AMD Athlon 1.2 and VideoFactory 2.0

bobmac wrote on 11/13/2001, 11:04 AM

We are thinking of upgrading our system from a Pentium III 500 MHz to an AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz. Our RAM will stay the same at 374 MB.
But we see adverse comments on this forum about rendering in VideoFactory 2.0 with this higher end Ahtlon chip. One commentator suggested that the Athlon chip wouild render no better than the PIII 500 GHz, and in fact might be less stable.
Any advice before we go ahead with an upgrade would be much appreciated. We love our VideoFactory 2.0 - it places in our top ten in nearly two decades of microcomputing, and we have tried several of the movie making packages!

Comments

rwsjr wrote on 11/13/2001, 6:59 PM

I have an Athlon 900 and have posted several times about rendering problems to mpeg 2.

Rendering to avi has been very smooth with no problems. Performance when rendering to mpeg 2 has been problematic because my system often re-boots part way through the process. However, the speed is not an issue. It was not common to have my old system take three or four hours to render an 8-minute video. This has not been an issue with my Athlon.

I don't believe my issues are related to the Athlon chip because I have had no problems with some of the other video editing software I have. Candidly, I would not let a $60 piece of software dictate my hardware purchase, though I like Video Factory when it is working.

Another note: I have noticed that my chances of successfully rendering from avi to mpeg 2 get much better when my hard disks are freshly defragmented. Just yesterday, I repartitioned my drive to allow a partition to be used exclusively for rendering that can be easily formatted or defragmented before each attempt to render. I haven’t had time to test this solution but will post my experience when I have time to try it out.

RonC wrote on 11/17/2001, 10:42 PM

Unitl recently I had an slot A type 750 Mhz athlon with PC133 ram (128MB).I've had no problems whatsoever with MPEG2 generation. I now have a 1gig thunderbird with 256Meg of DDR 266MHZ ram. Again no problems. In my experience the Athlons are rock solid and the performance is better than the intel chips. I think you will find (check www.vcdhelp.com for a recent poll) that most video enthusiasts use the athlon platform.

Regards,

Ron

bobmac wrote on 11/28/2001, 4:59 PM

Thanks, Ron for your reassurance about Athlon chips and VideoFactory

Finatic13 wrote on 11/29/2001, 10:33 AM

im running an AMD 1.4T bird chip, 512DDR memory, ASUS board
no problems here:>)
regards
simon