I have no worries at all about overclocking as long as other parameters are favorable. For example, my PC lives in a room that has moderate temperatures. If it were in a hot room, that would have a large effect on the amount of overclockability.

Get a definitive answer about overclockability by downloading a free utility called "StressPrime 2004", a GUI-friendly version of the famous Prime95 stress test. With it, you'll know immediately just how much you can overclock and yet maintain complete stability. One test runs the CPU(s) hard, and the third test runs both CPU and memory hard. If it doesn't fail after hours of testing, you're golden. If it does fail, just dial back the freq a bit and try again.

Just came back to this thread to get ideas for my next system and re-read Nick's post above.

Nick, I am by no means an expert at this overclocking thing, but if you showed CPU temps of 90C there's something seriously amiss somewhere. Over the past few years with three different AMD setups (a 1.2GHz T'bird, a 1.6 AMDxp, and the current 3800x2) the CPU temps at stock settings never went above 50C and even when overclocked never went much above 60C. I discovered empirically that the CPUs would fail at about 65C (not a permanent "fail," they would run fine afterwards if the clock frequency was reduced a bit). My current 3800x2 peaks at about 61C after hours of torture testing with Prime95 and this is with a 30% overclock. So I'm surprised at the 90 degree mention. We're talking Celsius here, yes?

Yes Riredale, we're talking Celcius.

It's been running fine with no overclocking, and I'm basically happy with that. I'm away from home at the moment but I think the cores are in the 70s now in the middle of a heavy render and in the 50s at other times.

Maybe the CPU isn't seated perfectly. I'm a bit averse to removing and re-seating it though as I've had such a battle getting to this point i'm not keen on upsetting things for the time being.

I'd be very interested to hear what temps other quad users' cores are reaching.

Nick, my quad core temps are the same as yours in both circumstances.

Mike

There is no doubt about it... the quad cores temps run quite a bit higher. My q6600 is overclocked to 3Ghz and I have had to resort to liquid cooling to get the temps down... but the liquid cool does do a good job... idle is 37 and full load is about 65

"So I'm surprised at the 90 degree mention. We're talking Celsius here, yes?"

Yes... When I first overclocked mine with no liquid cool the temp shot up to close to 100C. I remember watching the temp gage continue to climb with no stopping... I said to myself This can't be right!? I had the case open at the time so I tried to hold my finger to the side of the cpu and I could not hold my finger to it, it was so hot. It scared the crap out of me!! I didn't even bother with a normal shutdown... just grabbed the power cord and pulled it from the wall.

Amazing.

In my humble and biased opinion I believe 60C is too hot. Heat is the number one culprit of solid state stuff.
JJK

Hmmm... 124 seconds for me.
I think something is wrong with my memory though - it all tests OK, but I am only using about 1.3GB of my 4GB installed.
CPU is at 100% (all four cores)

System:
Q6700 CPU overclocked slightly to 2.933MHZ
4 GB memory at 4-4-4-12 timing
Raid 5 work drive (1TB)
Raptor 15,000rpm app drive
Nvidia 8800GTX 768MB graphics card running dual monitors

No issues with heat. I am using an Antec 900 case with the fans turned up halfway and my CPU is staying nice and cool. It went from a 51C differential (at rest) down to a 31C differential (at 100%). Still in the 'green zone' on the meter.

Anyone know how I can max out my memory for more efficient rendering...or does it even make difference?

21:25 on AMD Sempron 3000+ notebook with 640 megs of ram run at stock 1.8 ghz. Ram is PC-2700.

I will post desktop number later tonight.

Joe

Andrew,

Vegas is only going to use as much RAM as it needs. 1.3GB for this test sounds about right.

However, if your QX6700 is overclocked to 2.93Ghz, I would have expected the render to come in under 120 seconds. How are you overclocking? Raising the multiplier or raising the FSB speed?

John

I am using intel's motherboard, so I only see the option for the multiplier.
I turned off all my other applications (virus, task manager, temperature monitor) and saved a few seconds.
I bumped the multiplier up to 3.466Ghz and complete the test in exactly 120 seconds.
Sounds slow, huh?
Motherboard is a D975XBX2...

Any ideas on what could be slowing things down? I do notice it takes a few seconds for the frame counter to start when rendering.

I've got the same motherboard, processor with 2 gig of Corsair RAM. (My complete system specs are HERE.) At its stock 2.66Ghz speed, I consistently get 119 second renders. When overclocking (leaving the multiplier at 10 and raising the FSB speed from 266 to 300), the render time drops to 107 seconds. When I crank it up to 373, the render takes 85 seconds. Do you have the latest BIOS for your motherboard? There have been a number of BIOS updates since it was released.

Intel D975XBX2 BIOS Updates

John

P4 3.4 E 800 FSB

8:55 (535 seconds) - not bad for a P4

Does this test have any real world results meaning? Im wondering if the I/O of hard drive HDV data puts a significant damper on the performance.

Someone should host a 1080i m2t file for a test not using generated media. It would be interesting to compare to the already posted results.

__________________________________________
Edit 7-23-2007

Well, I guess the OC experimenting I did while running the rendertest was the final straw for my well used P4 system. Motherboard just failed and it (P4S800D-E Deluxe) or anything close is no longer available. I will be trying out my new quad core build later ($1000+ later, bummer) this week after Newegg delivers.

Hard drive I/O has very little impact on rendering, any modern hard drive is plenty fast enough to keep up. When rendering .M2T files, the speed of the CPU is still the major limiting factor.

The only time hard drive speed becomes a significant factor is when you're doing a "smart render" using DV footage when Vegas is merely copying unmodified video and audio data from one hard drive location to another. In this case, it is always faster to have your footage on one physical hard drive and render to another physical hard drive. Whenever Vegas is dealing with video which has been modified in any way from its original form, then the CPU is doing 99% of the work and the hard drives are basically operating just above idle.

John

Vegas 7.0d
4.5 year old dual-Xeon 2.8GHz hyperthreaded system
10:01

A standard test involving a hosted HDV file would be interesting. I found that the dynamic RAM preview setting makes a big difference to rendering times when I'm rendering from .m2t files, but in this generated media test it makes no difference as long as it is not zero.

I am getting 3.36 on a quad core 2.4 with 4 gigs of ram, and two radeon cards, but I may swap them for nvidia even though it should not matter on the same system yesterday I ran two radeon a 1650 with 512 and 1550 with 256 and the times were slower to run the file as running an nvidia 8500gt with 256 by half so now I need to figure out if I can get a 8500 and 6200 to run together in one system I have an onboard 6150 and a 8600gtc running together.

Reason for two cards is I want two monitors a 22inch at 1650x1050 and a 19inch at 1440x900 and a lcd at 1920x1080p works well and great for playback to see what I am getting on HD since I am mainly still burning SD dvds so I cannot even output to dvd and see full res. Plus in vegas this works great as a realtime third monitor to preview.

I just ran it also on a dual core amd 5000 with 4 gigs also vista nvidia 8600 and 6150 running also two monitors and 42 inch 1080p that did it in 6.05

Strangely the same test rendering to wmv takes 3.10 on the quad system and 3.23 on the dual any reason?

"I am getting 3.36 on a quad core 2.4 with 4 gigs of ram, and two radeon cards, "
===========================================================
That seems a bit slow for a quad core... I wonder if the dual cards have something to do with it?

You should read this anyway... there is a blurb in there somewhere that mentions something about dual cards affecting memory:

http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm

Im getting 2:08 on my Q6600 machine.

Can probably get below 2 with some tweaking.

Q6600 running Vegas 7.0e - 2:14

Mac mini w/Bootcamp/XPHome SP2/V7.0e
1.66 GHz T2300 CoreDuo 2Gb RAM
7:46