A Conroe Upgrade Thread

[Dayvon]

So my newegg-ordered parts will be delivered tomorrow, and I will be building a new Core2Duo system. The Core2Duo part of the upgrade only cost me $280 by buying this ECS DDR400 LGA775 PCI-E Core2Duo motherboard (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813135023) and this E6400 Conroe (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819115004).

I upgraded from an Intel P4 Prescott 3.0Ghz CPU w/ HT. So the difference should be dramatic. Here is a link (http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html?modelx=33&model1=433&model2=462&chart=166) to a 3.0Ghz P4 D 530 that is %90 slower than an E6400 while running a single threaded application. That's the kind of performance increase I am looking for, and this should be increased even more considering I now have 2 cores that can encode instead of one processor.

I want to show you all my build, and how much this improves my encoding times. I'm expecting at the least to move from 8fps 2nd-pass speed to 24fps 2nd-pass speed with x264. 8x2x2 is 32, so I would hope to at least get 24fps, but near 30fps would be good too. Also, I plan to overclock my Conroe in time, and I will report the results of that eventually as well.

I would also like to open this thread up to any other Conroe x264 encoders. Let's see what kind of results we are getting, and see each others computers.

Here's to new hardware :D!!!

[Inventive Software]

I'm after a motherboard, processor, RAM and case with PSU that supports the Core 2 Duo E6300 and 1 GB RAM. All preferably for less than £300 (ideally around £250). So far, I got £290 from dabs.com, but if anybody can find it cheaper, I'm all ears. :D

And Davyon: Expect around 20 fps for 2nd pass encoding, cause multithreading's not totally 1+1=2, more like 1+1=1.8. :D

[mitsubishi]

Well I got my E6300 and a board for about £145 I think, I got the Asrock Dual-Vista (http://www.asrock.com/product/775Dual-VSTA.htm) board so I can use my AGP 6800GT and some DDR that I already had, then I can wait for RAM prices to become sane again and wait for DX10.

I'm not getting anywhere near 25fps though :( although my source is 20mbps 1440x1080i anamorphic MBAFF which can only just decode at that speed...

I posted some results here: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=900194#post900194
The clip is 51 seconds, ranges from "1p-Maxspeed @ 13.43 fps" to "HQ-Insane @ 1.29 / 1.35 fps"

Going to do some more testing later now I'm getting the hang of iit.

[Sharktooth]

it's HD... it takes more cpu cycles in both decoding and encoding...

[mitsubishi]

it's HD... it takes more cpu cycles in both decoding and encoding...
Indeed, that's why I gave details. I'm going to do some SD testing later also, although for SD I'm using xvid.

[Inventive Software]

@mitsubishi: Where did ya get the E6300+mobo combo from? £145 isn't bad, but was the processor OEM? (OEM in this case I believe requires a fan and heatsink.)

[mitsubishi]

I got the CPU off eBay, but the guy who was selling them doesn't have any more, they were £110, not £105 as I thought, but were retail, I wanted the warranty as I don't want to OC just yet. The OEM ones do come with a HSF though, I remember reading that the HSs on the OEM models were not flat and didn't sit too great. Will be getting a better HSF eventually.

The board I got from here: http://www.tekheads.co.uk/s/product?product=605872
I think they can be got cheaper, but I needed somewhere where I could buy without a credit card. They are great boards though, the only caveats are the low PCI-e speed (x4 starts to become a bottleneck with high end cards in some games) and the weakish Over Clocking abilities.

[Romario]

Conroe optimized x264 build would be awesome.

Sharktooth!!!

[Sharktooth]

There's almost nothing i can do to make x264 faster on c2d.
99.9% of the x264 optimizations are hard-coded in ASM.

[Inventive Software]

(OT Query) Do any of the SSE4 extensions look like they can be used in x264? I have no idea whether they're suitable....:confused:

[foxyshadis]

SSSE3; the real SSE4 isn't coming until 2008. (I guess Intel was embarassed by how useless the original SSE3 was.) There was a thread a while back where Manao and akupenguin discussed a few of the instructions that might help: http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=113719

[Dayvon]

Well, my preliminary tests are nowhere near my goals... :( Getting about 14fps, up from 7-8fps. I don't quite understand how 2 cores (that are 2x faster) still crawl in x264. I'm gonna do some more testing double checking the threading and amounts of threads, etc. Will report back in full later.

[Sharktooth]

it's normal... you cant get linear scaling...

[Dayvon]

it's normal... you cant get linear scaling...

I totally understand that, but upgrading to 2 cores vs. 1 AND the conroe itself being a faster processor by 2x a P4 3.0ghz tells me something doesn't seem right. I should at least expect to see 2x the performance because of these combined factors. I guess in a way, it kind of is 2x because i would run 7-8fps before and now I'm running mid 14s. I was hoping for a bit more I guess.

BTW, Conroes have HT or no? Basically, should I run x264 on 2 threads or 4 to maximize render speed?

[foxyshadis]

2, no HT. What's your cpu utilization? And do you run the multithreaded avisynth, along with the special commands to engage its multithreading?

[Blue_MiSfit]

Right-o. If you CPU utilization isn't very high, that means that AviSynth isn't feeding x264 fast enough. In this case, you should definitely try MT AviSynth. It literally turned my MPEG-2 encodes from 50 to 100 fps. But MPEG-2 isn't AVC. Chances are your system is already using its CPU resources effectively.

Still, you might see a boost by trying MT Avisynth.

~MiSfit

[Sharktooth]

CPU utilization isnt always directly related to encoding speed.
However i'd try MT Avisynth...