Speed Comparison: Dual Core versus Dual Processor

[Hugh DiMauro]

I am in a crunch: I have to buy a new comp within the week (jobs pending) and I don't have the time to research speed comparisons. I am running Vegas 6 now so can anyone suggest the better buy?

Dual Xeons or Dual core? Do processors run the applications faster or is it the L2 cache? I have so many questions and so little time. Overall, what would be the best buy?

[Kevin Shaw]

In theory one dual-core processor should give you better value in terms of price versus performance compared to two single-core processors, because you don't have to pay as much for a fancy server motherboard and other supporting hardware. But that may not be quite true just yet, because the dual core technology is so new it seems to be selling at a premium price.

Can you tell us more about exactly what you want to do and what you're realistic budget is? That would help form a better answer to your question.

[Hugh DiMauro]

Lets say money is no object. Is a 64 bit system upgradeable to 12 gig of ram on a dual Xeon processor motherboard better/faster than a dual core processor. Let's just compare with all other things being equal: Both systems having 2 gig of ram and hyperthreading. Which will run better and faster? Two Xeons or Dual core?

[Glenn Chan]

Two Xeons. Pentium dual cores will debut at a lower clock speed due to heat/power limitations, and they will be reasonably priced (~$280).

AMD on the other hand will debut dual cores at a price premium and roughly the same clock speed.

Vegas 6 should take advantage of multiple processors/cores now, so you don't get situations where a single threaded app will run fastest on the highest clocked processor (i.e. 3.6ghz single core beats dual 3.0ghz Xeons).

2- Dual core Pentiums are only available with select OEMs like Dell, Alienware, etc. right now I believe. If you throw in your upgrades (because those OEMs typically have overpriced upgrades), a base system from Dell may be the best value/performance.

3- If you have lots of money right now, a dual core Opteron system would likely be the fastest. The Opteron 265 is 1.8ghz X 2, around $851 each processor. That Opteron should be roughly equivalent to a 2.6ghz Pentium at video tasks.
monarchcomputer.com can custom-build you a workstation at a very reasonable price (they charge you street prices for the parts plus a build fee), although they may take a little time to build and ship it. Check out their resellerratings.com rating... they seem fairly reputable. A system from them might run you around $5000 for something that's loaded. Configuation may be a little tricky... you probably want 4 sticks of RAM so each processor can run dual channel, and a video card that works in the motherboard (check for AGP/pciE).

I'm not sure how Vegas 6 scales up with multiple processors (3rd party filters can only use one processor?). Vegas 5 didn't take advantage of multiple processors at all (only few percent improvement) until you ran two instances of Vegas with one rendering in the background. If you do the same in 6, it should definitely be faster with dual processors.

4- Cache seems to make a few percent difference at the rendertest.veg benchmark for Vegas. I don't think it's a big deal, and probably not worth paying for.

5- It's hard to say which is faster without having someone run relevant benchmarks on them. Maybe try to find some people with dual processor or dual core systems... farss on the Sony forums has one and he reports:

I really haven't had a chance to give it a caning with V6 but encoding sure runs fast in V5, even DVD prepare etc is very fast, being able to run multiple instances of Vegas with no impact is great, we do lots of simple DVDs and things like building the waveform files can be a slowdown, now I open 1 instance of Vegas and drop say 20 hours of video clips into that, then while it does its waveform building thing I open another instance and start editing the first clip.
Bob.

http://www.sonymediasoftware.com/for...4251&Replies=5