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View Full Version : Can P4 2.4cg with HT do my work?


clearwind
13th July 2003, 17:25
I am about to upgrade my pc next month or so.
What I am using now is Athlon 1600+, 256mb ddr266, wd 80 gb hard drive, upmost tv plus and creative live value.

OS is Winodws XP Pro.
TV program is VirtualVCR.

I always try to capture TV program into XVID and MP3 format.
My machine can barely record XVID with CQ 80%, but audio encoding should be PCM. Once I set it to MP3, sync problem occurs.

I think it's because my CPU couldn't handle the tasks.
I might upgrade my system to p4 with HT. But I would really like to know if HT can really do good jobs with capturing videos?
If HT can really provides two virtual CPUs (should be worse than really dual cpu system anyway), can it handle encoding in divx and mp3 at the same time?

And does HT really help you to excute multiple tasks at the same time as well?

Many questions and big thanks to those who are willing to help.

:)

Wam7
15th July 2003, 09:41
HT is slightly overhyped but systems do generally multitask better with it enabled. The 200FSB gives greater improvement in system speed than HT. You didn't say what resoltuion you were trying to capture at but I suspect that 2.4C will be able to capture and encode to mp3 with out frame drops/ sync problmes. P4 encode mp3's a lot faster than AMD chips. When it comes to maths processing, which comes more into play when using filters, AthlonXP's are very good.

Btw, P4 2.4C's are very good overlcockers without much need for voltage increases or changing the stock HSF. I recommend you put the ABit IS7 on your shortlist for motherboards.

wuzel
15th July 2003, 23:59
better go on capturing sound in pcm. p4 2,4 system is not powerful enough to do real time capture (at a reasonable resolution)with sound directly captured in mp3. (i use such a system -no ht - for real-time capture with pcm audio, then i do sound conversion to ogg-vorbis)

i do not intend to start some kind of meaningless discussion/flamewar about the best sound/video techniques since everybody has his specific needs and therefore has to decide for himself.
imo vorbis offers the best sound quality at reasonable bandwith needs.
so i suggest just to try it out for yourself.

with a 2 hour-movie you will probably lose about 20 minutes of time for offline audio compression but you will be able to use the spare cpu power for something more reasonable than mp3 compression on the fly.

the saved bandwith could be used to improve mpeg4 video quality for example - if you donīt have the time to capture loslessly.

as i said above, imho.