How much memory for encoding?

[droolian01]

Hello all.

I will be going out tommorrow morning and getting all the bits to build my super speedy encoding box. My present box is a celeron 800 on a crappy jetway mobo.

I will be going for:

Athlon xp2100+
asus a7v333raid
ibm 120gxp 40 gb (boot)
ibm 120gxp 123gb (mainly capture)
Sapphire ATI Radeon 9000 64MB DDR
winxp pro

I will be using this rig mainly for capture with a cheap pcrave tv card and for encoding to divx. The question is i can get (tommorrow) Corsair xms3000 memory (cas2 and rated at fsb 185 - incase i want to do some moderate overclocking later) but do i get 256 or 512mb? You see i've pushed the boat out a little with all this and will i really see a big difference in encoding speed if i get the 256mb stick?

If the difference in speed is significant i may go ahead and get the 512mb - it's cheaper to but that way than 2x256mb anyway.

Any thoughts and comments would be appreciated
Thanks

[theReal]

It seems the new avisynth version doesn't use as much RAM anymore as it did before - so 256MB should probably be enough for Win2k and encoding, but I'd go for the 512MB stick anyways.

Overclocking is probably better with a single 256MB stick than with a single 512MB stick - but you said you only want to do some moderate overclocking and the 512MB stick is also rated for FSB 185.

[droolian01]

Hi again.

Thanks for your advice - i'd basically come to the same conclusion myself. I discussed this with the salesman today - he agreed (he would!) but had run out of ddr3000 512mb, but offered me ddr3200 for the same price! Of course my credit card appeared within a few micro-seconds and shortly after that i owe visa much more than i had planned! But it does look awefully sexy with its heat sink and all!!
Only thing is i havent got enough screws to mount the hard drives - and the shops are shut now!!!

Hal9000 will have to wait till tomorrow!

See Ya!

[\AX]

heatsink? does true 3200 have a heatsink. i know there is a wannabe 2700 out there that is not true 2700 and comes wiht a heat sink. seems this is more along the lines of phony ram. Ive read alot about how the 2700ddr that requires aheatsink does not perform the same. is this true with 3200 because im not wanting a heatsink at all and im going to be buy 3200 here shortly. i don't think it will work being i can only push 333 so 2700 looks more like my option right now but i would like to have some 3200 anyhow...but the price is pretty high for a chance.

[droolian01]

Hi there.
This is what i got in the end:


http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_Memory_8.html

Check the picture of the:
Corsair 512MB DDR XMS3200 CAS2.5 (MY-007-CS)
(about halfway down).The picture isn't vert clear but the heatsink is just about visible.
Don't know if it actually dissipates much heat but it still looks pretty to me.

See ya

[droolian01]

P.S. \AX

I read your post about xp (got pro in the end so i could network my old box - will be a 'tivo' soon) and i agree with most of what you said. Not being a computer expert its going to take me quite some time to disable all the crap, but i have at least stopped msmessenger to not start (for now anyway!)

[phamilton]

About shutting down the surplus activities in XP, you might look at

http://www.deviantpc.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1926

which gives a list of all the Services, what they do, and what happens if you stop them.

By the way, to get at the services running, you need to go to Administrative Tools / Services. If you want to fiddle how a Service starts, right-click on it, select Properties from the resulting menu, and you get a window with things you can fiddle.