Do I need to upgrade?

[Ben Winter]

I have an Asus K8M motherboard with 2.5 gigs of RAM and a 2.0Ghz Athlon64. I have almost a terabyte of hard drive space. however, HDV refuses to play smoothly. So I ordered one of those BlackMagic Decklink HD PCI cards, which will come in two days and hopefully improve my situation. My question is: is 2.0Ghz enough? If I need a faster processor, I have to upgrade both my motherboard and CPU seeing as how 2.4Ghz is the fastest any Socket 754 processor will go, so I'm hoping that's a no. Any other suggestions as to what to upgrade? I have a pretty bad graphics card--FX5200--but I don't have PCI express. Any suggestions on a top of the line AGP graphics card?

[Tim Borek]

All the specs I see recommend 3.2 GHz or faster for HDV.

[Chris Barcellos]

I was about the same place as you were, when I got my HDV camera. Had similar problems.

Ended up buying an AMD 3800+ dual core processor/motherboard combo ($279.00.) ECS was manufacturer, and MB is fairly pedestrian, low end, but well reviewed. When I installed, in place of my Pentium MB, I had to buy new OS too, because MS deemed it new system. I was also force to buy a new video card, as this board only had pci express, and no AGP. I think that was a blessing, because I ended up getting a generic ATI 700 something or other, with 256 mgs of memory for about $179.00. I think Premiere actually uses it to help in render process. Also my old memory was not good on this board, so I ended up laying out another $300.00 for the 2 gigs of memory.

Had some early issues with crashing, but as I updated bios and drivers, that has disappeared.

[Dan Euritt]

Originally Posted by Chris Barcellos

When I installed, in place of my Pentium MB, I had to buy new OS too, because MS deemed it new system.

i've heard of that mess before, i think that the borg changed the licensing terms so that they could get away with it... you can now buy the o.e.m. winxp for less money, but if you aren't careful, you'll get burned down the line.

the way to avoid having to pay for an o.s. replacement like that is to call the borg and tell 'em that the p.s. burned up the motherboard, or something similar... they will allow you to re-register under those terms, without having to buy another winxp license.

the object is to prove to them that it's still running on only one computer.

[Chris Barcellos]

Originally Posted by Dan Euritt

i've heard of that mess before, i think that the borg changed the licensing terms so that they could get away with it... you can now buy the o.e.m. winxp for less money, but if you aren't careful, you'll get burned down the line.

the way to avoid having to pay for an o.s. replacement like that is to call the borg and tell 'em that the p.s. burned up the motherboard, or something similar... they will allow you to re-register under those terms, without having to buy another winxp license.

the object is to prove to them that it's still running on only one computer.

Thanks Dan, I had considered that. What would have been difficult was that this was an upgraded version of XP already from a machine I had previously ran Window ME on, which in turn was upgraded from Windows 98, which in turn was upgraded from Windows 3.5, which in turn was.... well you get the picture. Hard to tell where the old machines stopped, and the new ones started. Thought it was time to start fresh..

[Ben Winter]

Well, I decided to go all out and buy a new mobo, CPU and graphics card. 3.6Ghz socket 775 dual core intel, 4 GB ram, and the ATI Radeon X1900 XT. Is this good enough?! I swear, if it isn't I'll...

[Chris Barcellos]

Ben:

You might want to check this thread, unless you are a diehard Intel chip man. AMDs seem to be better suited for HDV-- and cheaper to boot.

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthrea...575#post487575

This is article being referred to in thread: http://www.videoguys.com/DIY4.html

[Ben Winter]

well that's just annoying. If the CPU is recommended above 3.2Ghz, what AMD chip runs at that speed? I cancelled my order--I've actually been a die-hard AMD guy for as long as I've owned a PC (I was mac before then).

[Peter Ferling]

Ben, I have both a Dell dual xeon 3 GHz and a Boxx 7400 with dual-core AMD Opterons. The AMD powered workstation is noticeably faster, and it's not just HDV. Even cineform transcodes intermediates practically on the fly. That is, capture twenty-minutes of HDV on the xeon, and I have to wait ten-minutes more for cineform to finish up. On the AMD it's about ten seconds and done.

It's really not the processor speed, but how the AMD system is setup. Having a seperate data-pipe for each core, right on the die, allows for real-time multitasking. That is, I could do one thing real fast on the dual xeon, such as rendering with Lightwave. But on the multi-core AMD I can render with LW, while working on another project in PPro and after-effects, while jamming with Itunes. Not once skipping a beat or waiting for resources to free up. Read AMD's white-papers, they compare their dual-cores with intel's 7505 xeon chipset, the same hardware in my Dell 650, and it speaks the truth.

There are rumors that Intel is going to produce a dedicated buss per-core chip to compete with AMD (go figure). But if you want something now...

[Ben Winter]

alright, im considering an Asus Dual Opteron motherboard, and two dual-core Opteron processors, the 170 2.0GHz / 2MB Cache. I will have around 4 GB of RAM to play with as well. Is this good enough?

[Peter Ferling]

Ben, my BOXX 7400 has the socket 940 tyan thunderbird k8we (S2895 config), with 265 opterons. The board also supports dual PCI express and dual Nvidia Nforce chipsets. Basically it's like two real PC's on a single mobo. Not sure what the ASUS offers, but you should compare specs with the TYAN. If the AMD has something similiar, that is, dedicated data-pipes for each chipset, then it should work. (The TYAN is a $600 mobo).

We put faith (and extra money) into BOXX tech to build the system. I don't have the time nor patience to build from scratch anymore.

Someone else with that ASUS board should chime-in, unless your the first : )

Do your homework.

[Leslie Dopkiss]

Ben,

I don't know if you have built your new system yet or not. I just joined this forum. I have been to videoguys.com and K8WE.com looking for the motherboard for a system dedicated to video editing only. The majority of what I read about the Tyan motherboad that Peter has is all positive, with the cost being the biggest negative. Also a few comments when it first came out about dual video card crowding. Haven't read about that lately.
If you go to videoguys.com look under reseach for articles, then the DYI thread. Their "Big Red" machine setup looks promising. To read about the Tyan motherboard, K8WE. com is good (and overwhelming to me!). And I know that I want to stick with AMD - Videoguys have some good benchmark reviews.
So, did you build it? Thanks!

[Jon Fairhurst]

Make sure to tweak your OS, and get rid of any programs that might be interrupting your processor. A slow CPU with a streamlined OS is often better than a screaming CPU that is spending too much time handling unwanated tasks.

I use http://videoguys.com/WinXP.html