New Hardware Advice

burly wrote on 9/24/2003, 11:40 AM
Hello Out There,
It's almost time to rebuild my old dual-800 pentium III system. I was hoping for something that supports hyperthreading and is going to be upgradable later, yet affordable now.
Anybody try the new SOYO Dragon 2 Platinum Board with the Intel 875P (CANTERWOOD) / ICH5R Chipset? I could get that, one gig stick of 800 ddr for now, and whatever the affordable hyperthreading capable chip is that week (I suspect about a 2.6). I have a video card with a Ti500 and 64meg ram already which hopefully can wait for upgrade, and use the RME Hammerfall DIGI9652 card system to interface with my ADAT HD24 Hard Disk Recorder and other recording devices.
I use Vegas primarily for Post Production Audio and often for purely audio (no video) editing and mixing. Will these three upgrades (Board, Memory and CPU) speed audio rendering up appreciably?

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 9/24/2003, 2:17 PM
Get at least 512 Mbytes of RAM; Get the biggest hard disk you can get -- and then get another one. You really want two. Get the most MHz you can afford.

As for the more exotic memory specs, various chip sets, and the differences between processors, all of these things together might get you another 5%, but probably not even that.

I hope others chime in, because I'd be interested in their point of view on this. There have been lots of threads about hardware assists for Vegas, and whether multiple processors could help.
TrekNW wrote on 9/24/2003, 3:15 PM
The 875 chipset uses dual channel ddr memory. System performance is highest when both channels are populated with the same size memory stick. see this app note for details. Does Vegas have support for dual processors? Tomshardware.com would be a good place to check on various motherboard options.

ftp://download.intel.com/design/chipsets/applnots/25273001.pdf

regards,
Tim
ScottW wrote on 9/24/2003, 4:31 PM
I just built a system using the SOYO P4I875P Dragon 2 MB. I'm quite pleased with the performance. While I don't have anything to compare with at this point, I'm seeing 150% of realtime rendering using Satish's frameserver to CCE Basic and close to that using MainConcept direct from V4. When doing this I've got about 10% CPU idle.

My system has five 60GB IBM 7200RPM drives; 4 of them configured in a RAID 0 set (using the onboard raid controller); 512MB of memory using two 256MB sticks (to get the dual channel suport; for x-mas I may get another 512MB). 2.8 GHz P4, 800Mhz FSB and hyperthreading. A Matrox P750 video card along with an canopus ADVC1394 capture card (which while not top of the line, is fine for my meager needs).

All of this sits in a Koolance case with everything water cooled (CPU, video, northbridge and disk drives).

I've not tried the BIOS that SOYO has for this MB that's specifically for overclocking - still trying to get a feel for what the system can do in normal mode.

--Scott
busterkeaton wrote on 9/24/2003, 5:56 PM
You may want to look at boards with the 865 chipset. I think the 875 boards tend to be more feature packed, but you may not need all of them. If an 865 board has all the features you need, you might be able to save a good bit of money. Perhaps enough to get a 2.8ghz chip.

From the reviews I read the boards with the 875 chipset are only about 3-5% faster than the 865 chipset.
The 865 is pretty much the 875 with a feature disabled. Some motherboard manufacturers have found a way to enable this feature and thus get back the 3-5%.

I don't know if Soyo is doing this though.