Hardware upgrade worth it?

IAM4UK wrote on 3/5/2010, 7:18 AM

I am considering a hardware upgrade, and would welcome opinions from you who may have experience with different levels of PC hardware for using Vegas 64-bit 9.0c:

Currently use Intel Core2Duo at 3.0GHz, 4 GB DDR2 RAM, 5400 RPM HDD, Win7x64

Considering Intel Core i7 at 3.2GHz, 12 GB DDR3 RAM, SSD, Win7x64

Such an upgrade is pricey; should I expect significant improvement with such changes?

Comments

daryl wrote on 3/5/2010, 7:27 AM

There are a lot of "it depends" in there, including what would you consider significant. I recently went from a dual-core AMD 2.8G with 4G RAM to an i7 2.6 with 12G RAM, I would consider the difference significant, but with all the variables (other hardware, motherboard, software configurations etc.) you may or may not see such a difference.

If nothing else, I'd get away from the 5400 RPM drive.

edit: I ran the HDV render test that is on this forum, my old system did the job in 6 minutes, the i7 in 59 seconds. Just my experience with it.

IAM4UK wrote on 3/5/2010, 8:35 AM

Thanks for the feedback. I am considering an intel SLC Solid State Drive ("mainstream," G2 series, 160GB). Comments or concerns I should consider?

CorTed wrote on 3/5/2010, 8:56 AM

I built the ASUS p6x58D MB using the i7 920 along with 12G of DDR3 RAM. I overclocked to 3.8Ghz
The system replaced my Q6600 set up.

The render times improved by almost 100% the HDV rendertest went from approx 120 Sec to 64 sec (between Q600 & i7)

I also got a SSD (80Gig) but was not impressed with its speed all that much, and found that using only 80G for a boot drive is not sufficiant, so I made it my Vegas working drive holding all of the project materials. I do think you will need at least 7200RPM drives.

Ted

IAM4UK wrote on 3/5/2010, 9:19 AM

Regarding the SSD: I have read about these, and found that performance can vary widely, with certain tweaks being required to realize the "proper" performance (e.g. TRIM).

Some I have read rave about performance increases for HD video rendering, even compared to 10000 RPM HDDs.

Any chance your 80GB SSD is not optimized for performance with the latest firmware and TRIM support? I surely don't want to drop the coin for one of those drives if the gains are minimal...

LReavis wrote on 3/5/2010, 10:45 AM

Only Win7 has TRIM, although Intel's utility can be set to run at each boot up in WinXP or Vista and get about the same benefit. Unfortunately, it only works with Intel SSDs (some other manufacturers provide similar free utilities for XP). The advantage of TRIM & similar utilities is that they clear the data from the cells after a file delete - unlike native functionality of earlier Win OSs that merely mark the cells as "available." The problem with them is that the SSDs become dramatically slower as all of the cells fill up, even though marked as "available."

I lost my G2 Intel during a thunderstorm (my G1 Intel survived intact, perhaps due to 50-nm traces instead of 34 nm traces). Got another one with no hassle from Intel - 3 year warranty.

My 80 GB SSD boot disk is by far the best upgrade I've made to a computer in many years. Boot time just a fraction of what it was with 7200rpm disk, and most programs open almost instantly (but not Vegas - I just timed it, and Vegas 8c requires 5 seconds for the first opening after reboot, and about 2 seconds for the second opening on my Q6600 @2.4 gHz).

During the weeks while I was waiting for Intel to send me the replacement, I could hardly stand working on the computer with the spinning boot disk - I had become so spoiled. According to RexTest, the SSD has a read time about 5 times faster than my fastest 7200rpm disk. Seek times are almost instantaneous, and that helps speed the read the many tiny files at bootup. Because of the almost-zero seek time, fragmented files read as fast as files that are not fragmented (SSDs should not be defragmented). Read times for my SSDs have not slowed down at all since new in late Oct. 09 (write times are nothing to brag about with SSDs, and they get slower as the SSD fills up).

I would think that 80GB is large enough for most users as a boot disk. I have a vast variety of large programs and mine is only about 75% full. However, I do take care to not load it up with temporary render files from Vegas and other non-essential clutter.

If you get one, be sure to make backup images often. I use DriveImageXML plus Win7's own imaging software. Of course, this is just plain good practice regardless of the type of boot drive that you choose.