The reason they are 2.4GHz processors is because they are guaranteed to work at 2.4GHz. Call me old fashioned, but I wouldn't risk anything on a production machine running outside its specification.
I appreciate that these Core 2s are far more overclockable than their predecessors (heh, "predecessor processor") but the way I see it, it's like driving 10% over the speed limit - mostly its safe enough but there's always the risk of (a) a kid running out into the middle of the road or (b) getting caught in a speed trap.
Ask yourself the Dirty Harry question :)

Thanks Tim. - Yeah, I had a similar thought too.

Bottom line here is what IS the difference 2.xx <££> 3.0 ? Yeah?

Does the memory sound about correct? 2GB DDR2-667 . . ?

Will this be good enough for HD? Will I see a difference between this and my existing 3.2? I'm sure I will.

TIA

Grazie

Normally I'd agree with you 101% (just to be safe) but Intel in the latest stepping unlocked the multipliers to make it much easier to OC these chips, I think they did this for a reason.
How safe is it though, well when with extra cooling these CPUs are being pushed beyond 4GHz and that's with nothing fancy in the way of cooling, just of the shelf liquid cooling, even nervous nelly me kind of feels you've got to be pretty safe at 3GHz.

Bob.

1- You could stress test your system to see if it's stable overclocked. Programs like StressPrime95 will do this.

As well, just use the system and see if there are weird crashes or reboots... if there are, then back off and see if that weirdness disappears. Wonky hardware leads to really weird problems.

Whether overclocking is worth your time is up to you... you do lose some time stress testing your system and figuring out if/why there are weird crashes going on.

2- the way I see it, it's like driving 10% over the speed limit - mostly its safe enough but there's always the risk of (a) a kid running out into the middle of the road or (b) getting caught in a speed trap.
Where I live, most people drive about 10km/h over the speed limit. (Or maybe 5km/h.)

I believe the traffic planners factor that in. And they know that if they raise the speed limit, then drivers will go 10km/h over THAT.

There is a certain level of headroom/safety built in... (except in the PCI bus and such... make sure it isn't overclocked or you will get corrupt data).

"Will this be good enough for HD?"

That really depends. HD involves processing 4 times the amount of data than SD. If your current system was having a struggle doing what you do in SD then you do need 4x the CPU grunt, actually more because the CPU has to work harder decoding the mpeg-2 stream(s) than it does for SD DV.

Bob.

Is anybody having success using this INTEL setup with HD?

BTW, Bob, I am not having an issue editing SD. We get along fine together.

So, real world feedback please?

Grazie

So, if it's perfectly safe to overclock a 2.4GHz chip to 3.0GHz, why not get the 3.0GHz chip and overclock it to 3.75GHz?

From memory the 3GHz chip isn't as easy to overclock, the clock multiplers are locked. Also the heat is a function of speed and voltage, so the 3GHz CPU at 3.75 is going to create as much heat as the 2.4GHz CPU at 3.75.
Then again I'm no overclocking guru by a very long stretch.
Just my hazy memory of what I'd read on THG.

Bob.

The quad 6600 is significantly faster with Vegas renders than the e6850 and is at price parity at newegg:

http://www.hothardware.com/articles/Intel_Core_2_Extreme_QX9770_Performance_Preview/?page=6

George

Well! by George - I think you are putting the Cat-Amongst-the-Chickens!!

This is the type of real world observations that I am going to "share" with my builder. Oh yes! Up to this point it was going to be the "Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz." Hmmm..... . .

Just love those EXTREME Vegas render time values!!! Smokin'

Thank you

Grazie

Grazie,
Using a P4 - 2.8Ghz HT on an efficient setup compared to my Intel Q6600 quad the renders on the Q6600 quad are approx 5 times faster.
So, for a Core2-Duo at 3Ghz I would expect at least double.

I just opened Vegas Pro8, loaded in some avchd files from a HG10 HD avchd cam.
Assigned only 2 cores to Vegas (under taskmgr) & left 4 threads the default under preferences.
Render 1 Minute avchd to 1080i (m2t) = 2 Min 52 Sec's

Closed Vegas, cleared temp files, manually loaded files again & trimmed to 1 minute
With 4 cores to Vegas (default) Render 1 Minute avchd to 1080i (m2t) = 1 Min 29 Sec's
What's nice is Vegas Pro 8a will use all 4 cores.
No overclocking, standard Q6600 @ 2.4Ghz

I think on a P4-2.8Ghz machine this was about 5 min 30sec's or so for a 1 minute conversion.
If you have to work with avchd/h264 I think you would want the Q6600 for proper playing, trimming, exporting etc.

Other applications do not see this type of benefit by choosing the quad core version because they do not leverage all 4 cores. Pinnacle Studio is an example, but Vegas seems to do an excellent job of extracting the horsepower. Good luck.

George

I'll vouch for what George says about the quad core.
I'm working on a project right now that has undergone several revisions.
After each series of changes, I burn a DVD for approval and wait for the comments.
On my work P4 3.4 GHz box, the 1 hr. 40 min. video (SD video, nothing fancy) takes almost 5 hr. to render :-(
My home quad core does it in less than 1 hr. !!
Guess where I do my rendering :-O

Mike

Grazie, dont forget the motherboard makes a lt of diffrence as well, inc. the FSB and the on board cache.

Leave the old maching and just get a new one, go Quad...

With regard to overclocking, and as a digital design engineer by profession, and one who has seen some of the problems with fine pitch geometry semi-custom devices, I would state the following:

1. The less serious problem: Unless you have good cooling and can keep the junction temperature of the chip reasonable, you are degrading the mean time between failure of the device, based on standard reliability calculations. For most practical purposes, the CPU will still outlive you, unless it is running very hot.

2. The more serious problem - metal migration. The current densities in those very fine wires in the CPU (more than a hundred can fit in the width of a single human hair) are a difficult problem to manage. Metal migration is a well-known problem with fine geometry devices, which is caused by high electron densities literally pushing around metal atoms to the point where a wire will eventually fail. By overclocking a device that may have a metal chemistry at its design limits, currents increases with overclocking could bring on a short term failure (maybe weeks or months) due to metal migration. That's one problem which, if it were me, I would want to not have to worry about , at the expense of running a little slower.

-Digital Steve

Grazie, my system (see my system information, with 2GB RAM) isn't fast enough for my wishes in HD, although it is very usable . The quad core should be considered (reports in this forum indicate good HD performance). I suspect that I'll be needing an upgrade when I start on 2K HD. More for real-time previewing than rendering. In computers and video it seems to be a matter of how much you can afford rather than how much you can save, if that makes any sense!

Get the Intel Q6600 and overclock to 3.0 with stock voltage.
Get the Intel BLKD975XBX2KR motherboard.
Get a good cooler, Artic Cooler freezer pro is great budget 30 ish
Corsair TWIN2X2048-6400C4 (4GB) always on sale
You have plenty of SATA RAID ports.
GB Enet.
Mother board has a rear 1394 port and you can wire in a front 1394 port off the motherboard.

Optionally you can put a Black Magic Card in a PCI-e slot, you can put a Raid Card in a PCI-e slot, and a PCI-e graphics card. plus 2 more std pci slots.

You can build this for around $1,300..US.... w/ windows xp pro and 250 GB SATA.

Spend about 20 minutes with google and the Intel BLKD975XBX2KR search with over clock and out of 20 hits, you should find 5 or 6 with the same bios settings for over clocking without having to go crazy. Don't spend the extra time to get it above 3 GHz as it's not worth the extra effort and getting near the edge for reliability. You can over clock the memory, but again, not sure if it's worth it.

It does HDV fine, but you will want more horsepower in a another 12-18 months. So the above is a great inexpensive way to get some great performance. If you are doing uncompressed hd, you will need a 8 + driver Raid array for multiple lanes.

Big Bang for the Buck

good luck

Noticed that Alienware are now selling a system with an Intel® Core™ 2 Extreme QX9650 3.0GHz over-clocked to 4.0 GHz! It ships in January. This being done at the factory means it comes with a warranty. However, this bang costs a lot of bucks.

Big Bang for the Buck

You bet Willi - I build me such a few month back and it's really fast. Rendering for DVDA is screaming compared to 3.0 GHz P4

/Ulf

Now here's something with some real grunt.
Looks like they'll even let you run Vegas on it too, for the price they should throw a copy.

Bob.

Not so silly really. What we need is an easy way to build clusters, so we could just add processors as we need more power. The secret is in the software that manages information and I understand doesn't require the actual application (e.g. Vegas) to know that there are really 100 CPUs working away. One of the guys who used to be in my team went away to do research on such systems -- where is he now he's needed in the real world (i.e. video post rather than aerospace)?

Grazie, Considering that you tend to keep your PC's for several years, I would not accept anything less than a QuadCore upgrade. You will be sorry two years from now when you are still running with 2 cores and everyone else is upgrading from 4 to 8! At least get 4 now so you can get some longevity from it.

~jr