Upgrade strategy with V5 network rendering

BrianStanding wrote on 4/19/2004, 1:47 PM
I have two computers at home: an Athlon XP 2700+, and an old Athlon Thunderbird 800.

I'm thinking of upgrading, but I'm on a limited budget. Which do you think would give me an overall better performance boost with V5?

1. Upgrade the XP 2700+ system to a P4 2.8Ghz 800FSB system, or;

2. Upgrade the Athlon 800 to a second XP 2700+, add two gigabit network cards, and use network rendering in V5?

Or is this simply too early for anyone to know?

Comments

SonyPJM wrote on 4/19/2004, 3:11 PM

I can't give you a clear-cut answer because it depends on a bunch of
things but I can offer some observations that might help you decide:

* I have found that copying files over a switched 100 MBit LAN takes
just about the same amount of time as a local copy... assuming you
don't have a RAID, the bottleneck is the disk drive. Gigabit Ethernet
will probably only help if you have a RAID and you do lots of video
compositing.

* If you attempt to use an under-powered machine for net renders, its
contribution is very minimal. If you previously wouldn't consider
rendering on that machine alone, you probably should think twice about
using it for net renders. In fact, if the machine does not have
enough RAM for the project it is rendering, it will sit there and swap
so much that it could (in some circumstances) actually end up
increasing the render time.

* For computationally intensive projects (lots of effects, 3D, motion
blur, etc.), the time it takes to render each frame usually exceeds
the time it takes to move it over a 100 MBit network. On the flip
side, if you have a project consisting mainly of cuts and fades,
network rendering is not the way to go because the render will require
(at least) twice as much disk space and you'll sort of eliminate
Vegas' ability to efficiently pass through unaltered frames.

TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/19/2004, 3:44 PM
I think PJM is hinting the 2nd choice is better: upgrade that athlon! :)
BrianStanding wrote on 4/19/2004, 4:05 PM
Hmmmm..... thanks, guys. Good food for thought.

I'm guessing that MPEG-2 and / or jetdv's Film Look plug-in rendering would fall into the "network rendering is better" category?

Too bad I can't afford to get the P4 2.8 800 AND keep the Athlon XP....
DataMeister wrote on 4/19/2004, 5:32 PM
I may be wrong here, but personally I would upgrade the slower computer. There shouldn't be a huge amount of improvement over an Athlon 2700+ and a P4 2800 MHz. If you were jumping to a P4 3400 MHz or a Athlon 64 then maybe.

But it seems more liogical to me to have two medium class machines rather than a slightly higher medium and a considerably lower class machine. You could for instance do the editing on one machine and the DVD authoring on the other. In that particular set up you might even find that letting DVD-A do your MPEG rendering would give you more time on the edit machine.

JBJones