Im looking at upgrading my desktop to something like this

GT5228
AMD LIVE! Smarter Digital Entertainment; AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 dual-core processor 4200+; DL DVD±RW/CD-RW drive; 250GB hard drive; 2GB PC4200 DDR2 memory; Windows XP Media Center 2005; 9-in-1 digital media manager

What Im wondering is if it is better to have dual core and if Vegas would take advantage of it? Any advice would be great .

Joey

It definitely will make use of multiple cores.

Version 7 is just supposed to utilize dual core more efficiently.

Thanks Guys

What Im wondering is if it is better to have dual core and if Vegas would take advantage of it? Any advice would be great

I have used Vegas 6 on both a true Dual CPU system (Dual Athlon MPs) and a pseudo dual core (P4HT). They both eat up all available CPU. I have yet to find a machine where Vegas cannot saturate the CPUs (and here I was worried about disk IO).

jason

Jason,
What are you doing to get Vegas to 'eat up' both CPU. I have a dual core that shows only 60-70% of both CPUs being used when rendering. But don't have a lot of Fx either.

Jason,
What are you doing to get Vegas to 'eat up' both CPU. I have a dual core that shows only 60-70% of both CPUs being used when rendering. But don't have a lot of Fx either.

Terry-With Vegas 6 and now Vegas 7 on my dual-core rig (X2 4600), I'm also getting 100% use out of both cores when rendering, whether I use lots of fx or not. It's cut my rendering times greatly from the P4 I upgraded from. Make sure you're running the latest proc driver from AMD. http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html I also installed the dual core optimizer (first selection on the page) to help with apps that aren't designed for dual core (non multithreaded)...
Just a guess, but maybe a bottleneck, I/O or elsewhere, would prevent the cpu's from getting enough data to process at 100%. I'm running a raid0 array for my OS and apps--maybe this is helping me with respect to that.

Jason,
What are you doing to get Vegas to 'eat up' both CPU. I have a dual core that shows only 60-70% of both CPUs being used when rendering. But don't have a lot of Fx either.

Keep in mind that not all codecs are multithreaded. I don't believe Real is (could be wrong cause I don't use it). MPEG2 is BUT only on the local machine (network render will NOT multithread).

It could also be that I work on RAID storage so there is always enough data being fed to teh CPU. The two systesm I have are a 4 yr old dual Athlon MP 180+ with 512MB PC2100 ram and a 1yr old P4HT 3Ghz with 2.5GB DDR2 ram. bot have raid 0 storage.

jason

Do you get 100% dual cpu usage when rendering DV footage to DV .avi with no effects?

Rich-
You're right, I don't get the 100% when rendering without fx to avi...I guess I almost always have fx of one type or another going on. My mistake.

Thank you for the reply.

I was always worried about not getting 100% usage because the old machine that I used in the past did have 100% cpu usage when rendering dv with no effects.

Rich-
I've been using Magic Bullet on nearly all of my wedding projects, which is why I'm used to seeing the 100% on both cores...even just adding the film Looks taxes my little X2 to the max. You ready for another CT winter?

I'm ready and will enjoy it, but the football game I was suppose to shoot tonight wasn't. They cancelled because of the outlook of rain and high winds.

Wow, cancelling a football game is a rare thing, but yeah, the wind was really kicking up last night. I think the temp dropped about 25 degrees in an hour. I was out and didn't have a cam with me to catch the way the clouds were sailing across the sky. Would've made great background footage. Hey, if you ever have a project brewing and you're in need of another man w/cam who's local, let me know.

Sure thing Vincent.

Do you get 100% dual cpu usage when rendering DV footage to DV .avi with no effects?

If you're rendering from dv avi to dv avi of the same specs (60i, 50i, etc.) without any effects, Vegas is acting as a sophisitcated data-copying device. Vegas passes through DV unmolested in regions without processing.