Which Processor would be better
 

I can build the one of the following PC's for about the same price, the question is which processor do i use?

Pentium 4 3.06 W/ 800FSB Hyper Threading
or
AMD 3000 64-bit W/ integrated FSB (2.2ghz) Hyper Transport

the machine will include....

Pioneer DVR-106 DVD Writer
1gig Ram
80gig 7200RPM Maxtor (Already Have) - OS/Progs
120gig SATA Harddrive - Media
ATI 9800 Pro 128MB

and BLUE COLD CATHODES....for fun!@

I just want people's opinions on which machine would be better for rendering and editing....I will be using extensively...Premiere Pro, After Effects 6 Pro (Networked to a 1ghz Duron and Athlon XP 2400 for rendering nodes along with this new machine) Photoshop

Thanks

It's a tough call. Overall, it seems that more software has been optimized for the Pentium processor and its parallel instruction set. If you choose the AMD, go for the nVidia nForce3 chipset, which has a lot of options for overclocking and is the highest performing chipset without that. Check your software data sheets for the processor-specific optimizations.

You've chosen the processors with the fastest FSB, but you didn't list your "1gig Ram" at 400 MHz DDR.

If you add another disk drive on the other IDE channel or a card or USB2.0/Firewire, you'll have a pretty good performance gain for MPEG2 encoding. The nForce3 chipset and drivers offer a nice opportunity for RAID using any combination of IDE, USB, Firewire, SATA, etc. devices. However, other threads in this community report that they are not acheiving a performance improvement with only two "striped" disks.

I am putting PC3200 (400mhz) Ram in, and the way I had it configured was using an Nforce 3 motherboard....so what do you think.....which machine would i acheive the best performance for Gaming and Editing/Rendering

The first processor you listed is either a 3.0"C" (800FSB) or a 3.2"C" (3.2ghz, 800FSB) or a 3.06"B"(533FSB).

Unfortunately I haven't seen any good benchmarks comparing the two, but they are pretty close in other benchmarks.

anandtech.com and tomshardware.com and hardocp.com all have benchmarks but not really for video editing. The Athlon tends to come out on top for games and the Pentium tends to come out on top for encoding/compressing video.

For after effects, the dual 2mhz G5 is the fastest right now. see http://www.media-motion.tv/aebenchmarks.html and http://www.barefeats.com/g5op.html It's also pretty fast at video editing (7 streams of RT but only with apple optimized filters).

No the 64-bit has an integrated front side bus, which means it meets the processor speed, and the fsb of it is running at full duplex and the pentium is running at 800mhz fsb half duplex

I know you can o.c. the Pentium easily. I have a 3.2 OC'd to 3.5 with no problem whatsoever.

The hugest increase in performance will come from your hard drives though. Go with a RAID-0 SATA array. I got two 200 GB SATA Maxtor drives for $300. The speed will blow you away.

Peter, have you done any tests comparing RAID to not RAID? I've compared 2 different hard drives (one old, 20GB and a new WD 80GB 8MB buffer) and saw a 2% rendering difference in Vegas. That isn't much. However, when the hard drives are a bottleneck performance will suffer *a lot* though (try using PIO instead of DMA mode :P). If you can get multiple RT streams then RAID can be worth it (the dual2mhz G5 demonstrates this since it can't get 7 streams without the XSERV RAID). On most motherboards RAID 0 doesn't cost anything but doubles your chances of losing your data in event of a hard drive failure.

What I've noticed though is that NLE performance seems to be hugely dependent on CPU speed.

Hmm I was pointing out the "Pentium 4 3.06 W/ 800FSB Hyper Threading" doesn't exist.

Glenn, I'm sorry I never did outright comparisons with everything exactly the same except the hard drives RAID vs. no-RAID, but I will tell you I was getting sustained transfer rates of 60 MB/s at one point as measured by Windows.

But anyway, in Vegas if it can already write to the hard drive faster than it can render a frame, then obviously faster HD speed isn't going to make much difference in render times. But there are certainly enough occasions when you need to read from the hard drive in video editing that the extra speed is worth it overall.

As for the risk, it's true - it's there and it's a little scary! But just keep everything important backed up (I use an external firewire drive) and use the main drive primarily for program files and your raw footage (which you can replace from your TV tapes) and you'll be fine.

Keep your system files and programs on a seprate non-raid controller and it should be find if the raid0 fails.

I actually would disagree with that - keep your system files and program files on the RAID0 and don't bother backing up - you can always reinstall them! What you need to backup are your workfiles, documents, email, etc. Also, assuming you can recover them from DV tapes, don't bother backing up your enormous DV source files.

Just make sure your video editing software is set to make backups of all your project files to a non-RAID0 drive.

Hmm I thought of a good test of RAID versus non-RAID. You can use RamDisk to use RAM as a hard drive. RAM speed is insane compared to hard drive speed so it should show any hard drive-related bottlenecks. I'll post my results if I get around to doing this.

2- Backups are really important!