Dual Core better in what way?
 

Hi,
I just bought myself a new PC for editing DV and HDV

Intel Pentium Dual Core 930 3,0Ghz
2 Gigas of ram
NVIDIA QUADRO FX 540 graphics card

My question is: In what way is this better than a normal Pentium 4 3,4ghz, roughly the same price in Finland, for video editing??

Thanks,
Arthur

The biggest benefit is multi-tasking and generally smooth or streamlined operations.

In a single chip scenario, your pretty much stuck to keeping focus on one application. That is, if you capturing video with PPro, or rendering with Lightwave on a single chip, and you open a web browser, or do some 2D stuff in photoshop, then your performance takes a significant hit and everything slows down (i.e. frames drop, render times increase, and in some cases, apps crash or the PC locks up). With a dual-core, or dual processor, you should have enough resources to do two things at once and be more productive.

Taking it one notch further, if you opt for a dual-core AMD system, then you'll also have a dedicated buss for each chip, with that buss also residing on the die and not elsewhere on the motherboard. That scenario actually works. I moved from a dual xeon 3GHz to a dual-core dual Opteron on a BOXX 7400. In using the same applications, with the same overhead, I get much better or shall I say: Real mulitasking. When I captured video in PPro with the dual xeon, if I changed focused or opened another application, PPro would start dropping frames. On the dual AMD system, I did all sorts of tasks with PPro churning away in the background. Capturing four hours of video without dropping a frame.

The rumor mill suggests that Intel is also working on a dual-core system with dedicated on the die buss. The current p4's simply run too hot, and for a machine that needs to churn out video, or rendering frames of animaton 24/7, that's asking for trouble. The opertons run much cooler and consum only half the wattage.

Also...
 

If you use a editing program (Edius for example) it can actually take advantage of both cores while capturing/renduring/etc. I have found Edius much faster with my dual core. I wanted to go amd, but Dell had a great deal that I could not pass up. Maybe next time I will go with the Boxx.

I've had about 4 dells, 3 workstations and labtop. Either I've had bad luck or I'm just to hard on them. My 650 was a beast and dead fast when I first bought it, until I fried one of the processors within the first week! I then killed a few system drives, a pci sound card and lost a stick of ram. I figured it was too much heat and I left the case cracked open. The 650's have very poor airflow inside, and a four-drive scsi array and two system drives churning away, it was a virtual heater for my feet. There were many nights and weekends that I'd leave it on to render many thousands of image sequences for animation. I quess it wasn't designed for that kind of abuse.

The BOXX has five, yes FIVE fans. One on top of each processor, and three large ones in the back drawing all the heat out. Yet it's no louder than my dell. You can definetly tell the difference, when I pull a drive it's much cooler to the touch than found with the Dell. That it itself should help in the speed department, as a cooler running PC should be a faster one.

In the Apple world, I was rendering a large HDV project (plus converting it from PAL to NTSC) and it was going to take 29 hours on a dual processor 2.7 ghz, 64 bit machine with 4 gb of RAM. So I put it on my system, a dual dual-core (4 x 2.5 ghz), 64 bit machine with 4 gb of RAM. It took only 9 hours. Dual core rocks!

heath

Amen Heath!!!

Peter...I do agree with you. This is the first PC I have bought that I have not built myself from parts. I did get one of the gaming Dells (XPS) and the airflow is great so far. There are multiple fans and things have stayed quite cool. Not saying Dell is the greatest, but so far I am please with the performance.

arthur.. i just bought almost the exact same system.. multi tasking is defintaly good

building your pc , best way
 

this a a suggestion if you want a powerful pc. off the shelf is very limited these days,.

What I did was go to mwave.com. YOu can pick all the parts you want at great prices then pay them 79 buck to put the whole thing together. I did plenty of research and it is the best thing going for special pc needs.
I paid bout 1k for a dual amd 4400 , came and worked great right out of box. I love mwav.

Dual dual-core? How is that pulled off?

Alex,

As you know, Apple and PC makers have always put two processors in higher-end systems. So when Apple came into the dual-core game, they put two dual-core processors into one system.

www.apple.com/powermac

Intel is working on one chip with FOUR processors on it! A true Quad-Core! Can you imagine two of those suckers in a Mac or PC??

heath

Heath, I also think the rumor mill also has Intel coming up with something similiar to AMD's dedicated buss or pipe per core, and including that right on the die. I already see an advantage to that, coming from a dual xeon to dual-core dual opteron. In many cases the dual xeon wouldn't perform no better than my single P4 HP950.

Intel getting closer to AMD?
 

Yeah,
Intel anounced their Duo 2 (or something like that) this week. I looks pretty nice - goes back to the efficient Pentium Pro based Pentium M core in a duel configuration and dropping the P4. By the end of the year they should start shipping something (don't know about in what volume) that can catch an AMD X2 4800. Until the new Duo 2s are widely available, I wouldn't buy an Intel machine. Ideal machine rightn now would be dual dual-core AMD Opterons (4 cores total) with 4 to 8 gig of RAM - but I don't have the 5 grand or so, so have to stick with my X2 4400 with 2 gigs.

Are HP's with AMD duals any good?? And what is "BOXX"??

BOXX makes high-end systems. Core Duo is still 32 bit, something not really spoken by both PC and Mac publications, I've noticed.

heath

HPs are fine. I wouldn't call then optimized for video production. BOXX are probably about the best available. I'm one for building my own, but something like a HP d4100 with an AMD X2 4400 and 2 or 4 gigs of ram would be a good easy sub $1,500 machine - but hardly optimized for video. There are many web vendors that allow more customization. ABS, Alienware, Monarch & Cyberpower are all listed on AMDs website as partners.

If you have loads of $ a workstation with 2 Opteron 285s in it would be the way to go. I know more about scientific computing than vid production, so fine tuning should be done with the vendor to optimize what your are doing.