX...

If you want the fastest 'cheap' option, get an Intel P4 Northwood on a DDR platform and overclock it. Many find the 1.6A runs very stable and cool at 2.4G and will be a vast improvement over your PIII.

I would not currently recommend a single athlon as the optimal single cpu system if you are prepared to buy a cheaper P4 Northwood and overclock it.


For the rest of the system - what data volumes are you working with? What do you capture as etc.? Do you have a capture card, or are you taking raw DV-AVI from 1394?

For all types of capture a 5400rpm drive is fine, the most you can capture at is 3-4MBs which is the rate of DV-AVI. Make sure you have enough RAM to not be paging all the time. I'd suggest 512Mb since it is relatively cheap.

Use WindowsXP or 2000, not ME/98. ME/98 cannot capture files over 2 or 4GB, cannot remember which, but it is a limitation.

A good video card is recommended - people always told me that ATI video playback was higher quality than nVidia, and it seems to be generally true, however I'd still stick with nVidia myself.

What is your final medium? I burn DVDs - but that is a crap shoot right now with the arguements between DVD-RW and DVD+RW. From disc prices and lack of DVD+R I'm betting DVD-RW will win.

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