For all of you HDV users out there, I am curious to know what computer setup you are using (AMD/Intel, single HT,/Dual Core etc.), and if you built it yourself or had someone else construct it for you?
Dell Precision 670, dual 3.2gh Xeons, SATA system drive and 2 SCSI drives for video and audio storage with 6gb of dual channel memory. Running Win XPx64.
Best advice for now: Stay away from WinXP64x, not enough drivers available. Just got through with it and went back to 32 bit.
AMD Dual Core 4600, 4 gig kingston ram, SATA 150, SATA 300,
Gigabyte GA-8KN-Ultra-9, SCSI 160, Matrox APVe using 2 monitors, a tv & Samsung 242MP HDTV. And firewire 800 SIIG. Plextor 716A, ADVC 300.
I had little problem obtaining the drivers for my accessories, e.g. printers and scanner. Dell provided the x64 cd and it contained the drivers necessary for the base system.
I waited two weeks and Epson had the driver for my printer, two weeks later the driver for my scanner. A week later Unbrain came out with their driver to provide full 1394b speed on my firewire card.
Otherwise x64 already contained the same drivers that MS supports for XP SP2 (32 bit) so my cameras and older laser printer were covered from the get go.
With a little research and prep the switch was painless and well worth it.
I assembled mine with my computer literate friend watching every step. He thought that then I'd know all about computers! My setup runs real-time with HDV without effects, but I would say step up processor speed and more powerful graphics card. My setup is listed with my name.
My motherboard is a Gigabyte K7 Triton with hyper-threading.
I had every driver but one---Matrox APVe. Actually I had the 64x driver but they put up an asterisk by the "SE" which said and I found out the hard way that the driver no longer requires .net and that it does not support "Dual Independent Monitors" nor "TV/HDTV. For me this was a total disaster as their 32 bit driver supports "two analog monitors" plus TV/HDTV output at 720p and 1080i and 1080p.
XDT in Melbourne, SuperMicro mobo with dual Xeons at 3.0GHz, SATA RAID 0 off RocketRAID controller, pro NVidia dual DVI card.
Damn thing cost more than my car but it runs faster and so far no speeding tickets.
Added Decklink card afterwards myself, nice to preview to SDI monitor.
Bob.
You should check out Spot's machine, which is a dual core dual Opteron.
Only AMD is making dual core dual processor systems right now- Intel is still single core for their dual processors. So 4 cores versus 2.
How does an Opteron dual core compare to an Athlon dual core at the same speed? (say both 2.4). Are they very similar? I've been reading up on new Athlons and someone said "hey dummy, you need to be looking at Opteron's."
Is the main difference that you can scale the opteron's with multiple processors or are there other big differences?
I'm using a 3.6 ghz 800fsb dell 8400 and thinking about what to do next year for a new system that will dig into hdv with ease.