I just built a new Vegas system for work and used pretty much the same specs and I love it! So much faster than our old Dell P4 system. We used the Athlon 64 bit 3500+ Venice core and the MSI K8n Neo2 Platinum board with 2GB of RAM and about 800GB of hard drive space.
Just to give you an idea of the speed we used to have a system from Dell, P4 2.4ghz with a gig of ram. To render out a clip to MPEG-2 it took about 1.5X to render it out. On the new system it's pretty much real time to render a AVI-DV out to MPEG-2.

I recently had a system built around the AMD 64 x2 4800+, and am VERY pleased with its performance with Vegas. My rendering times as well as real-time performance are much improved over Pentium 4 3GHz.

Gary

AMD 64 3500+ here; all home-built.

Works great...with just the 32 bit environment.

I'm also using an AMD 64 3500+ but with 32-bit XP. It'll be nice when everything has gone 64-bit native, but we're not there yet. In the meantime, these procs are very fast on either platform, so be confident; it should work great.

jsnkc, is 'venice core' their name for dual core?

Using the AMD 64x 4600 dual core with XP pro. Tried using WinXP 64X
but the video driver for the Matrox APVe (64X) cut off the TV/HDTV overlayand the Dual Independent monitor selection. Gave up. Went back to 32 bit.

JJK

Have had the same experience. Built a system with the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium board, 2GB RAM, AMD 64 X2 4400 Dual Core. It renders files to mpeg2 about 50% faster. First little test was a small avi file. nothing added to it. V6 took 47 seconds on a P4 3.4 w/ hyperthreading and 2GB. Same file with the AMD took 30 seconds. EVERYTHING has more pep!

To be honest...i'm not really sure what "venice core" means....I just did some research on the diffrent cores and most people seemed to reccomend the venice core so that is what I went with. Maybe someone else here can give you a better answer on what the diffrent types of cores are and what they mean.

Just did a quick little google search and found this:

Newcastle....130nm....older memory controller...SSE2, 512K L2 cache

Winchester...90nm....Improved memory controller....SSE2, 512K L2 cache

Venice.....90nm......Improved memory controller over winchester....SSE3, 512K L2 cache

San Diego...same as Venice....only 1MB L2 Cache

bigsole
- x2 is the name for the dual core.
- Venice is the name of one of AMD's chips. It's a socket 939 chip (versus the older & cheaper 754), 90 nanometer technology (versus the older 130 nanometer), and has less onboard cache (512 KB versus 1 MB, I think). Venice is single core, but runs very cool and overclocks well. That's the extent of what I know.

Brian

Gary said.........."I recently had a system built around the AMD 64 x2 4800+, and am VERY pleased with its performance with Vegas."

pleased is a gross understatement for me , fast, did i say real #$%&^*( fast .

Seems like the best course if you wanted to go with the 64bit OS is to find someone to build it for you. Maybe Boxx. Alternatively, you could look at their specs and try to reproduce it. At the very least you could take a few tips from the specs, like what graphics card to use.

The main problem I see with 64bit is that I haven't yet noticed any posts here from people who are using it and loving it. So I'd not worry about a 64bit OS yet.

The more important thing for "Right Now" is to make sure your system will work well with the Athlon64 X2 processors. Everything else is "future technology" and you may not even have a use for it until your next upgrade anyway.

IMO

Rob Mack

does a 2.4 ghz dual core athlon run neck and neck with a 2.4 ghz dual core opteron? I've read serious (performance and cost!) systems go with a multi-chip, multi-core opteron. Is that the difference, the opteron's will scale with multiple chips (and each has multi-core)?

Is there a certain performance boost that either chip has over the other at the same clock speed?

I can't find any real comparisons between the two AMD series. thank you!

Sean

vegas is rendering about 3-5% slower on 64bit WinXP64 than on the same machines running WinXP32 .. i have all 64bit drivers etc ... but vegas is a 32bit app - with 32bit filters ....

programs like virtualdub have 64 bit versions though !

the athlons are single processor only (although some are dual core). The Opterons go up to 8 processors (or maybe more).

You can get single processor opterons, they are the 1xx series. I forget the exact differences between them and the athlons... may be different socket. It used to be the opterons had dual channel memory controllers, but now the Athlons do too. A single processor Opteron can be useful in server-type motherboards, which isn't necessarily what you want (server motherboards have things like SCSI, provide for redundant PSU, may have on-board graphics or lack AGP, etc.).

Not all Opterons are dual core, many are single core. Probably because AMD can't churn dual cores out fast enough.



I don't think so, but i haven't been following this closely. For single CPU setups, a dual core Athlon is probably the best bet.
For multiple CPU setups, you can only get Opterons.

I'm using the AMD XP64 with Win XP Pro with no problems except for the well known UAD-1 issues with Vegas and Acid.
(I wouldn't touch the new Win XP 64 bit OS with a 10 foot pole at this time - audio is hard enough to get to work reliably, why would anyone try a new OS unless you like to cause yourself pain!?).