How powerful should the pc be....????

[ladieskiller101]

Hi all, I am planning to build or buy one PC. But I am not really good about it, so here is my question. How powerful should the PC be so i can encode or rip a dvd in real time? Can you experts give me a list of things (like what cpu, how much ram, graphic card.....) i should buy to make my pc powerful enough to do that? I also want to edit digital movies too.
P.S. I want my computer ranks anywhere under $2,000. Thanks in advance!!!

[Emp3r0r]

With two grand you can go all out. Do you need a display because if not go with Dual Xeons at 2.4ghz with hyperthreading and 2gigs of ram. This machine will be hard to slow down and if you got money to waste, up the Xeons to 2.8ghz ::drooling::

ps: this machine will be like you have 4 processors

[ladieskiller101]

First of all, thanks for your reply. Second, i want to ask you about Dual Xeons. How much is it? or the 2.4 ghz and for 2.8 ghz? What kind of motherboard will support that? And sorry if this question is stupid but is it some kind of pentium??hehhe....

[mrbass]

http://www.anandtech.com
http://www.arstechnica.com
http://www.hothardware.com
http://www.tech-report.com
http://www.tomshardware.com

all of those places have forums..hardware related

[killingspree]

here's what i'd buy with that money (didn't calculate the exact cost lately)

PIV 3,06 Ghz HT
1 Gig RD ram
2x 120 WD hard disks (8MB cache) - possible up to 200 Gig
Sony DVD burner (the one with 4x and support for + and -
probably extra DVD ROM for faster rip speeds
Gforce 4 Ti 4200 (if you want to do some serious gaming you can also go for a radeon 9700)
Audigy sound card for nice 5.1 sound in connection with the appropriate speakers
motherboard: make sure it got USB 2.0 on board
if you have or want to get a digicam also get yourself a firewire card

have i forgotten something? hope not...
steVe

[wmansir]

You should know all these machines mentioned will FAR surpass real time. A duel 2.4 Xeon will probably give you 2-3x realtime depending on exactly what you are doing.

[ladieskiller101]

What is the Dual Xeon? Is it a professor like pentium or something? Cuz i've never heard it b4 (like i know lots of things) hehe...and also? I thought pentium 4 only come with 2 version which are 2.4 and 2.53. The 3.0 GHZ P4 would be really expensive right? One more thing, i heard that there's a new type of ddr memory is coming out, is it true? Is it a good time to have a computer right now? Or should i wait a little bit longer so i don't have to upgrade my computer in a short future? THanks

[ladieskiller101]

By the way guys, one of my friend said that Dual Xeon is just produced to be used by server. We can't really buy it to use individul on our pc's. Is that true? But since you guys are recommending it, i guess i has to be sold for public too right?

[killingspree]

Originally posted by ladieskiller101
What is the Dual Xeon? Is it a professor like pentium or something? Cuz i've never heard it b4 (like i know lots of things) hehe...and also?

yes it is a processor also produced by Intel and it is true that it's main purpose is situated in the server section. but somehow it has turned out that it works really well in video encoding especially using CCE (iirc)

I thought pentium 4 only come with 2 version which are 2.4 and 2.53. The 3.0 GHZ P4 would be really expensive right?

the 3,06 PIV exists since last november, but it's true, it is rather espensive (not more expansive than two Xeon though (: ... also there has just been released a new PIV with an 800 MHz frontside bus... so the prices on the normal and HT PIvs have been dropped...

One more thing, i heard that there's a new type of ddr memory is coming out, is it true? Is it a good time to have a computer right now? Or should i wait a little bit longer so i don't have to upgrade my computer in a short future? THanks
well there's dual channel DDR (i think this is the same as DDR2...) but i'd stick with normal DDR or RIMM ram...
oh andthe time is never right to buy a new computer(: there will alsways be new releases in the near future and price drops are coming up with them... just do not buy it before christmas :-P


We can't really buy it (Xeon) to use individul on our pc's. Is that true?

well you won't get a dual Xeon 2.4 PC as a complete solution at compUSA or so :D but you can get it...

steVe

[Atamido]

This really belongs in a hardware specific forum.

Xeons are basicaly Pentium 4's that have been heavily optimized for multiprocessor, multithreaded environments, and usually have a much larger L2 cache. These environments are typicaly reserved for servers though. Because of the higher cost, and the fact that most applications aren't optimized for the multithreading that Xeons are good for, Xeons typically aren't a good choice. As far as video encoding goes, if you have a codec that is well designed, you can get a huge boost from Dual Xeons. For most other consumer applications, it usually isn't worth the cost, though you can buy them without any trouble.

Dual Channel DDR is not the same as DDR2. Dual Channel DDR doubles the bandwidth by accessing two memory sticks (DIMMs) at the same time. DDR2 doubles the bandwidth by doubling the amount of data that a memory stick can send on a clock cycle. (DDR sends double SDR, and DDR2 sends doube DDR)

A single Xeon 2.8ghz w/ 533mhz bus is $452US, compared to a single Pentium 4 3.06ghz w/ 800mhz bus at $550. See Price Watch (http://www.pricewatch.com/) for more prices.

@killingspree: With that money, you should pick up a Radeon 9800 pro instead.

Also, don't get an Audigy card, or any other Creative Labs card. Trust me, I own one. There are lots of other cards out there with better hardware, prices, and driver support. Check one of the listed hardware forums for more information.

If you really want to future proof your board, get one with Serial ATA, and get some Serial ATA hard drives. You will pay a premium, but the extra air flow and room inside your case from the tiny cables will be a life saver. Also, it means you won't have to configure jumpers on the Harddrive. I have a harddrive and a CD drive that absolutely will not work on the same channel.

Personally, for a CPU and board, Intel or AMD doesn't matter to much right now. Find one that is in a good spot on the price/performance curve. Also, look for a good board with dual channel DDR if you get the Pentium 4. It will make a difference. Check out this review on HardOCP (http://hardocp.com/article.html?art=NDcw) for some good ideas.

At this point, almost noone ever sees a benefit by going over 512MB of ram. You can do the 1GB thing, but you would probably just be wasting money. I work with large databases, and it is almost never an issue for me.

[Solo]

Just read a review of a Dual AMD MP2600+ system that kicks a
P4 3Ghz systems butt when encoding using VitualDub + AviSynth.
I'm drooling all over my desk !!!
Check it out:

http://www.hardwarereview.net/Reviews/AMD%20Athlon%20MP2600/AMD%20Athlon%20MP2600.htm

Just imagine what a dual AMD 3000+ could do?

[dTb]

There's also reviews of the 800MHz canterwood p4 and the 3200+ Athlon XP on that site mentioned by Solo.
I find the reviews quite good because they feature real video encoding benchmarks (ie. not just xmpeg).

[Xayd]

Multiprocessors can be great, but it's a matter of the application in question being able to use both processors. I can see why video encoders and such would be able to, but don't assume that it'll make your games twice as fast or anything, since the only gaming related application to my knowledge that supports multiple processors is the Quake 3 standalone server ;).

With that said, get what you can afford when building a PC, but the differences between 3ghz and 2.4ghz aren't gonna be much. Hardware is actually outpacing software a bit in the PC arena these days, so it's not a big deal.

RAM is cheap, so might as well get alot of it. 8 meg cache IDE drives are also cheap, so might as well get one of those too (they are noticably faster than 2 meg cache drives).

Video and sound depend on what you do. If you're a gamer the high end nVidia and ATI cards are nice if you wanna spend 300 dollars +, but otherwise a 100 to 150 dollar card (for video for the PC I'd say Radeon 9000) would be fine.

If you're a gamer sound is a concern since you'll require DirectX support, but if you don't play games you could easily get a studio sound card such as one of the M-Audio Delta series cards that could do anything with recording and surround sound output that you ever want to do.

[Milkman Dan]

Originally posted by Pamel
Dual Channel DDR is not the same as DDR2. Dual Channel DDR doubles the bandwidth by accessing two memory sticks (DIMMs) at the same time. DDR2 doubles the bandwidth by doubling the amount of data that a memory stick can send on a clock cycle. (DDR sends double SDR, and DDR2 sends doube DDR)


No, not quite.

Dual DDR, in practice, does little more than lower latencies associated with LOADs and STOREs. On the Athlon platform especially, this is true (the PIV benefits more from Dual DDR in the bandwidth sense because of heavy prefetching and the nature of the SSE2 extentions) and that is why the nForce2, though useful in dual channel mode for versions with integrated graphics, pretty much does little for performance otherwise.

In any event, saying that D-DDR (Dual DDR) doubles memory bandwidth is rather misleading, since the system implemented by nVidia doesn't have two discrete memory controllers, but rather works under a "crossbar" system, where part of the memory logic effectively load-balances LOADs and STOREs and other such traffic over the bus(es). This is less about doubling, and more about more effective use of bus resources on the Athlon platform. Again, this is different on the PIV side of things, and since I don't know anything about Intel's D-DDR implementation at the hardware level, I won't speculate on the specifics.

But the bit above about what DDR2 constitutes is completely wrong.

In a nutshell, all DDR2 really does is decouple the I/O logic on the memory chips from the core (memory cells themselves) and increase their effective "clock." The cores themselves do not run any faster, necessarily, though the chip package for DDR2 (BGA) helps clock the DIMMs as a whole faster because of lower electrical latencies.

But no, DDR2 is not "Quad-SDR." DDR is a rise-and-fall-of-the-clock transfer system, and so is DDR2.

I can't for the life of me find the article I read about DDR2 that outlines this, but I'll link to it later when I find it. In the mean time, Arstechnica has several great RAM guides, as does Aceshardware. Read up.

[Ramirez]

Originally posted by Milkman Dan
In any event,saying that D-DDR (Dual DDR) doubles memory bandwidth is rather misleading, since the system implemented by nVidia doesn't have two discrete memory controllers, but rather works under a "crossbar" system, where part of the memory logic effectively load-balances LOADs and STOREs and other such traffic over the bus(es). This is less about doubling, and more about more effective use of bus resources on the Athlon platform.
Not quite correct,all NVIDIA NForce2-SPP/IGP chipsets actually do have two separate memory controllers working using NVIDIA's DASP technology, basically two separate memory modules are joined into one 128bit wide logical unit which gives more then 6.4GB of effective bandwidth when used along with DDR-400(so yes,we're talking about doubled bandwidth after all) when one of the two memory controllers is reading data another one is caching and vise versa; hence this model allows smooth memory reads/shorter read times.

However as you stated above, using Dual-DDR memory design on AMD platform is pretty much senseless simply because such a great bandwidth is much more then Athlon processor can actually handle as a moment: 333FSB/2.8GB.

Regards.

[Sirber]

If I use a AMD @ 333MHz FSB, I can only use 333 DDR. But if I use a 266 FSB, I can use 400 DDR. It's wierd and Yes, Ramirez, I have a Gigabyte :devil:

[Milkman Dan]

Originally posted by Ramirez
Not quite correct,all NVIDIA NForce2-SPP/IGP chipsets actually do have two separate memory controllers working using NVIDIA's DASP technology, basically two separate memory modules are joined into one 128bit wide logical unit which gives more then 6.4GB of effective bandwidth when used along with DDR-400(so yes,we're talking about doubled bandwidth after all) when one of the two memory controllers is reading data another one is caching and vise versa; hence this model allows smooth memory reads/shorter read times.

However as you stated above, using Dual-DDR memory design on AMD platform is pretty much senseless simply because such a great bandwidth is much more then Athlon processor can actually handle as a moment: 333FSB/2.8GB.

Regards.

You're right. A quick look through the whitepaper shows that there are indeed two memory controllers in the SPP.

However, I must stress that the single arbiter controlling the controllers still determines the traffic over the bus. So we're really talking about 6.4GB/s of theoretical bandwidth, and not effective bandwidth, as you term it.

Benchmarking of the system shows that it's really more like 2.5-3GB/s, and that's in syntheic tests.

As I said, it's really about reducing latencies; like you said, one channel can be STORE-ing, and the other can be pre-fetching.

But yes, I'll eat crow on that statement.

[Ramirez]

Yeah, you're right of course these figures are indeed pretty much theoretical, but still I think that NVIDIA's Twin bank Memory (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzAsMg==) architecture allows quite impressive bandwidth throughputs when coupled with a good pair of CAS-2 DDR like Corsair XMS, the new Barton 3200+ 400FSB (http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/Barton3200/Barton3200_2.htm)CPU is definitely going to take advantage of Dual DDR architecture due to its increased bandwidth needs (3.2GBPS) and IMO D-DDR is perfectly capable of providing him such bandwidth with no sweat.

[Milkman Dan]

Originally posted by Ramirez
Yeah, you're right of course these figures are indeed pretty much theoretical, but still I think that NVIDIA's Twin bank Memory (http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MzAsMg==) architecture allows quite impressive bandwidth throughputs when coupled with a good pair of CAS-2 DDR like Corsair XMS, the new Barton 3200+ 400FSB (http://www.3dvelocity.com/reviews/Barton3200/Barton3200_2.htm)CPU is definitely going to take advantage of Dual DDR architecture due to its increased bandwidth needs (3.2GBPS) and IMO D-DDR is perfectly capable of providing him such bandwidth with no sweat.

Well, I tell you what: I currently own an Abit NF7-S, version 1.0, and I use two DIMMs running fairly aggressive timings. I'm running the FSB at 200MHz, and in Sandra, I only get about 2900MB/s in the memory bench. I have a 2GHz Thoroughbred B (well...HAD a 2GHz Thoroughbred B...lightning struck :( ), so moving up to the Barton isn't going to make that much of a difference.

Maybe you're right, but I haven't really found the benches with non D-DDR nForce2's and D-DDR nforce2s in the same article to see if there is really that much of a difference. I'll read the linked article anyway though (although overall I'm not much impressed with the [H]. I prefer Aceshardware or Tech-report).