Just curious, but if overclocking works at all, why would you expect it to affect how Vegas renders in any way except speeding it up?

Yeah, overclocking is so early 2000's

Why bother with 8-16 cores?

Good question Chienworks.

I had read several postings where people were apparently overclocking okay, but when using Vegas had some crashes and lockups. Of course, that certainly isn't proof of anything.

So, I thought I'd come to the source and get some users experience.
Since I'm thinking about a new motherboard, I'm also wondering if overclocking works and what the improvement might be.

Speaking of cores , pro 9.0b here did crash on 16 cores ( 2 x Xeon Nehalem ).
Pro 9.0c however runs when hyperthreading enabled and thus having 16 cores .

When however render now ( 8 or 16 cores ) with pro 9.0c , it starts rendering the first few seconds only at 100 % processor power whilst immediately thereafter drops to 40 % to 50 % only processor power till the end .
The RAM use maxes and stays at 8 Gigs only ( 24 Gigs available ) as if vegas really limits it to 8 gigs total workstation limit.
Result is much slower render then pro 9.0b which did same job at 100 % processor use all the time .
Noticed this on 2 x 1.5 hours recording which had to be rendered and re-rendered.

I am always rendering ( for 2 years now ) m2t into mpeg dvdarch and now with pro9.0c have set the quality over speed mark and quality set to 31 ( default is 20 ) since I want best possible DVD quality .
Is this quality over speed mark causing all this ? ( end quality still not to be proud of actually , not at all , considering the perfect amazing sharp original m2t recordings of the sony HVR-V1 camera )

windows vista 64 - vegas pro 9.0 x 64 bit - dell workstation T7500 - 2 x Xeon Nehalem - 24 Gigs 1333MHz DDR3 RAM - 2 x quadro FX3800- 3 x 10k rpm HDD - 2 x 1TB 7k5 rpm HDD

Render time drops proportionately to the CPU speed - assuming you are able to fully load the CPU when rendering - that depends on the file format you are rendering to and the file source.

Yes, I have a Core i7-920 (2.66 GHz) running at 3.8 GHz with Vegas v9 with no stability issues. I am using a 3rd party heat sink and not the Intel heat sink.

It's quite easy to get an overclock with the i7 920. The Asus P6T board lets you change one setting in bios to get you up to 3.6. As rtbond says, get a new CPU cooler and you're good to go. Nice thing is, at least with Windows 7, when not under load the CPU will run at around 2.0. Then when you render, it jumps up to 3.6, all cores maxing out to 100% - at least with files I've rendered so far.

Why not have a fast chip if it's this easy? Some will say the heat will wear out your components, but apparently the i7 is designed to go to 100C before it "throttles" down for self protection. When I render a project, the temp is about 70C. So I feel I'm well within the safety zone...

Vegas 9c and win 7 64 is so far so good.

Thanks all for the good information

After reading this thread I did a test using John Cline's Rendertest HDV as a benchmark. Enabling hyperthreading so all 8 cores are active.

Time = 2:09 (while rendering core +/- 50% to 80%

Disabling hyperthreading so only 4 cores are active.

Time = 1:49 All cores 100%.

System: Gigabyte X58 - i7 920 - 6GB 1333 Ram.

Hi,

You really benefit from overclocking especially during rendering (and during playback of HD material). But only assuming it is done properly, and with enough margin. Overclocking can easily result in an unstable PC, so you must really know what you are during the tuning.

I have been running Qx9650 Quad core PC now for 2 years @ 3,8GHz, with no problems whatsoever. But you need better cooling than standard Intel. And a good mobo.

My rendertest runs at 1:11 (71 seconds) on VP9.0c and WIN7 64-bit. Not bad - compared even to all the new CPU's...

Christian

What surprised me was that the 8 cores ran slower than 4 cores.