Can Avid and AMD work together?

[Vincent Sanchis]

Is anyone working with Avid Xpress and AMD microprocessors?
Avid has never recomended a single machine with an AMD micro (in fact they ignore them, in a sort of conspiracy). Besides I have adressed this question to an Avid distributor, and all I got is the page where Avid recomends their beloved HP and Dell Dual Xeon workstations, which in my opinion can be outperformed by some AMD configurations.

[Gary Bettan]

The official answewr from Avid is "Get a certified machine"

The real world answer is that yes, you can get excellent results with an AMD machine and Avid, but it may take you a bit of extra work to get there. The critical deciding factor for your NLE workstation is no longer the processor, it's the motherboard and chipset. This is where many NLEs have run into issue with AMD in the past. It took years for VIA to get their 4 in 1 drivers right so that you could push thrtough all that video data without hitting bottlenecks. Initial nVidia chipsets were a nightmare for video editors as well.

Jump to today. I think we have gotten over these issues as more mainstream Mobo vendors have now started supporting AMD & Pentium. We are in the process of putting together our next DIY project. It's going to be dual core, and for the first time we will build more than 1 workstation for the article. We'll be doing both an Intel (Asus P5WD2 Premium mobo) & an AMD (Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe mobo) dual core machine. We've finished our research and the motherboards and parts are here, so we are ready to begin building and testing the machines. This phase can go quickly, or get stalled along the way.

I have posted the article early, as a "sneak peak" because we are getting bombarded with questions about dual core. We've listed the two configs we are building, plus 2 additional options we feel will also work well. I have included a ton of links to the articles we used from sites like Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, Anadtech and others. We will be posting additional info and more research notes as we go along. Please keep in mind that on DIY3, we ended up having to go through several builds until we got it right. We learned alot, and I am confident we've picked the best possible motherboards for the project. Hopefully our research was accurate and the official article gets posted in a couple of weeks.

We will be installing Xpress Pro Mojo PowerPack on both systems (along with Avid Liquid, Sony Vegas and The new Adobe Production Studio w/ CIneForm Aspect HD). I'll be updating our DIY4 page as we learn more and make adjustments.

http://www.videoguys.com/DIY4.html

Gary