Best Processor for 3D Graphics and Video Editing

[Glenn Chan]

A lot of NLEs don't require you to re-render DV material and only render the parts that need rendering. You don't have to make copies of the DV material.

[Nick Jushchyshyn]

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : A lot of NLEs don't require you to re-render DV material and only render the parts that need rendering. You don't have to make copies of the DV material. -->>>

Exactly what I was saying in my last post, so much of the process of "rendering" an edit to a finished file is just copying DV data from one file to another (same is usually true if you have captured & edited video in MPEG2). This is exactly the kind of situation where a single hard drive becomes the bottle neck, not the CPU. :)

Again, I also completely agree with your statement earlier, regarding the CPU being the bottleneck during transcoding.

Have fun.

[Justin Boyle]

going by what nick has said in that good post of his it pretty much says what i have said the whole way apart from the raid part. You can't get more clear proof than he provided either. He mentioned virtual memory, the more memory you have the less virtual memory is needed so less hard drive time wasted. and as for two hard drives the evidence is clear. What i had said in previous posts is not from experience but from what i had read.

Justin

[Young-H. Lee]

Hi everyone, I thank you all so much for your helpful responses. They have helped me choose a system. I have placed an order on NewEgg recently. In the end, I tried cutting down on costs as much as I can, so I went with the Opterons because Xeons were too much. I stepped down 2 levels of the nVidia Quadro cards to 750 and started with 1 Gig of memory. I will be buying another gig sometime in the near future. I also will be using my old 100 gig drive from my current comptuer to use as the OS disk. Here are the final specs:

1
MB TYAN|DUAL OPTRN AMD S2875ANRF RT
$232.00

1
CASE TT|7ATXM XASER III VM2000A RT
$97.00

1
VGA PNY| 750 XGL 128M DVI+VGA %
$327.00

1
DVD+/-RW PLEXTOR|PX-708A/SW R
$156.00

1
FD 1.44MB SONY MPF920 Beige %
$9.75

1
HD 250GB|WD 7200 WD2500JD 8MB%
$193.25

1
SOUND BLASTER|AUDIGY 2 PCI SB0244 %
$72.00

2
CPU AMD|OPTERON 244 1.8 GHz RETAIL
$654.00


1
POWER SUPPLY ANTEC TRUEBLUE 480 RET
$76.00

2
DDRAM 512M|64X72 PC-3200ECC MSKIN%
$314.00

GRAND TOTAL + SHIPPING: $2,165.00
---------------
The keyboard, mouse, speakers and a few other misc. parts will be coming from my old system. Again, many thanks to all for being so helpful, I'll post some pics of my new computer next week!!!!

Young

[Glenn Chan]

Exactly what I was saying in my last post, so much of the process of "rendering" an edit to a finished file is just copying DV data from one file to another (same is usually true if you have captured & edited video in MPEG2). This is exactly the kind of situation where a single hard drive becomes the bottle neck, not the CPU. :)

Well in my message I meant that you don't have to copy footage that does not need to be rendered. If you are just printing off to tape this is true. Perhaps if you are making a DVD then you need to actually copy out the DV footage.

[Young-H. Lee]

Hi guys, my new system is up and running, let me post a few pictures for your viewing

thanks again for all your input.

- edit -
hmm seems that I cant post images, you can go to this link to see pictures:

http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=...s&uid=98537539

[Jesse Bekas]

Sorry if somebody mentioned this already, but I really don't have time to read the whole thread...

Pentium 4 processors are optimized for multitasking, simultaneous multimedia... If you are doing video, FX, web-surfing, and downloading royalty free stuff, all at once this is the way to go (although you probably won't be doing ALL that at once!).

Athlon 64 processors are optimized to provide maximum power to a single program. Of course they handle multitasking fine as well, but if in the scenario where you shut down all unnecessaries besides your NLE, the Athlon will finish rendering faster than the p4.

This is just what I have understood from reading PC magazines and articles.

[Steve Rogers]

Young, with a couple of minor exceptions, I would say you made an exceptional choice and you'll be quite happy with it.

You mentioned 3D, what apps will you be using?

A pity I had not seen this thread earlier, I could have made some helpful suggestions on gear for you. Minor changes, nothing earth shattering.

If you are doing editing, I would have strongly suggested a better audio card, like an Audiophile 2496 at least.

Also I would have suggested that you bump up that motherboard from the Tyan Tiger K8W to the Thunder K8W. Almost identical boards, but the one is a bit cheaper due to less memory slots, and the board you got uses a cheaper method of supplying memory access to the 2 processors. The Tiger board connects all the memory to a single CPU, then memory requests are fed to the second CPU from the first one.

In general usuage, you are not going to really notice it, benchmarks really don't show enough of a difference to matter.

The real down side is being limited in the amount of ram you can eventually add to it.

[Young-H. Lee]

hey thanks for the input steve. I'm using Softimage XSI for my 3D application, and running Windows XP. Do you feel I should get more RAM? I currently have 1 gig and I keep hearing that I should go up to 2 gigs eventually.

[Steve Rogers]

<<<-- Originally posted by Young-H. Lee : hey thanks for the input steve. I'm using Softimage XSI for my 3D application, and running Windows XP. Do you feel I should get more RAM? I currently have 1 gig and I keep hearing that I should go up to 2 gigs eventually. -->>>

2 years ago I would have said 1gb is fine.

for the last year, I have not built a machine for any purpose that has less than 2gb minimum to start with.

XSI, Maya and Lightwave are memory pigs and suck up all the resources you throw at them.

Also consider that your 1gb is split between 2 processors. That is only 512mb each. That's not very much.

I would say you should at the very least double that to 2gb.

[Glenn Chan]

In Windows XP you can kind of check how much left is used.

Hit Crtl Alt Del and click on the processes tab. Look under the amount of RAM available. Anything under 10MB is bad.

Having an overkill of RAM does not really help performance though. In some cases, have 4 sticks of the same model RAM will increase performance perhaps by a few percent since memory bandwidth is increased (although memory latency goes down slightly).

If you have 4 DIMMs and they are not all the same model then memory bandwidth will decrease and performance will suffer by a few percent.

If you run out of RAM, performance will drop drastically since your computer has to use the hard drive for temporary storage instead of RAM. Hard drives are roughly 60X times slower than RAM. Hard drives are still reasonably fast though.

[Steve Rogers]

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan :
Having an overkill of RAM does not really help performance though. In some cases, have 4 sticks of the same model RAM will increase performance perhaps by a few percent since memory bandwidth is increased (although memory latency goes down slightly). -->>>


In 3D animation, there is no such thing as overkill in ram. 2-4 gb is a necessity these days, especially if you are working in the industry.

You can easy overload a system when you have hundreds of megs of object data, and then throw hundreds of image maps totalling a gb or more in size into a scene to render.

[Glenn Chan]

I do not use 3d animation apps so I do not know what an overkill of RAM is. However, starting a render and hitting Crtl Alt Del is a fairly good way to see how much RAM you need.

[Steve Rogers]

<<<-- Originally posted by Glenn Chan : I do not use 3d animation apps so I do not know what an overkill of RAM is. However, starting a render and hitting Crtl Alt Del is a fairly good way to see how much RAM you need. -->>>


Uh, no it's not.

In animation, your scenes are going to vary a lot. Depends on how much detail is involved and how much textures and effects are involved.

As a general rule for basic animation systems, 1gb is the bare minimum for a single CPU and even that is not considered a large amount of ram. It is considered average user. Even with 1gb per processor, it is very easy to slow the system to a crawl with only moderately complex animations.

As scenes are becoming more and more complex, 64 bit systems are becoming more attractive since we'll be able to use in excess of 4gb without software trickery.

The original poster has 1gb of ram for dual CPU's. He is most definitely going to be memory starved when he starts animating.