Can the ol' AMD 64 X2 handle an HD project?

JHendrix wrote on 6/4/2009, 8:07 PM
Can the ol' AMD 64 X2 handle an HD project?


AMD 64 X2 Dual Core 4400+
2.20 GHz 2 GIG RAM
Windows XP 32 SP2 installed
Vegas 8c

(i could install 64 bit but only if it really actually makes a difference)


I also have a mac 8 core with 13 gigs of RAM and vista bootcamp but I need a second cutting station

Im trying to figure if this AMD is worth getting up to speed of if I should just get something newer.

Comments

TheRhino wrote on 6/5/2009, 6:16 AM
Before we upgraded our AMD X2 4400+ workstations to Core I7 with (2) 4-drive RAID 0, editing HD on the X2 reminded me of editing SD on my old P3 laptop... It is do-able, but tedious.

One of the biggest bottlenecks of older systems is the lack of PCIe slots on the motherboard and/or an inadequate onboard SATA RAID controller... For instance, our older X2 motherboards would not allow us to add a PCIe Blackmagic card to import HD from our cameras or add PCIe SATA RAID controllers. I recommend at least ONE 4-drive RAID0 for editing HD content.... FORTUNATELY large capacity drives can be purchased for around $100 and most I7 motherboards come with pretty good onboard controllers...

We paid $225 for the I7 920 and $300 for the P6T6 which included 6gb of FREE memory as a special promo. That's just $525 for superior performance and we used our exisiting case, power supply, etc. since they were beefy enough for the power needs of the I7. The BIG costs were adding the Blackmagic card, 8 hard drives and an additional PCIe RAID card.

If you can afford to add the hard drive space needed to edit HD content, then you can probably afford to upgrade the processor, motherboard & memory... The processor was definitely the biggest bang/buck out of everything because for only $225, it is 4X the speed of the X2 4400+...

Workstation C with $600 USD of upgrades in April, 2021
--$360 11700K @ 5.0ghz
--$200 ASRock W480 Creator (onboard 10G net, TB3, etc.)
Borrowed from my 9900K until prices drop:
--32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3200 ($100 on Black Friday...)
Reused from same Tower Case that housed the Xeon:
--Used VEGA 56 GPU ($200 on eBay before mining craze...)
--Noctua Cooler, 750W PSU, OS SSD, LSI RAID Controller, SATAs, etc.

Performs VERY close to my overclocked 9900K (below), but at stock settings with no tweaking...

Workstation D with $1,350 USD of upgrades in April, 2019
--$500 9900K @ 5.0ghz
--$140 Corsair H150i liquid cooling with 360mm radiator (3 fans)
--$200 open box Asus Z390 WS (PLX chip manages 4/5 PCIe slots)
--$160 32GB of G.Skill DDR4 3000 (added another 32GB later...)
--$350 refurbished, but like-new Radeon Vega 64 LQ (liquid cooled)

Renders Vegas11 "Red Car Test" (AMD VCE) in 13s when clocked at 4.9 ghz
(note: BOTH onboard Intel & Vega64 show utilization during QSV & VCE renders...)

Source Video1 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 on motherboard in RAID0
Source Video2 = 4TB RAID0--(2) 2TB M.2 (1) via U.2 adapter & (1) on separate PCIe card
Target Video1 = 32TB RAID0--(4) 8TB SATA hot-swap drives on PCIe RAID card with backups elsewhere

10G Network using used $30 Mellanox2 Adapters & Qnap QSW-M408-2C 10G Switch
Copy of Work Files, Source & Output Video, OS Images on QNAP 653b NAS with (6) 14TB WD RED
Blackmagic Decklink PCie card for capturing from tape, etc.
(2) internal BR Burners connected via USB 3.0 to SATA adapters
Old Cooler Master CM Stacker ATX case with (13) 5.25" front drive-bays holds & cools everything.

Workstations A & B are the 2 remaining 6-core 4.0ghz Xeon 5660 or I7 980x on Asus P6T6 motherboards.

$999 Walmart Evoo 17 Laptop with I7-9750H 6-core CPU, RTX 2060, (2) M.2 bays & (1) SSD bay...

DRuether wrote on 6/5/2009, 6:50 AM
If you stick with HDV and not AVCHD (especially 24 Mbps AVCHD), you can give it a try. Previewing may not be the best, but it was adequate on my dual core Intel even with a 540x960 preview window set for "Best Full", and I did edit several projects with this. Going to a quad core CPU improved previewing and halved render times (but going from a video card with 256 megs of RAM to one with 1 gig did nothing for previewing...).
Dach wrote on 6/5/2009, 7:23 AM
Yes - Your system will get the job down. Our workstations have X2, 4200 processors and we're still getting the job done. Could it be better, sure, but none the less we have not yet spent the money on the new systems.

Chad
rmack350 wrote on 6/5/2009, 8:09 AM
I was just looking at this last night while thinking about someone else's preview problems. I have an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ in socket 939 with3 GB ram running Vegas 8.0c . I don't normally deal with HD.

I created a couple of generated noise textures at 1920x1080x60i and then did a crossfade on them. Preview performance was poor on the crossfade. Then I tried prerendering it in the various prerender options Vegas provides. Preview was still low all around.

Trying it in VP9, setting the preview to Scale video to fit the preview and to automatically adjust quality, VP9 settles on Preview (Half) quality and then needs to loop a few times before it can really play the crossfade. Various prerender formats still don't play well although MXF is a little better than in VP8.

You could try to sink some money into your system but if it's like mine I wouldn't bother. PCI and AGP cards are a dead end, as is the memory you're using. It's still a great platform for a lot of other work but at this point I'd be looking at a Core 2 quad or a Phenom II quad, at the least. Core I7 would be best, or a Core I5 later this year will also be very good I think. The extra cost of the Core I7 ought to be worth it if you're doing paying work and the platform is very expandable.

RAID might be useful but it depends on the type of media you work with. Add-in cards can be costly but a good one takes a bit of load off your CPU. Onboard RAID usually leans on your CPU more but I have heard over the years that Intel's onboard RAID controller is pretty good. That amounts to another plug for the Core 2 or the Core I7.

Rob Mack
amendegw wrote on 6/5/2009, 9:45 AM
I don't do HD (yet), but the following is the config of my computer:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz
2GB Memory
ASUS A8V-E SE mobo
Windows XP 32 SP3 installed
Vegas 9

I ran rendertest-hdv.veg and got an 8 min 45 sec render time. Is that acceptable? Someone else will need to answer.

...Jerry

Edited to add op system & vegas version

System Model:     Alienware M18 R1
System:           Windows 11 Pro
Processor:        13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-13980HX, 2200 Mhz, 24 Core(s), 32 Logical Processor(s)

Installed Memory: 64.0 GB
Display Adapter:  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 Laptop GPU (16GB), Nvidia Studio Driver 566.14 Nov 2024
Overclock Off

Display:          1920x1200 240 hertz
Storage (8TB Total):
    OS Drive:       NVMe KIOXIA 4096GB
        Data Drive:     NVMe Samsung SSD 990 PRO 4TB
        Data Drive:     Glyph Blackbox Pro 14TB

Vegas Pro 22 Build 239

Cameras:
Canon R5 Mark II
Canon R3
Sony A9

TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/5/2009, 10:16 AM
it's acceptiable if that's find with you.

When I first got Vegas 4 I had a P3-667 & captured all my video uncompressed HuffyUV SD. Rendering took forever, but it was fine for me!
rmack350 wrote on 6/5/2009, 10:39 AM
I think for me the biggest issue would be playback. I think my system is pretty similar to JHendrix's and the least I'd want to see is that it could play back untouched clips at full frame rate. Forget about filters and transitions because you know you're "making do", but it has to play the plain media at good/full.

Rob Mack