As some of you know, I have to edit an HDV project with Vegas 7.0. Therefore, I have to upgrade my PC. My money is REALLY tight right now, so I'm wondering if I should go the extra mile and get a Core 2 @ 2.66 or save some money and go with a Core 2 @ 2.44. What do you all think? Is the extra mhz worth the 72 extra dollars? Thanks.

FYI, I'm simply doing a feature film in HDV. Therefore I'm only going to be working with one track of HDV at a time, coupled with about 4 to 6 audio tracks at once. Nothing fancy, just going to be doing basic cuts, fades, dissolves and maybe a little CC here and there.

From my perspective, if it saves me 2 hours of time at the cost of $72.00, I'm going there. Immediately. But I work full-time in this business, so I might have a different take. For some, it's "only" 72.00. For others it's "Can I afford $72.00.

As DSE says, spend the 72 bucks. With mild overclocking you can run at 3.0ghz. I run that chip in my box for editing HDV and am really happy with the performance. I think you'll probably save more than two hours but whether or not it is worth the extra dollars is up to you.

If $72 is the difference between Ramen and salad for a couple of weeks, save your life and get the cheaper processor.

As valuable as time is, either of those processors can handle 2-stream HDV playback well enough. You can get better multi-stream performance from having a second hard drive for RAID.

Or you'll get better reliability by having a backup hard-drive, or you'll have enough space to keep everything ingested with another hard drive.

You might sense a theme here. The Intel and AMD guys won't like to hear it, but clock speed isn't always the big deal. Having enough RAM and a sufficient disk subsystem to go with those smokin' processors is really important to overall system performance.

I switched from my 2.13GHz Xeons to 2.66GHz Xeons, and I saw only a small performance increase in the HDV rendertest project (5-10 seconds shaved off of just under 2 minutes). Memory bandwidth and my drive configuration have a lot to do with this.


I vote for saving the dough.

I'd go with save the 72 bucks for much same reason as above poster - an incremental speed increase between processors in same family will only result in an incremental performance increase.

It'd be a different story if one put you just below the threshold of useability and one just over it, but both are more than adequate for running the app without impacting on the hands on aspects of the workflow.

As it stands theres far worse areas you could try to squeeze a 72 dollar saving (RAM or disk I/O) than one thats only really going to show itself in final render times.

Yeah, you can keep the $72 and OC the processor to 2.66 easily anyway.

Yea I was going to say, 220mhz is never worth $72

I have a 2.2ghz X2 4200 Running at 2.6ghz (the 5200's speed)

Price difference when I bought the 4200? Like $150 vs. the 5200... I just bought it OEM and grabbed a $20 AC64 Heatsink/Fan

The performance difference between those two would be seconds of rendering time.

I recommend some 10,000rpm Raptors + More Ram if anything... Remember the backup the files on another drive though, Raptors aren't the MOST reliable harddrives ever :) but they sure are some of the fastest SATAs...

I don't know what you have now but I went from a Pentium 4 HT 2.8 ghz to an E6420 and I am major happy with increase in performance.

May take a few seconds longer than the other Processors but gets the results and fits the budget.

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

better to put money in more ram, or if sufficuent, in your pocket.
i am not sure what cpu you are referring to, but tomshardware.com has a great comparison between cpu's ... apples-apples.
i'd test against the prem pro render hd test, should be pretty accurate.

current sweetspot has been the core2duo e6600 (i think the e6620 or 6640, maybe off on the number) is revised, probably incrementally better.

Well, alot of people don't know this, but that 2.44 and 2.66 chip could have come down right next to each other on the production line. When they take the chips off the production line, they test them to see what speed they will run at in their rated temperature and other parameters. Some run more efficiently than others because of micro inconsistencies in the chip. That's one of the reasons that people can overclock so easily now-a-days, cause many of the chips at different speeds were manufactured to be the same. Then they program them to come up as a certain speed and slap a sticker on it. I vote for the 2.44 and overclocking. If you're talking a 30 second difference in an hour render time for $72, save your money. Now, if it was a $72 difference to save 15 minutes per hour of render time, that's a different story. If 30 seconds is that critical, you need to be spending A LOT MORE on computer equipment...

Well, alot of people don't know this, but that 2.44 and 2.66 chip could have come down right next to each other on the production line. When they take the chips off the production line, they test them to see what speed they will run at in their rated temperature and other parameters. Some run more efficiently than others because of micro inconsistencies in the chip. That's one of the reasons that people can overclock so easily now-a-days, cause many of the chips at different speeds were manufactured to be the same. Then they program them to come up as a certain speed and slap a sticker on it. I vote for the 2.44 and overclocking. If you're talking a 30 second difference in an hour render time for $72, save your money. Now, if it was a $72 difference to save 15 minutes per hour of render time, that's a different story. If 30 seconds is that critical, you need to be spending A LOT MORE on computer equipment...

I think the mistake people are making here is that you dont' simply only overclock for rendering speed. Everybody knows that a few extra Mhz isn't going to mean that much of a difference in rendering times. Frankly, does it REALLY matter if something takes 2 hours and 30 mins to render a project or 2 hours and 21 mins. The real benefit of higher clock speeds should be realized in the editing process with previews being faster, etc.

For that matter, I completely agree with DSE. $72 when spread out over the life of the system is probably going to be money well spent.

As far as OC goes, everybody here just says it like "No big deal, just OC the processor" but the reality is that it does take somebody who knows what they are doing to accomplish this. Yes, I know many MOBO manufactures make utils to do it, but all Core 2 Duo CPU's I believe are still locked with the exception of the multiplier and when you move the multiplier up, you speed up EVERYTHING and if you are already running your memory too fast, that could be a problem. The point being here, not everybody knows what they are doing and probably shouldn't attempt this unless you do.

I'll chip in here with one comment. With memory being SO cheap right now for good sticks, you'd be hard pressed not to just spend and extra $150 for 2Gig's more of RAM and go straight to 4Gb (even though XP will likely only use/see 3Gb). I think I'd rather stick with the E6600 and go with 4Gb of memory over the E6700 with 2Gb of memory. Anybody disagree?

Jon