New PC - Your help is appreciated

Mr_fps wrote on 1/6/2006, 5:36 PM
I have looked at the older posts but many are quite out of date in terms of the self made systems, since technology changes so fast. I am asking you to help me if you have recently built or ordered a new system.

I am upgrading from a P4 3ghz prescott, i865PE chipset to a faster and better system. I am considering the following options. Most of my work is Vegas 6 and Photoshop CS2 . These are my starting points, please help me in deciding which one is better for me, especially if you have made one for yourself.

Option 1
(dual socket 940 single core Opterons)
Asus K8N-DL
2 Opteron 246

Option 2
Athlon X2 (suggestions)
mobo ?

Option 3
P4 dual core system


If you have made any of these for the applications that are similar to mine can you also elaborate/suggest which memory you used. I will be tranferring the other components from the old system i.e. hard drives etc.

Thank you!

Comments

GlennChan wrote on 1/6/2006, 6:26 PM
The rendertest.veg results show that AMD is the best bang/buck on the high end. I'm not sure what's happening on the low end... Intel might be good for value. In your case, I think the choice is clearly AMD X2. Why:
You can likely re-use the RAM. AMD X2 uses PC3200 DDR. Penitum D uses DDR2. Opteron may need registered DDR.

Also, Pentium D may require a new power supply with higher wattage/capacity and the new power connectors (24-pin for motherboard).

The rendertest results for dual core only happens when RAM preview is a certain size, and when the video preview window is turned off.

39s - AMD X2 4600+

2- RAM:
I don't think there are any incompatibility issues to watch out for.
They all more or less perform the same. The low latency stuff makes no difference for render speed in Vegas (hidden by experimental error in my tests).

3- There's another current thread here about building a machine for Vegas.

4- Do you have an AGP graphics card? Do you want to re-use it? Most but not all the socket939 motherboards (for X2) require a pciE graphics card. Some take AGP.

Do you want to re-use your RAM?

5- The following info may be helpful:
Swapping your board without so much as a reinstall (243kB of images, updated Dec '05)
http://episteme.arstechnica.com/groupee/forums/a/tpc/f/77909774/m/1400925745
Wes C. Attle wrote on 1/6/2006, 7:00 PM
Option 2. Can't be beat for the money. I have a dual CPU Opteron system, my wife has a dual-core X2 system. Dual-core CPU's will perform exactly the same as dual CPUs of the same speed and L2 cache size. So you get the same perf for MUCH LESS cost when going with the dual-core X2. With money saved you could go with a 2.2 or 2.4 Ghz X2 instead of the 2.0 Ghz Opteron you are thinking of. You would still win with performance and cost by far.

I built the 3800+ X2 system for my wife. The $300 range 2.0 Ghz X2 is plenty for most needs. 3800 X2 will give you about twice the rendering perormance of a Pentium 4 single core 3.0 Ghz CPU. You only gain 10% with each 200 Mhz increase, so up to you to decide if you need a bit more. Go with the 512 MB cache X2's. The 1GB cache size really doesn't give much value in the desktop/workstation world.

Go with the newer Nforce 4 chipset motherboards which offer RAID and take advantage of the latest and greatest disks and stuff. All those nForce4 motherboards are great. Especially Asus, Gigabyte, and DFI. Choose a PC case that fits your size and future expansion expectations. Don't skimp on the PSU wattage, especially if you get a high-end video card or two, and multiple disks for RAID. You should have at least two separate disks for Vegas. Recommend a RAID 0 array only for you media/video files source disk. Greatly improves things. Keep your Windows paging file on this disk too. (Vegas rendering times increase for me by 15% when I keep the paging file on a separate disk from the Vegas temp/scratch files). Does not seem to matter when paging file and source media are on the same disk.

I built my wife's PC with a Shuttle SN25P barebones kit. It is dead silent, includes motherboard, PSU, cooling system, but small form factor and not good for adding lots of disks later.

Get the cheapest generic RAM. There is no Video editing related performance difference despite the many PC gamers who believe otherwise.

There is absolutely no reason to consider an Intel CPU at this date and time.

If in the US, buy it all online at newegg.com or http://www.monarchcomputer.com for best prices and good service.


Mr_fps wrote on 1/8/2006, 7:37 AM
Thank you all for the input.

Has anyone had any experience with the 100 series dual core socket 939 opterons on non Tyan motherboards. AMD seems to be only supporting the Tyan as far as their official compatible board. I like the dual core Opterons though for many reasons.

On the other hand my local store has a major sale on the Opteron 150 (2.4Ghz single core) as well.

Here's the scenario:

Opteron 170 (dual core 2Ghz)
Opteron 150 (single core 2.4Ghz)
Athon X2 3800 or 4200

Which one would you go with (or have built) and what is your motherboard?

Great Forum...thanks again.
GlennChan wrote on 1/8/2006, 5:21 PM
The 1xx series Opterons (single processor only, designed for servers) are really good overclockers. Overclocking does waste time if you test your system for stability. If you don't overclock, I believe you wouldn't really have a need for the 1xx Opterons. They are designed for server use and last time I checked, Opteron systems are more expensive.

The X2 might be a clear winner if you can't re-use RAM on the Opteron systems (I think Opterons will require registered RAM, but I'm not 100% sure).

2- Go for dual core over a single core since Vegas can take advantage of dual core.
Wes C. Attle wrote on 1/8/2006, 9:28 PM
For the price, X2's will give you more than the 100 series Opterons. And yes Opterons require Reg ECC RAM as the server platform standard.