great respone spot...

So generally if it were you and you had the listed system and you don't make insane dough but you do make a living from you system...would you take the plunge now and buy an additional faster system or hold out a bit until Vegas can take advantage of the new hardware features?

See....that's the question. If you're making *a living* you don't wait for anything if there is something available now to speed your workflow.
For the first time in years...I'm buying AMD again, because their multicore stuff is impressive. So...No, I wouldn't wait. I DO know multicore is here now. I DON'T know when there will be a Vegas (or any other software) ready for what is next from M$oft.

I have had bad experiences from AMD way back in the K6 days. Is the dual core better than the 64 bit EM64T XEON. In your opinion of course.

My Xeon system seriously has crashed all of 3 times in 1 year or more of constant use.

But having said that I really need speed/power.

Is there such thing s a dual-dual core setup meaing quad (maybe more threads if you include HT) processing?

And if so will Vegas 6 utilize this configuration?

Bottom line if there is something out there that really works well I will find the money and get it (within reason ofcourse).

cost /benfit scale

Yes, there are MOBO's that can handle 4 procs, which is 8...or more.
I've only heard a lot about this particular one though, but I have seen the dual proc multicore in action.

aparently this company make an 8-cpu Opteron Duel core system:
http://www.egenera.com/prod_spec_home.php

I'm betting that anything above 2-cpu will be a server though. :) Except for SGI's that could support really powerfull work stations, but that still use a custom MIPS CPU, so that's out of the question.

But more then 2 duel cores would be over kill right now.

XP Pro only supports 2 procs. Only W2K server and higher supports 4 or more procs. Save your money :)

Microsoft did mention that they count a dual core as single physical processor, for licensing reasons. So dual, dual cores will be supported in XP Pro.

1) Will Vegas 6.0 perform better with 64bit Cpu and/or XP64 OS?
No. however, the next version of Windows will have a new scheduler and will suport NUMA. Opteron has NUMA, so it should be faster when Windows supports it. The performance increase depends on the program... I doubt you will see anything spectacular, but I haven't seen benchmarks on an AMD64/opteron system for Vegas.

4) Does the new 800/1066 FSB make a big difference in overall performance?
I ran some tests, and memory bandwidth makes a few percent difference.
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18841

Memory bandwidth would make more difference when the CPU gets faster.
Memory bandwidth is related to FSB speed.

Xeons should see improvement with higher FSB because both processors share the front side bus (as far as I know). Sorry, but I can't make a very good guess about what effect a faster FSB will do for performance. A decent benchmark would be useful.

6) Is 8MB cache way better than 2MB or 1MB cache?
Probably not. For video/Vegas, it would probably only make a few percent difference. There are rendertest.veg results for the extreme edition pentiums (more cache, way overpriced) versus "normal" pentiums.

-----7) Is Sata drive better that SCSI?--------
Rendering performance depends on how much CPU utilization your drives use. Fake RAID (i.e. on-board RAID, promise) may have high CPU utilization. Unfortunately I don't have a RAID to verify this.

For simple renders (i.e. ones that goes fast, around real-time speed) hard drive sustained transfer speed makes a mild difference. I don't think this is what you're worrying about.

Your hard drives need to be fast enough to do X streams of whatever format you want. SATA/IDE RAID is ideal for video in terms of price/performance/storage if you need to do HD or something.

1SATA drive versus 1SCSI drive shouldn't be much of a difference at all.

SCSI does have its uses though.

--------8) is a hugmungous amount of Ram (8GB) better than 2GB of really fast RAM--------
The humungous amount of RAM may be slightly faster if it applies the better memory configuration. Ideal memory configuration makes a few percent difference... see
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37831
and the Anandtech article linked in it. That information only applies to Intel, single processor, 865/875 chipset. (for that particular combo, 4X512MB double-sided/banked, or possibly 4X1GB is best)

Dual Xeons' ideal memory configuration- don't know.

Dual opterons ideal memory configuration I think is 2 or 4 DIMMS PER PROCESSOR. 4 DIMMs in total is definitely better than 2 in total.

On dual channel platforms, pairs of the exact same model memory is better than everything else. Intel, most but not all AMD, and Apple/G5 use dual channel.

----9) Is there some new technology down the pipe that warrantes me waiting on the new system.----
Dual core processors basically.

----10) If XP64 does not make a difference when is the approimate time frame for a 64bit version of Vegas?----
Vegas may not benefit from 64-bit. 64-bit just means the program can use bigger numbers. This can mean better precision calculations, but I don't think it's necessary for video.

----11) Any general comments to imrove live preview and shorten render time----
Overclocking does work, but it does risk instability and is very tricky on dual processor systems.

A render farm might help you a little, but it has caveats from what I hear. I do not have a render farm setup so I can't tell you how much faster it is.

You can also improve performance by making sure your system is configured right. The easiest test would be to run a benchmark and compare with others, but I don't think that many people here have dual Xeons. You can compare against single processor systems though... lots of rendertest.veg results around (you have to search this forum though).

In task manager, setting Vegas to "real-time" priority may improve performance by 1% or so.

2- Some of the things above only make a few percent difference. You likely won't notice a few percent. Honestly, anything under 10% difference I wouldn't worry that much about. However, tweaking a few percent out of your system sometimes costs nothing and is worthwhile (i.e. getting memory to run dual channel... install your RAM properly, and use identical pairs).

Good post, glenn... however, one small note -- when asking about 1 or 2 vs. 8mb of cache, I'm pretty sure that's a reference to hard drives. And yes, 8mb makes quite a difference.

The Xeon comes in 1, 2, and 8mb flavours I think?

Anyways, I'm sure the author of this thread can get things sorted out.

As far as hard drives go, the buffer can make like a 30% difference in application/desktop-usage benchmarks. (see storagereview.com of the 800jb western digital) However, for video buffer size makes little effect on sustained transfer rates (which is what matters).