PC performance question

nataq wrote on 4/13/2005, 7:18 PM
Hi,
I am in the process of upgrading my system because I just started HDV editing.

I have two questions, maybe some of you can help me with those. I have read a lot in the forums and elsewhere.

What can I expect from a dual xeon processor PC. How much more speed will it give me, if I maximise the performance on any other part of the pc.

The same question for an SCSI Harddrive. How much faster will this be compared to a non SCSI. Average seek times seem to be around 9ms with SATA and 3.5 with SCSI. Is this worth the extra money? How much can I expect?

Thanks for any answer!

Comments

BillyBoy wrote on 4/13/2005, 8:11 PM
What can I expect from a dual xeon processor PC?

A BIG price tag.

How much more speed will it give me, if I maximise the performance on any other part of the pc?

I always consider the price to performance ratio. If you pick a decent motherboard, do some modest overclocking, get a faster CPU and the fastest memory it supports, such a system will give similar performace to the one your thinking about and let you keep about $1500 in your bank account.

The same about SCSI drives. Once upon a time they were better. Not really anymore. Why do you think you need faster seek times? All seek time means is how long it takes to position the read/write heads. In other words a ONE TIME event every time you read a file. A faster seek time may be useful if your a ISP and are feeding web pages. Otherwise for most tasks, meaningless fluff. Ask yourself, does it really matter if it takes a tad longer to seek a file? No, of course not. Same with other marketing hype such as sustained throughput speed.

Video rendering is an intensive task for the CPU, but not for your hard drive. Its all buzz. Save your money and instead get a BIGGER drive. That you'll use.


Spot|DSE wrote on 4/13/2005, 8:39 PM
Nataq,
I'd recommend waiting just a little while. You'll want something with more mature multithreading, and those are just starting to really hit the streets now. The AMD 252's scream, but you'll see some prices on these and the new Intel's dropping. If you want a Xeon system, which does have some benefits, you'll not want the latest/greatest, just due to price.
Having a GOOD software RAID is critical for HD/HDV, or better, having a dual channel 320 SCSI system. You need the fastest sustained speed possible, and SATA just isn't seeming to really cut it unless you've got a good software RAID controller. Otherwise, you'll really struggle getting multiple streams playing back. Ask this question again if you can wait a week, and I'll give you some real time response on a currently NDA system that we'll be using at NAB. Or, maybe one of the Sony guys will chime in on what they're experimenting with before then.
pelladon wrote on 4/13/2005, 8:55 PM
Nataq, both intel and AMD are coming out with dual-core chips. If you can wait, it might be worthwhile.

I think DSE meant hardware, not software RAID controller :) SCSI is the standard for RAID due to maturity, but SATA is getting there.
Spot|DSE wrote on 4/13/2005, 9:17 PM
What I meant to say was exactly that. Thanks for the catch. I should have put a "not software" in there. I have seen a couple software RAID packages that look good but...it's still not there.
BTW, avoid Promise RAID controllers like the plague. We've seen some serious issues with these lately.
Yoyodyne wrote on 4/13/2005, 10:05 PM
I would also love to hear about what you guys are using and having good luck with - I'm waiting till after NAB to put together my new system (The dual core stuff sounds very promising).

FuTz wrote on 4/14/2005, 4:44 AM
What were the issues with Promise controllers?
Dexterbot@gmail.com wrote on 4/28/2005, 2:21 PM
I would like to point out a couple of things...

In reality, you can expect to pay about the same for a single P4 3.6 system and a dual Xeon 3.0. I've done a lot of research on this and I'm still debating whether I should upgrade mine to a Dual Xeon vs single processor.

A dual processor won't give you much performance improvement if the application is not written to utilize the extra processor (multi threaded application). In my opinion, I believe Vegas is still in the early stages of the Multi Threaded processing. I did a bit of research from this forum and what I can gather from the product detail and it appears to me that the biggest performance gain is in the rendering.

However, there is little written about performance while you are performing your typical task of compositing complex effects. I've had times when my PC would just freeze because of the amount of layers of effects applied. I'm not an expert but I think a lot of plug-ins such as Magic Bullet and Pixelan may not be multi-threaded so having an extra processor may not increase your overall performance and it's a mystery to me during render how the application splits that off to multi processors.

As far as Hard Drive is concern, I highly recommend a RAID 0 or data striping configuration. This is brought up by many above. It will give you the highest performance boost but at a very expensive risk of losing the data if one of your drives in the RAID array goes down so make sure you backup frequently. I've used PATA RAID and now SATA RAID and the performance boost over a single drive is HUGE. You will notice that during cuts on a very large file, it's almost seamless.

I currently have 320 GB made up of 2 160 GB drives in RAID 0 as my video drive. I then have a primary boot/system drive which is strictly for my WinXP and all my apps are installed in there as well. Then I have a 3rd drive for all the project files. I also have an external drive that I use to backup my RAID drives every couple of days.
apit34356 wrote on 4/28/2005, 2:52 PM
dual cores are hot items, but definitely wait a couple of weeks, Some serious news is coming out about new and improved rendering engines that used the graphic cards cpus. I have been using a couple of these new graphic rendering engines for 3d effects for avi since september and they are real speed demons. A few software houses are looking/testing mpeg2/4 rendering engines using the same approach. Maybe Sony can beat Apple on this new approach.