When is it time to upgrade PC?
 

I have a Dual 3.06 Xeon Worksation on a 533 FSB. It has 1 GB DDR400 PC3200 Ram, 1X 160 GB boot drive, 2X 250 GB SATA Hitachi Deskstar Media drives, a Quadro FX 500 graphics card, a 5.1 Soundblaster audio card, firewire and USB ports, all that standard stuff. I bought it in Sept 2004, and I have loved it. But hearing all about these Dual Core machines, it sounds like I might be missing out. Should I sell unit this while it's still woth something, and move onto this newer technology? Or is this machine worth holding onto for a while? Just looking for some opinions, thanks

Your system looks fine to me.

The only thing I might suggest to improve on is the audio card, if you ever capture audio independently from video. But most people don't.

What editing program are you using? You should wait a bit to see if your program is planning an upgrade that will take advantage of dual-core CPUs, as I don't think any presently does.

Edius Pro
 

According to Canopus support, Edius does take advantage of dual core processing. I have a PentiumD 940 and I have seen both processors chugging at close to 100% when rendering HDV video. It's great, and tons faster than what I used to have.

Scott,

What mobo are you using?


Carlos

I am running Vegas 6. It does take advantage of the dual processors, but I am not sure about any further advantages of Vegas on a dual core...

And what platform would recommend for capturing audio only?

I haven't seen the latest offerings, but you should look for something that usually separates the pro from the amateur: balanced inputs and/or outputs.

It doesn't need to be XLR types or anything like that, and you don't need too many channels either.

Take a look at the soundcards around and see what you find. Let me know and I will have a look, if you want me too. I will be on a short holiday for two weeks, so take your time.

It doesn't need to be expensive. Mine is rather old and I don't think you will find it around: Echo Mia. But if you find any reference for it, look at the specs and see if you can find anything like it.

If possible stay away from Creative or USB connections.

Since it is a Dell machine, I am not sure exactly. It's an Intel 945P chipset. It has an 800/1066 bus (depending on my processor), so I assume it can handle the Extreme Edition CPUs. It has 4 memory slots (2 are used, 1 GB sticks). I have a pdf of the system specs if you want it.

More Ram would be my suggestion. 2 Gig MINIMUM.
Oterwise, I would wait for a full upgrade until Intel's new Core 2 Duo (or whatever they are now called) are widely available and compare them to AMD's currently shipping chips. I think it would take a high-end AMD Opteron machine (with 2 dual-core processors - so 4 cores total) to show any real improvement (like 50% improved render time) over what you are using today.