Morte66
9th February 2005, 18:58
I have an Athlon XP1900+ 512MB PC2100, which served me well enough for Photoshop etc until I started (a) doing lots of DVD backup and (b) failing miserably to do lots of ffdshow resize/denoise/sharpen for my 1600x1200 PC monitor. I'm now wondering whether my next upgrade might come sooner than expected. I wanted to get some vague idea of what sort of performance gains I could get, and I'm hoping you folks can help me.
At the moment, my usage and times (excluding rip/burn) for a 2 hour PAL movie might be something like:
- Cut out unwanted extras and audio in Shrink, no compression: 3-5 mins
- Compress by 15% in Shrink with deep analysis etc: 1.5 hrs
- Compress by 30% in DVD-RB/FreeEnc: 6 hrs
- Compress by ~50% in Xvid Single pass Q=2: 6 hrs
- Compress by 35% in DVD-RB/QuEnc, 2 pass high quality with trellis: 17.5 hrs
- H.264 and WM9 abandoned (no better than Xvid but much slower)
As for ffdshow, I can do decent noise reduction at 720x576 but I can't lanczos resize to 1600 wide, and there's no point sharpening until after resizing.
So I wonder if you folks who are running faster systems, or just into this sort of thing, have any feel for what I'd get if I:
- Get a socket 939 mobo and an Athlon 64 3200+ for about GBP 200
- Wait maybe 6 months, get a mobo and dual core Athlon 64 with the extra SSE3 instructions and improved memory controller for GBP ???
- Get some Intel mobo/CPU solution
As for price, I'm probably facing about 200 discs to do that are too big for Shrink and need serious encoding. If the solution is cheaper than 200 dual layer blanks, I'll consider it.
I'm particularly interested in how dual core CPUs perform -- could I run an encoder on one core and run things like VB, Office and Photoshop without feeling pain? Does anybody have experience with platforms like these? Or are they a great unknown at the moment?
At the moment, my usage and times (excluding rip/burn) for a 2 hour PAL movie might be something like:
- Cut out unwanted extras and audio in Shrink, no compression: 3-5 mins
- Compress by 15% in Shrink with deep analysis etc: 1.5 hrs
- Compress by 30% in DVD-RB/FreeEnc: 6 hrs
- Compress by ~50% in Xvid Single pass Q=2: 6 hrs
- Compress by 35% in DVD-RB/QuEnc, 2 pass high quality with trellis: 17.5 hrs
- H.264 and WM9 abandoned (no better than Xvid but much slower)
As for ffdshow, I can do decent noise reduction at 720x576 but I can't lanczos resize to 1600 wide, and there's no point sharpening until after resizing.
So I wonder if you folks who are running faster systems, or just into this sort of thing, have any feel for what I'd get if I:
- Get a socket 939 mobo and an Athlon 64 3200+ for about GBP 200
- Wait maybe 6 months, get a mobo and dual core Athlon 64 with the extra SSE3 instructions and improved memory controller for GBP ???
- Get some Intel mobo/CPU solution
As for price, I'm probably facing about 200 discs to do that are too big for Shrink and need serious encoding. If the solution is cheaper than 200 dual layer blanks, I'll consider it.
I'm particularly interested in how dual core CPUs perform -- could I run an encoder on one core and run things like VB, Office and Photoshop without feeling pain? Does anybody have experience with platforms like these? Or are they a great unknown at the moment?