Is RAMBUS worth it? Thinking of switching from AMD to INTEL. Please advise

[asifanwar]

Hello all.

Here is my current setup:

Dual AMD Athlon 1600XP (came bridged so function as MPs)
Tyan Tiger S2460 mobo (BIOS 1.04)
2x256Mb Crucial Reg DDR PC2100
2x40Gb Maxtor ATA133 7200rpm drives as RAID0
LiteOn 163D DVDROM & Pioneer A03 DVD-R
WinXP Pro w/SP1
SiSandra CPU ALU=7671, FPU=3864


Rip, DVD2AVI, AVIsynth2.06, CCE2.50 @ 3000-5000k
(no resizing or anything, cos using original menus)
Speed: 1.90-1.95 x realtime


I am considering getting a SINGLE Pentium4 Northwood 533MHz 2.53GHz with an ASUS P4T533 and using PC1066 RAMBUS RAM (RIMM4200) and overclocking to maybe 2.8GHz or so?

My question is this: if my processor power on the new system is about SiSandra 6500ish (I think), will I still be encoding faster cos of the huge increase in memory bandwidth from the RAMBUS?

ie is the switch worth it?

I appreciate all helpful comments. Many thanks!

PS: I did build a dual AthlonXP2000 (unlocked) on an Iwill MPX2 and overclocked to dual 2200MP setup. SiSandra CPU score 10800!
But the encode speed went from 1.9x to 2.1x which makes me wonder if the PC2100DDR on the MPX chipset is the bottleneck here.....

[gnutellafan]

I dont think so, but that is my opinion. P4 with rambus is faster but not much. If you really want to increase your speeds I would suggest more ram (a gig or 2) and/or two raid arrays to transfer video between when working with it. So I think your money would be better spent on more ram and another raid setup (1 4 drive w/ raid 0 and the other 4 drives with 0+1, go for the WD cavier drives with the 8mb buffer, really makes a difference for video)

[Chu]

>> I am considering getting a SINGLE Pentium4 Northwood 533MHz 2.53GHz with an ASUS P4T533 and using PC1066 RAMBUS RAM (RIMM4200) and overclocking to maybe 2.8GHz or so? <<

Considering the price of 512 megs of PC1066 right now ($378) vs. a proformance quality PC2100 ($130) or good quality PC2700 stick ($169), if you had the extra money it is probably better spent elsewhere, water cooling and overclocking a few extra MHZ or going RAID0 are probably more effective, but since we don't know the exact details of this rig, it is hard to say.

Also, how expirenced are you at overclocking? Any of the 133mhz based chips have *VERY* low ceilings, not to mention require very high quality memory. You are probably far better off buying a "certified" 100mhz overclocker over in the anandtech or hardocp forums. These are basically 100mhz P4's that are gaurenteed to hit 133 and beyond, and are MUCH more cost effective. Also, the new c0 stepping on P4's give you a huge boost. I am not sure if all (or any) 2.5's (100 and 133fsb versions) use them, but if you got the money to go high end, you really want one of these.

One final note, If you are willing to shell out the big bucks for that CPU and RAM combo, I really hope you found some funds to set aside for a nice little raid0 setup. It makes a world of difference for encoding machines. A dedicated raid0 for windows also makes your system feal 10x faster . . .

-Chu

[alexnoe]

@gnutellafan:

The thing with 2 raid arrays won't work as expected. 4 WD JB drives would not work at full speed, due to the 133 MB/s limit of the PCI bus.

i850 Chipset has a burst-transfer bug and allows only 90 MB/s, so that 2 of these WD JB discs would be able to completely occupy the PCI bus. I don't know if the bug has been fixed in newer chipsets for PC1066.

If you go for a Pentium 4, then this should not be for performance, but for not having VIA bugs in your system, because the performance of a Pentium 4 won't be much faster than an Athlon, unless you are rich or you use software which has been optimized for Pentium 4. Note that "optimizing" does not mean "use silly compilers that claim to be able to do this", but that it really means doing that manually, in writing assembler code. Since not many people can do this, and since it takes lots of time, mostly freeware and really expensive software could be Pentium 4 optimized.

[asifanwar]

Well folks! I'm back! It took rather a long time to get everything up and ship-shape. Sorry for the delay.
I now have a Giga-byte 8IHXP mobo, a 2.4B P4 (533bus), 512Mb PC1066 RDRAM (samsung), ATA133 RAID0 (which I had on the old system anyway).

I have been playing around with a lot of bus speeds and VCores, over-RIMM voltages etc. It's quite a balancing act between heat, CPU speed, stability and real-world encoding speed. The system DID go to FSB 154, giving a CPU speed of 2.77GHz. It was KIND of stable and but did act a bit funny and did give the odd BSOD (for which I have a ZERO-tolerance!). THe CPU got really quite hot and so I started dropping back. It was stable at 150FSB, but I actually dropped it down to 148 now. The CPU is cooler and the encoding speed is barely lower.

I ripped a 1Gb DVD (Apollo13), and frameserved via DVD2AVI. Used AVIsynth2.06 and MPEG2DEC2 with no other parameters. Dropped into CCE2.66 and encoded using CBR@2000 (just for testing purposes).

2.77 GHz = 2.59 xRT
2.70 GHz = 2.53 xRT
2.66 GHz = 2.51 xRT

So I settled on an FSB of 148 = CPU 2.664GHz and a real-world encode speed of 2.51xRT (I had previously gotten 1.8-1.9). I think the RAMBUS has made a big differece. My SiSandra CPU score is only 5108, whereas my dual Athlon1600XP was about 7700. In addition, I had made an Iwill MPX2 with dual Athlon2000s o/c to dual 2200s which had a CPU score of 10800! but it could only encode at 2.1x with PC2100DDR.
So I think the 533 bus (now 592) along with the PC1066 RDRAM (now PC1184 RDRAM) is making a significant difference here even with lower number crunching power.

Like most things, this is to some degree a personal preference, but I am happy with the new system. I will likely move on next summer to the dual AMD/new DDR offering at the time, but I think the P4 with RDRAM is the way to go (for me) for the time being. Thanks to all of you for a lively discussion. I hope that this has added to the knowledge pool.
Kind regards.

[alexnoe]

Well, I don't know of RAMBUS really made a difference. On one side, it is faster, on the other side, the maximum FSB will be limited not by CPU core, but my what other components tolerate.
For DDR-RAM, there is the Asus P4B533-E, which can set PCI clock asynchronously to FSB, and therefore allows higher CPU clock speeds, which might compensate for the slower memory.

My 2400 runs at 18x161 = 2900, with a PCI clock of exactly 33.3 MHz :)

[asifanwar]

I have already tried the ASUS board and it was encoding at about 2.0x just like the other DDRs (this was a 2.26 @ about 2.75ish). My CPU processing power is lower than the other two machines I mentioned but I encode MUCH faster. The other components are the same, so to my mind it's the RAMBUS. My SiSandra memory score has gone from about 1600 to 4100.

[alexnoe]

The Sandra memory score is of course much higher.

I remember an old benchmark, where PC800 RD-RAM showed about 10% better performance than DDR-266 (with i845) for video encoding.

I'm not sure where the big difference you found comes from. It's far too much to be cause by DDR vs RD only :confused:

[asifanwar]

my memory is almost PC-1200 RAMBUS and I have about a 35% speed increase. Does that not fit?