Basic Q on upgrade of PC

[KuroNeko]

I would like your opinions on following issues, regarding updating a PC to increase encode times (CCE MPEG2 and x264)

- current CPU, Intel Core 2 Duo. The latest generation of Intel C2D processors increase speed mainly by a larger L2 cache. Does this help with CCE and x264, or do these rely more on clockspeed?

- OS is XP, main RAM 2GB DDR2 667. Should RAM speed be increased, or rather size be upped to 4GB?

With the used OS being XP, should the user be concerned running as a user rather than admin, or has this no influence on performance whatsoever?

Thanks!
Neko

[fibbingbear]

I don't have much experience with trying x264 under different processors and systems, so I'll answer the stuff as best as I can...

1.) Larger cache: I don't know if this will help. I'd guess it would, but it'll really rely on 1.) if you are having a lot of cache misses already, and 2.) if those cache misses can be solved with a larger cache (it may be that x264 requires such a large working set of data, that even a moderately larger cache will still get many misses... somehow I doubt this). I'm sure someone else here will be able to give a definitive answer. I'd imagine clock speed is more important.

2.) More/faster RAM: I think faster RAM would probably give more benefit, but again, not confident of my answer. I don't think x264 takes up that much RAM to run (at least on my 1 gigabyte system, I never had a problem with running out of memory), so I doubt increasing the size will matter.

3.) Being a user vs. admin should have almost no effect on run-speed.

[KuroNeko]

Thanks very much for your input. I hope others will chime in as well!

Neko

[fazzaz31]

Hey there, KuroNeko, have you stepped into the cowflop!

I'm no expert, but I play one on TV, and the last script I read said to ask, what's your Intel chip? E4500, E6300, E6800, what?

What make and model is your motherboard? Are you ready to toss the RAM and buy something more appropriate? There's not that much difference in performance between 2 and 4 GB RAM, as it's the chipset and bus speed doing the work. That's Gigabytes of RAM we're talking about here, nearly half a feature DVD.

Generally, to really make her rip you need to overclock an inexpensive chipset, when your gain can be as much as twice the speed if you start out with a cheap but overclockable chipset like the E4500 (= half the usual processing time, when overclocking at about 20%) but at the expense of a new motherboard, really fast RAM and a new power supply. And fans! Don't forget the fans. On the other hand, you can buy reasonably fast dual cores (2.3 MHz) for about $475 or so.

Important notice: a fast game machine does not necessarily make a fast rendering/encoding machine. Two completely different animals here.

Reports I've read claim that an overclocked 2.2 MHz E4500 (-> 4 MHz) will beat a 6800 running at spec, if it's on the right board with a fast bus speed (1333 MHz). But overclocking generates a ton of heat and sucks up watts = new power supply, like maybe 600 W, so you have to deal with that. A 4500 chipset can be had for about $120 but a 6800 can be as much as $1,000+. You need expensive DDR2, maybe DDR3, with overclocking ability, at a minimum of 100 to two hundred bucks.

It's a tough call, as you are either going to spend a lot of time in research learning how to overclock without busting the hardware, or shell out big bucks to get a fast machine that doesn't need overclocking, for a gain of maybe 15% over an inspec fast chipset. But the real bottom line is that you should buy the fastest chipset you can afford, match it with a decent board, and hope for the best.

FYI, I know from hands-on experience that there is a 0% (zero) speed advantage of a quad core over a duo when rendering or encoding, because the programs have not been written to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the quad.

Just my 2 cents, but what's the big deal with fast encoding? You're supposed to hit the hay while the machine does the dumb stuff anyway.

Disclaimer: Your mileage will vary wildly from what I'm talking about, as this is entering into serious geekland. People have been known to come to blows over this stuff.

[Dark Shikari]

FYI, I know from hands-on experience that there is a 0% (zero) speed advantage of a quad core over a duo when rendering or encoding, because the programs have not been written to take advantage of the parallel processing capabilities of the quad.http://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gifhttp://myeve.eve-online.com/bitmaps/img/board_smilies/icon_lol.gif

I really hope that was sarcasm.

[fazzaz31]

Nope. Actual experience running a render of a 20 layer image in 3DMax on an AMD Phemom 9600 quad vs an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, both systems running Vista Ultimate. Render time was twenty minutes, as opposed to rendering similar 3D graphic images on a single core 1.8 MZ P4 which took almost 4 hours!

That time is an estimate, but I was most surprised in the lack of advantage of the quad over the duo.

I could run the test again tomorrow and get back to you if you don't believe me.

BTW, both mobos are running in the same double high tower and have independent power supplies and cooling systems.

[Dark Shikari]

Nope. Actual experience running a render of a 20 layer image in 3DMax on an AMD Phemom 9600 quad vs an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 4400+, both systems running Vista Ultimate. Render time was twenty minutes, as opposed to rendering similar 3D graphic images on a single core 1.8 MZ P4 which took almost 4 hours!

That time is an estimate, but I was most surprised in the lack of advantage of the quad over the duo.

I could run the test again tomorrow and get back to you if you don't believe me.

BTW, both mobos are running in the same double high tower and have independent power supplies and cooling systems.Almost all modern encoders and renderers are fully multithreaded.

If you're not getting a performance benefit, the problem is likely a PEBKAC error, or not having a license that supports all of one's cores.

In terms of encoders, all modern encoders that don't suck support at least 8-16 cores minimum.

[KuroNeko]

So a Q6600 would be preferred over a new dual 8200? Both are about the same price here. The new quads look interesting but still not available.

From what I gather sofar, 2GB is fine, but DDR2 667 is too slow and should be upgraded to as high a speeds as affordable?

Neko

[Sharktooth]

q6600 is the CPU to buy. cheap and overclockable well beyond the higher priced CPUs stock frequencies.

[fazzaz31]

Almost all modern encoders and renderers are fully multithreaded.

If you're not getting a performance benefit, the problem is likely a PEBKAC error, or not having a license that supports all of one's cores.

In terms of encoders, all modern encoders that don't suck support at least 8-16 cores minimum.

I do believe you're correct about the PEBKAK error. I didn't get access to the studio today to check how the drawing programs were configured, but I was able to jump on Tom's Hardware site, and look at his benchmarks for a side-by side comparison.

AMD says:
Phenom 9600 Quad 2.3 MHz / bus speed 3600
Athlon 64x2 4400 Duo 2.2 MHz / bus speed 1600

Tom says:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=916&model2=1075&chart=418
Tests for render/encoding:

DVD 9 -> DVD 5 encode, quad is 8:49, duo is 10:24
3DSMax graphics 1 test file, quad is 8362, duo is 10477

Tom's opinion:
Relative difference between Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (F2) and Phenom 9600: 25.29 %
Absolute difference between Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (F2) and Phenom 9600: 2115

I don't know what mobo or DDR type they use. Our machines are running 2 GB DDR2 memory each, so we're not getting the full potential out of either chipset.

On the other hand, Extreme Tech did a shootout of overclicked chipsets (http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2226945,00.asp
) and their charts show quads at up to 2x advantage over duos for some rendering tasks, while duos beat quads for others.

Bottom line here is that you pays your money, tweak the hell out of what you got and takes your chances, and I get to eat my words.:confused:.

[Sharktooth]

tests on phenoms are just borked coz pre B3 stepping phenoms are borked.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yeah. The Q6600 is the only CPU to consider if you're encoding and have any kind of a budget. Otherwise the Q9xxx series.

I can redline mine at 3 GHz just encoding SD x264, no problem - to say nothing of doing 1080p. x264 scales very nicely. I think at least 8 cores can be used with almost linear scaling if all else is up to par.

Somebody did a benchmark with an octo-core xeon system overclocked to over 3 GHz, and a giant RAM drive to store his temporary files - uncompressed YUV files in SD resolution. He was running linux, and a 64 bit build of x264 on the command line, with no GUI or other applications running. I recall him exceeding 300 fps on the second pass, if I'm not mistaken.

So yes, for encoding, the more cores the better. Absolutely.

~MiSfit

[Avenger007]

- OS is XP, main RAM 2GB DDR2 667. Should RAM speed be increased, or rather size be upped to 4GB?Neko
I would like to know that as well. Here's my question:

Using Vista Ultimate 64bit, for encoding HD vids using x264 (and occasionally playing modern games with settings maxed), which is better:
1) 2 x 1GB DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600)
2a) 2 x 2GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)
2b) 4 x 1GB DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500)

Prices are close for some brands.

[burfadel]

ddr3 has extra latencies involved, so not sure how much faster 1333 is over good 1066, considering the price difference its probably not beneficial, especially considering you would be limited to 2gb instead of 4gb from your list.

2x2gb is usually preferred over 4x1gb, some motherboards may not like the use of 4x1gb 1066 sticks even if its a '1066 capable' motherboard. It also gives you the option if you can get another 2x2gb sticks to have 8gb of RAM! which most motherboards should be able to support. That would make Vista fly over XP in theory, as more programmes and data can be precached. I'm not saying go for 8gb, just saying that more memory is beneficial for vista over XP!

[Avenger007]

:thanks:

If only there was an article that compared the first 2 from the list, especially at overclocked frequencies with looser timings, I think ddr3 would show a significant advantage both for encoding and gaming.

The reason I included 4 x 1GB was that maybe it might give more parallelism - imagine each core using its own 1GB stick (maybe even with some replicated data on each stick to improve concurrency, but I don't know much about that stuff).

[Sharktooth]

no. DDR3 may even be slower than DDR2 due to additional latency. also, with current CPUs cache sizes the memory bandwidth is no longer a big problem.

[IgorC]

x264 has very good MT support.

4-Cores & 8-cores (2xQuad):

http://www.fcenter.ru/img/article/MB/Intel_Skulltrail/114989.png

Article (not english) http://www.fcenter.ru/forprint.shtml?online/articles/hardware/motherboards/23526

[burfadel]

I agree 2x2gb ddr2 1066 (good low latency ones) would be better than the ddr3 option, even if the ddr3 option were slightly faster per se, the additional system resources used considering there's less RAM for vista may actually subtract a few tenths of fps off from the fps encoding, encodes therefore taking longer!

The way the memory controller works isn't 1 stick per core, that would be very inefficient as each single thread is therefore only limited to 1gb of ram. The RAM is controlled by the RAM controller, which does benefit from 2 indentical sized RAM sticks for dual channel operation (theoretical doubling bandwidth, effectively only about 20 percent).

4x1gb sticks may not even work, and if they did may not overclock as much, and if they did will almost always imply whats known at 2T timing instead of the faster 1T timing.

[Sharktooth]

in the meanwhile some things are changed (https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=136337) so i'll correct my previous statement: c2d q6600 and phenom x4 9850 (B3 core) are the CPUs to buy.