Video Workstation Advice Needed

Joe Lombardo wrote on 9/1/2005, 7:53 AM
We are looking to purchase a new workstation to be primarily used for video editing & rendering.
Our main goal is to decrease our rendering times as much as possible.
Price is not a limiting factor at this point but I'd really like to see a dramatic improvement for the money being spent.

What processors would you recommend for this workstation?

Intel Pentium D Processors with dual-core
Intel Pentium 4 Processors with Hyper-Threading Technology
Intel Pentium Processor Extreme Edition with dual-core, HT and EM64T technologies
Dual Intel Xeon processors 32-bit
Dual Intel Xeon processors 64-bit

Let me know what other specs you would recommend too!

Thank you

Comments

GlennChan wrote on 9/1/2005, 1:34 PM
1- Dual core dual Opterons are probably your best bet if you can afford them. About $5-6k for a machine, depending on what you want in it.

DSE / Spot / Douglas Spotted Eagle on this forum has one, and he reports that it's fast. Unfortunately it's hard to say how fast his system is compared to others.

At the dual CPU level, the only thing comparable are dual Xeons (up to like 3.6ghz?) and dual core Pentiums (up to 3.2ghz). Which is only two cores, compared to four.

There are also 4-way and 8-way Opteron systems available. That's 8 and 16 cores respectively.

You will see diminishing gains though, as you may be running a filter that Vegas can only run single-threaded.

At rendertest.veg, AMD processors run neck to neck with the "equivalent" Intel processor. Intel is usually about 6% faster when comparing "equivalent" processors, which is not much.
By equivalent, I mean a AMD64 3000+ is equivalent to a 3.0ghz Pentium. There are various different processor lines, so this really complicates things. The best single processor AMD64 processors to get are the Venice cores.
The best Pentiums to get are the 5xx-series ones, NOT the 6xx-series (unless you need 64bit).
The 6xx-series Pentiums are overpriced and would perform as well or worse than an equivalently-priced AMD processor.

At the high end of single-core single processors, AMD64s should be just as fast if not faster because the AMD processors clock up a lot more without being as overpriced.

*annecdote: it seems that AMD users report significantly faster renders at some specific things, like 3D compositing stuff in Vegas. Don't take my word on this though.

2- I think Intels are generally faster at MPEG2 encoding. Benchmarks for that vary though.

3-

With computers, you generally pay exponentially more for diminishing gains in performance. And in about 1.5-two years, you can get something twice as fast for the same price.

A 8-way system will cost about $35k and be about 0.95X to 6X as fast as a single CPU system (costing like $1200). But hey, it's still cheaper than an Avid.

4- Vegas doesn't work with 64-bit Windows (I believe), and wouldn't be meaningfully faster on it anyways.

5- You can also look into network rendering, although there's catches to it.
The best bang for you buck render farm would probably be a good deal on a Dell 9100.
dell.com --> small business --> outrageous deals --> inspiron 9100
Add $100 for upgrade to a dual core CPU.
The upgrades are overpriced. Dell doesn't make any money on the base system.
Watch out for the rebate, and only buy when there's free/$10 shipping (because it doesn't cost $130 to ship a computer).

If you price it out and wait for the right deal, the Dell should be about a hundred dollars than buying parts and building the machine yourself (and that assumes your time is free).

You'll probably want to throw in gigE cards and a gigE switch (try newegg.com), and a KVM switch or use UltraVNC.

6- You can run with 2 instances of Vegas open, rendering with one and working in the other. Adding more RAM (2GB) and moving to a dual core/dual processor system may help.

Yoyodyne wrote on 9/1/2005, 1:38 PM
Wow - now that's an answer!
winrockpost wrote on 9/1/2005, 3:58 PM
Athlon 64, 4800
with Vegas it is very ,very fast . Someone posted an issue with dvda, cant say ,but can say the renders are speedy
Joe Lombardo wrote on 9/6/2005, 6:05 AM
Thank you so much for the response, that's some incredibly helpful information. Looks like I've got spme shopping to do!
xjerx wrote on 9/6/2005, 7:19 AM
I have a Boxx computer with dual Xeon 3.2 processors...and I am very happy with its speed.
Edin1 wrote on 9/6/2005, 8:48 AM
I am pretty much concentrated on cheap stuff that works (performs), and I can tell you that when I did some testing comparing Intel and AMD CPUs, I found that AMD offered better CPUs at a lower price. Up until that point, I was using Intel, but from then on, I switched to AMD, and never looked back, nor felt sorry for making such a decision. AMD did wonders with my rendering times in Vegas, where Duron running at 1600MHz beat the **** out of Celeron running at 2500MHz, and P4 running at 2660MHz. Encoding times were comparable. As an added benefit, AMD systems seem to be more stable, which surprised me, as I heard horror stories about Microsoft and AMD incompatibility. Intel's bitches obviously lied.
The power consumption between AMD and Intel is almost the same.
GlennChan wrote on 9/6/2005, 6:38 PM
AMD systems should be just as stable most of the time. A problem with AMD is that the chipsets sometimes aren't that great (i.e. Ali made some crappy chipsets, Via made a few although they are getting better) which would give some people issues.

Intel has higher power consumption than AMD now, which is why you don't see their dual cores clock as fast. Higher power = higher heat.

As for which is faster, it swings back and forth between both manufacturers. It highly depends on what you run.
For dual processors, AMD has dual cores while Intel does not. So in that scenario, AMD is usually faster.
AMD is certainly faster at games and at DAW use. At Vegas I'm not really sure.