OT:Dual Xeons & Vegas

overyonder wrote on 8/29/2008, 10:03 AM
Anyone using dual quad xeons? I'm going to be building a new system soon and want it to remain perky for awhile to come. Will also be moving up to HD. My other chioce would be a single q6600 quad core.
Question is would the xeons be overkill, with the added cost of about $400-$500, and how would vegas benefit?

thanks all,
--
John

Comments

Jeff9329 wrote on 8/29/2008, 11:45 AM
Don't know about dual Xeons.

I do know you should consider the Q9550 as the base processor rather than the Q6600. The Q9550 was a decent improvement over the Q6600 and the Q6600 is available but out of production already.

Find the rendertest thread for CPU comparisons.
jabloomf1230 wrote on 8/29/2008, 8:17 PM
Use the forum search function. Vegas 8.0b Pro only supports 4 cores. The x64 version (8.1 due out in September 08) is rumored to support 8 cores and possibly more. Your best bet at the moment would be an Intel Skulltrail D5400XS motherboard with two Xeon 5440 Harpertown quad core processors. You could go with a faster Xeon, but once you go above 3 GHz, the price per processor is > $1K US. You could also choose a server mobo, but don't expect the to also function as a gaming computer, etc.

Assuming that Vegas 8.1 does support 8+ cores, such a system would not be overkill, as video rendering in Vegas (and most other NLEs) scales up linearly with the number of cores.
ritsmer wrote on 8/30/2008, 12:22 AM
Got a Mac Pro 4 months ago. It has double quad Harpertown Xeons.
Installed Boot Camp and Windows XP sp2++. It runs VMSP 8 and 9 and also full Vegas very well.
True, that VMSP "only" supports 4 rendering threads - but some plugins, FX's and transitions utilize more threads themselves (i.e. Neat Video) so that 6-8 processors are working hard when I render.
It also seems to be a codec issue - meaning that there are differences in the CPU load when you render to i.e. wmv or mpg.

... and with such a machine you can have 1 or 2 render jobs humming in the background and still do some decent editing or other work in the foreground.

... and BTW when you consider the salesprice of a 2 years old Mac Pro compared to a 2 years old HomeBuilt - well then ...