"Win Vista 64 Intel core i7 940 @ 2.93 GHz 6G ram Vegas 8.1 1:08"

Woo-hoo. David Newman from Cineform also has some Core i7 benches posted on his blog:

http://cineform.blogspot.com/

Coursedesign...

Here is my complete system info. Although it probably wasn't necessary, I did add another 8gigs of RAM to the system. I'm always looking for any kind of performance boost. So if anyone has any recommendations, I would appreciate it.

Professional Video Editing System:
Poly 5400X8

1- Poly 5400X8 1600FSB Xeon MB 6SATA2GLAN 7.1A 1394
2- Intel QuadCore Xeon X5450 3GHz 12M 1333FSB
8GB Memory: 4x DDR2 667MHz 2GB PC5300 Memory ECC Full Buffered
1- TX110 Stacker Full Tower Black (STC-T01-UWK)
1- 1000W Quiet P/S PFC,High Efficiency SLI,
2x Seagate 500GB SATA-II 7200RPM HD 16MB Cache
2x Seagate 73GB SAS 15K RPM Cheetah 16MB HD 3.5"
4x Seagate 146GB SAS 15Krpm Cheetah hard drive 3.5"
1- Adaptec ABM Memory Back up Module SAS Kit
1- Adaptec 3805 SAS 8port RAID-6 Controller PCIe LP
1- On-board 1394 Firewire Ports
1- 52-In-One USB 2.0 3.5" Internal Card Reader Blk
1- Lite-On 20X LightScribe DVD+/-RW Dual-Layer IDE
1- Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Platinum Fatal1ty
1- Nvidia QuadroFX 1700 512MB GDDR2 (Dual DVI)w/HD
1- Windows Vista Ultimate 64Bit DVD
1- 3 Yr Polywell Phone Support (M-F, 9am-4:30pm PST)No Fee
1- 3yr Parts Replacement in Advance
1- 5yr Labor,3yr Ltd-part warranty
1- Bootable Recovery DVD Disc for System Restore
1- System Assembly & Packaging for Server/WStation
Price: $7476
Shipping: $79
Total Price: $7555

Christian, cost for Asus P6T MB, 6G ram, 940 CPU & Vista 64 was $2K CDN, then i had to add another $200, for the ASUS Xonar since i couldn't get the onboard audio to do ASIO, and my MAudio Revolution 7.1 still doesn't have 64 bit drivers. All four PCIeX slots are full, there's 5TB onlline, and i bought a cheap video card with HDMI/HDCP in case that becomes necessary. Once i get the rest of the software installed and vista optimized, then i can play with mild over-clocking.

T60 T7200
Vegas 8.0c
5:41

"since i couldn't get the onboard audio to do ASIO"

But you can! This works on virtually all sound cards in both 32 and 64 bit operating systems:

http://www.asio4all.com

Hi I'm new here.

I saw this post and I tried the file on my Q6600 2.4Ghz with 6 gigs and it did it in 90 seconds flat.

MS Vista x64, Vegas 8.1 x64

"i couldn't get the onboard audio to do ASIO, and my MAudio Revolution 7.1 still doesn't have 64 bit drivers."

You know.... I'm sorry but I have to say this.... That's just pathetic. (IMO)... you show me a company that has yet to produce 64 bit drivers for their hardware, and I'll show you a company that doesn't deserve my hard earned cash!

sadly asio4all doesn't do 48KHz.

"sadly asio4all doesn't do 48KHz."

Hmmm, it does on the laptop and the one desktop machine on which I am running it.

1 minute 11 secs

Vegas 8.1
Intel Core i7 920 (2.67 GHz)
ASUS P6T Deluxe Motherboard
6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3 1333
Vista 64-Bit Home Premium
~$1700 system (inclusive the above, plus video card, two HDDs)

No overclocking of Core i7 920 (have not got around to it).

John_Cline,

If you are still reading the posts in this thread, have you kept a tally of the fastest times, and the configurations used to get those times? It is a little daunting to go through this thread which is probably one of the longest in the history of this board. One day soon I will finally upgrade my six-year-old computer and I'd like to build the "money is no object" best I can do.

John,

Oh, yes, I still read this thread. I was keeping track of the various setups and their render times, but I fell behind and gave up. I don't think there's ever been a thread on this forum that's hit 277 posts. The new Intel Core i7 chips seem to be winning, my original Quad-core from almost two years ago got a render time of 120 seconds, the i7 machine just a few messages up in this thread is getting 51 seconds with a non-overclocked CPU (using Vegas v8.1 in Vista64.) Someone is going to hit a 45 second render any day now...

I usually buy new machines when they are twice as fast as my current machines. It looks like it's time to get out the checkbook and build something new. Considering how absolutely rock-solid my last machines have been, there is no doubt whatsoever that I will be building new machines based on an Intel i7 CPU, Intel chipset and Intel motherboard.

The only question is whether to build one now or wait a month until the dual CPU Core i7 mobos hit the streets. A PC built around one of those babies should be able to lower the benchmark to around 30 seconds. I'm torn, my "wish list" Core i7 machine on NewEgg has fallen to below $3500 and probably will go lower in another month. Going to dual Xeon Core i7s will jack the price up another $300 extra for the motherboard and ~$600 for the 2nd CPU. I'm not sure it's worth it, but time is money.

John,

Thanks for the update. Very useful to hear that the Core i7 is probably the best CPU to look at. Thanks jab for the additional info on that.

I generally wait until the performance improvement is much greater than 2x, just because it takes so darn much time to get a new computer configured (the software) the way I want. It is always at least 2-3 days of non-productive time. However, you will note that I was the first person to respond to this thread, and the time on my now six-year-old computer (which I am still using) was 14:41. That's 881 seconds. I compare that 51 seconds, and that is a factor of 17x. Given the magnitude of that multiple, I guess my 2-3 day investment will be paid back pretty quickly by recouping time on renders. Hopefully the timeline speed will go down by a noticeable amount as well, although given that many of the performance gains of the past years have come from parallelism, and that doesn't provide much advantage to timeline playback. I don't know if there has ever been any attempt to benchmark that. I guess you could do it if you could somehow ensure that everyone had the identical Preview settings and then reported the sustained fps number shown on the preview window.

first render came in at 33 seconds
second one took longer??

It's highly unlikely that you were able to complete the render test in 33 seconds. You must render it out as a MainConcept MPEG-2 using the default HDV 1080-60i template with it set to the "best" render setting (selected by hitting the "Custom" button.)

all you'd really have to do is have everyone reset everything to default when they started up vegas and then run a set filter, or series of filters on a clip and watch the number, (making sure none of it has been buffered in the ram).

That would give you a common ground by which you could test the playback rate during editing of different procs and configurations of hardware.

Dave

Vegas 8.1 x64 = 1:07
Vegas 8.0 32-bit = 1:58

Intel Core i7 940 2.9ghz
Vista x64
12GB RAM

So it seems the i7 is not that much faster than my old QX6700 @ 3.0 GHz :)

I am in the process of building up a Core i7 PC with a 920 processor that will be pretty much the same as the one rtbond is using to get a rendertest of 1 minute 11 seconds. So I'm assuming that I will get similar performance from my new machine.

Just for drill I ran the rendertest on my ancient 1.9 GHz Pentium with 1 GB RAM and Vegas 8.1. The results were stunning and, I believe, represent a new LOW for this forum: 39:53. That's 2393 seconds as compared to rtbond's 71 seconds.

So I expect an improvement in my Vegas Rendering of 2393/71 or 33.7. That sounds pretty good to me. And I plan to overclock so I might squeeze my way up to a 35 to 40 to one improvement. LIfe is good - or at least it's about to be.

My old system amd athlon xp 1800+ 384mb ram
31:28
You win by 8 minutes wow

Small update,

I made the step to Vista 64bit and with nothing on it besides Vegas 8.1 and now 6GB RAM I was able to come down from 2' 53" with WinXP32bit to 2' 11" :-) Not a blast but it seems to work out. Now, I only have to get used to VISTA, buahahahahahaaaaaaa