Comments

Coursedesign wrote on 1/12/2006, 8:45 AM
Base your choice on AMD, either X2 or Opteron.

There is an overwhelming number of comparisons that have shown that Intel is far behind AMD when it comes to performance currently. This has been specifically shown to be the case also for MPEG-2 rendering.

The AMD chips also use a lot less power [than Intel], which means less heat, which means less noise and longer component life. A dual-core Xeon motherboard uses up 400 Watts just on its own, without a graphics card or drives...

Boxx makes some great Opteron machines, HP has some good Opteron workstations, and there are several X2 machines that you can buy if you don't want to custom-build one.

Estimates of when Intel will catch up to AMD performance-wise range from 2007 to 2009.

Historically, AMD machines sucked in reliability because of their reliance on VIA for peripheral support chips. Today, NVIDIA makes AMD support chips that really work.

There have been a number of posts on this here, with recommendations, over the last few months.

R. Heffels wrote on 1/12/2006, 2:01 PM
The idea is that all this goes into a 19 inch rack.
I prefer off the shelf servers, but custom build is also an option.
Cooling, power consumption, etc. is not any concern.
I just need to buy the fastest Vegas MPEG-2 encoder there is :-)

Are there any chipsset that are recommended ?

We encountered a problem a while back with an MP3 encoder (that we use for radio broadcast).
The encoder did not properly support the Xeon processors and therefor was dead slow until we switched to a standard Pentium 4.

Is anyone aware of such problems with the Main Concept MPEG-2 encoder that is used by Vegas ?

And dual processors are great, but what about quatro processors ?
How much profit would I get from that ?
And Is that supported at all ? :-)