Building the MONSTER CCE encoder.

[Roveer]

It's time to upgrade my CCE encoding machine. I usually dedicate a machine just for this purpose. I'd like some input on what I might want to consider for this upgrade.

First, what is the best 'path' arrangement for CCE? What I mean is, since I have multiple high speed SCSI drives in my machine, where should I be putting the files so that I eliminate the HD bottleneck? I usually keep the VOBS on one drive and do my encoding to another. BUT, should I be splitting the encoding across drives, (meaning the paths in CCE?) I'd like to 'optimize' my present system (1.7mhz P4) to get benchmarks. Right now I get around 1.3 on CCE encoding.

Next, the monster system.

Assuming that I'll move my multi-drive SCSI system to the new system, I'm considering getting a DUAL CPU system. I've read about a few CCE 3.x rated systems using Dual Athlons. Anyone want to share their tips here.

Finally,

What's the fastest DUAL Intel CPU MB's? I'd actually consider Dual 2.4ghz P4's, but I don't think there is a MB that supports it. Any ideas? I'm a Intel guy, but would consider Dual Athlons to build the ultimate encoding machine.

Look forward to a lively discussion.

Roveer...

[Arky]

Because you are specifically building this for CCE usage, then I would agree that building an SMP rig is a great idea.

If you haven't already done so, check out the forums at:

w*w.2cpu.com

I would suggest, though, that, owing to the cutting-edge nature of SMP MoBos, you err on the side of caution and choose a more established model, even if it is marginally slower on paper.

Also, have you conisdered e-mailing CinemaCraft/Custom Technology directly, to ask THEM for their hardware configuration recommendations? I have found them quite helpful in the past.


Arky ;o)

[Roveer]

I actually found that dual cpu site last night while doing some research. Among a few other things I found is that it appears that P4's arent' designed for dual system use. Seems all I can find are PIII MoBo's. If that's true, then the question becomes what's better a dual PIII with the fastest CPU's that I can find support for, or a 2.6ghz P4? Or the Athlon Dual's??? Like I said, I'm not an athlon guy, but I guess I'd consider it.

Roveer

[auenf]

the dual P4 is called XEON, but now with Hyperthreading, the P4 can appear to the OS and the apps as two processors.

of course that doesnt mean its faster, there is only 1 physical processor still ;)

the 2cpu site has a hyperthreading article and benches (actually on XEON's, but they are the same as P4s anyway.

Enf...

[jbalakri]

I would go for a P4 2.4 running on the latest 845PE MoBo's with DDR333 memory. I get 2.2 with CCE running on a P4 2.4ghz overclocked to 2.8ghz. Ofcource you got to make sure your system is stable after overclocking by running prime95 and 3D Mark 2001

[Arky]

Originally posted by jbalakri
I would go for a P4 2.4 running on the latest 845PE MoBo's with DDR333 memory. I get 2.2 with CCE running on a P4 2.4ghz overclocked to 2.8ghz. Ofcource you got to make sure your system is stable after overclocking by running prime95 and 3D Mark 2001

What framesize are you encoding to, jbalakri? Are you creating SVCD?

That seems like an awfully fast encoding speed for 720x576/720x480 encoding.


Arky ;o)

[jbalakri]

Encoding at 720x480 NTSC DVD. It quickly shots to 2.4 initially and then stabilizes between 2.1 and 2.2. I did'nt realize 2.2 is very fast:) Nice to know.

[auenf]

must be CCE 2.66 for a P4 to be that fast?

Enf...

[Arky]

Using a 2.26ghz P4, and encoding directly from a firewire-captured DVcam AVI file (720x576) to 720x576 .m2v, I get about 1.05 from CCE 2.66

I have a gig of DDR 3000, so I can't see that being a bottleneck. However, I use the safe default settings for both processor (i.e. default FSB, on the Pentium 4s), and RAM, since Overclocking, or using Turbo DRAM timings seems only to upset my system stability. Nevertheless, I am amazed that you are getting DOUBLE the speed, even though you are encoding a marginally smaller framesize, and have a moderately faster processor.

Is your P4 a 533, or older 400mhz FSB, prior to overclocking? The older 400mhz FSB series seem to be much more amenable to overclocking. With proper cooling, I've read of people O-Cing 1.7ghz (400mhz default FSB) P4s to past the 3.2Ghz mark. Obviously, we're not talking air cooling here, but nevertheless, it's pretty impressive. My 2.26ghz (533mhz FSB) P4 is an absolute PIG if you try to overclock it even slightly, and that has been a big disappointment to me because I bought a very respectable (air) cooler for it, and deliberately bought an EPoX MoBo because they are supposed to be good for O-Cing.


Arky ;o)

[jbalakri]

Arky,

I am using CCE 2.5. Are you encoding on the fly or encoding after the avi is captured and saved? Because if you are encoding on the fly, it can be only as fast as the incoming frame rate.

I am sure you are probably aware of this, but I can think of two things that contributes to encoding speed. CPU speed and more importantly memory bandwidth. CCE is a very memory intensive application. I have'nt seen another application using as much system memory as CCE. And I think a fast hard drive may also help.

My system config is 533 FSB P4 2.4, Abit BG7 Mobo, 512MB of original Samsung DDR333. FSB is overclocked to 153Mhz running at 4:5 ratio. So memmory is also overclocked to DDR382 and this increased memory bandwidth is surely contributing a lot towards the CCE encoding speed in adition to the increased CPU speed. And it is all air cooled.

I am sorry about your dissapointment. I have learned that to overclock successfully, CPU and memory burnin is important. I ran prime95 and memtest continuously for 2 days before I attempted overclocking. And I repeated this at every step of overclocking. Hope this was helpful.

[Roveer]

What would you choose? Remember, I'm doing mostly CCE encoding.

OK, I've put together 3 systems. Which would you want if you could have:

Dual Athlon MP 2200 with a MSI K7D system board and 1gb DDR ($1044)

or

Dual Xeon 2.4ghz with MSI 860D Pro system board and 1gb RDRAM ($1579)

or

Single Intel P4 2.8ghz with Asus P4G-V system board and 1gb DDR ($1055)

I've been reading for a few days and I'm more confused than ever about the 'Dual-CPU' capability of CCE. Some say yes, some say no, some say if you are frameserving, then it won't matter. Well, I'm frameserving using AVISynth or VFAPI, so I'm wondering if the Dual CPU options will actually be of any value.

As always, input is welcome.

Roveer...

[Kilyan]

I would like to share my knowledge.

A friend of mine gave me his pc for 2 weeks, so I had some time testing it with cce 2.64 and 2.50 with pal dvd video only (means m2v prior demuxed).
The system was an asus A7m-266D, with 2 mp1800s, 512ddr, 29160 adaptec scsi 64bit pci, and all hardware aree scsi's , mainly 80 and 160 harddisks.I uses dvd2avi to make a project file, used with the simpliest script, with mpeg2dec.Using windows XP
The problem I found out is that my home pc is hanging like when encoding, but this problem was not found in case of this big machine. I switched to task manager and only 60% of cpu time was used, so I started another cce encoding parallel to this one. Cpu usage growed to 100% and the total encoding RT spec was 2.2.
That's it.

[asifanwar]

VOB to DVD2AVI (FILM or not)
d2v to CCE2.66 via AVIsynth2.06 (no filters/resizing)
Making DVD-Rs at 720x480 @ 3000-5000

Speed: 2.8x realtime

Pent4 2.4GHz overclocked to 2.61GHz
512Mb PC1066 RAMBUS RAM (overclocked to 1160)
2 Maxtor ATA133 7200rpm 40Gb HDs as RAID0
Gigabyte 8IHXP mobo
WinXP Pro SP1

I noticed a hige speed increase when I switched to RAMBUS from DDR. My old Dual Athlon1600 with DDR2100 only did 1.8x and my (short lived) dual Athlon2200 only did 2.1x with the same RAM. Processor power is of course important, but dont forget about system bandwidth. Although CCE can use 2 procs, AVIsynth can only use 1. The biggest advantage I found with the dual Athlon was the ability to multitask while encoding and not notice it. But that of course means that you are NOT using all your CPU cycles.... (my usage was only about 62%)

[auenf]

Originally posted by Arky
Nevertheless, I am amazed that you are getting DOUBLE the speed, even though you are encoding a marginally smaller framesize, and have a moderately faster processor.

Arky, you are encoding an interlaced PAL file at 25fps

jbalakri says he is encoding a NTSC DVD, which would be 720x480 but at what framerate? 24fps film or 29.97 interlaced?

im pretty sure that CCE encodes progressive sources quicker than interlaced.

and anyway, the frame size differences between PAL and NTSC are usually offset by the frame rate difference. but that excludes 24fps encoding.

Enf...

[auenf]

Originally posted by asifanwar
I noticed a hige speed increase when I switched to RAMBUS from DDR. My old Dual Athlon1600 with DDR2100 only did 1.8x and my (short lived) dual Athlon2200 only did 2.1x with the same RAM.

going from a athlon with DDR to a P4 with rambus with RDRAM and saying the RDRAM made the biggest difference isnt a correct assumption, but its close ;)

the P4 wants as much memory bandwidth as possible, the more you give it, the faster it works.

slapping RDRAM onto a athlon (if it was available) wouldnt make that much of a difference, the Athlon has a small Branch Prediction compared to the P4.

Enf...

[asifanwar]

Are you saying that the P4 is inherently a better proc for encoding?
I have also tried a 2.26 P4 overclocked to 2.6 with DDR RAM (I just keep building and selling until I am happy!), and it only managed 2.1x...
I am very happy with the current machine, and will likely hang on to this until next Summer probably.

[auenf]

Originally posted by asifanwar
Are you saying that the P4 is inherently a better proc for encoding?


no, im just saying that if you give a P4 592.4GB of bandwith, it will use it all up (mostly on branch prediction, which is scary when you read up on it). the athlon on the other hand uses raw power, not 'advanced and long pipelined guessing'

Enf...

[Roveer]

OK, I'm continuing to work on my research for the Monster CCE Encoder. I've just about eliminated AMD CPU's from my list. I'm reading too much stuff about them that I'm going to stick with Intel. I know there are a lot of AMD folks out there, but I'm willing to spend the bucks on Intel.

Now, Here's the latest iteration.

For $1,500 bucks Yes I know it's an insane amount for computer stuff, but I havent' upgraded in a LONG time. I can build either of two machines.

3.06ghz P4 with 1gb of RDRAM

or

Dual 2.6ghz Zeon P4 with 1 gb of RDRAM.

I've read a few articles about hypterthreading that tell me that I will probably disable it for encoding. Seems that several tests show it encoding slower with its turned on.

My understanding of the dual is that CCE has limited dual capability, especially with AVISYNTH frameserving, BUT I will probably be able to run 2 encodes and get great speed from both?

I'm really leaning towards the Dual setup. I like the idea of having 2 cpu's. But, remember, what I'm really looking for is the fastest encodes.

Comments?

Roveer

[jbalakri]

According to the latest review of Hyper threading in P4 3.04 at Anandtech Hyperthreading is particularly strong in media encoding. Checkout the review at http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1746&p=12

Though they have used MPEG4 and MP3 encoding in the article, I would think that MPEG2 encoding with CEE should also get a boost.

[auenf]

not sure how the HT will go with CCE, but XEON's have HT anyway ;)

can you say '4 virtual processors on 2 physical processors?'

Enf...

[Roveer]

I had come across this article earlier in the week. You have to read the whole thing to fully understand the pitfalls of HT with encoding.

http://www.2cpu.com/Hardware/ht_analysis/

I'm still looking for some good advice on whether to go with 2 Xeons or the new 3.06 P4.

Roveer

[jbalakri]

Roveer,

According to Anandtech review, it appears that Intel has tweaked the HT functionality with the new 3.06 P4 which has improved the media encoding performance with HT turned on. Xeons used in the 2cpu article is probably the older HT architecture.

Checkout this interesting video at Tomshardware.com

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q4/021114/p4_306ht-22.html

Both Toms and Anandtech have reported faster MPEG4 encoding performance with HT turned on with the new 3.06 P4. I am not sure how that would translate into CCE encoding. Without hard data on CCE encoding, it is hard to recommend.

[y22kc]

I use CCE 2.5 with NTSC through dvd2avi and vfapi. I had a dual 1600+ amd rig that would do around 1.8 on progressive material. I bought a celeron 2ghz, overclocked to 3.1ghz with some pc3200 ram and now get around 2.1. The new celeron 2ghz once overclocked is very good for encoding for the price.

The 3.06ghz is going to be probably your best bet for encoding with HT enabled. Like said earlier, the HT is different from the Xeon and better.

can you say '4 virtual processors on 2 physical processors?'

I'm not aware of a motherboard that supports this, but this would be wicked awesome if it were possible!

*EDIT* There is a mobo that does this! Read a review here. (http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/0203131/index.html) that shows it.