upgrade to multi-core

[John L. Miller]

I would love to upgrade my processor to a mulit-core....I have a dell dimension 8400 with a 3ghz right now...and when I called Dell to ask about the possibliity of an upgrade..I was put on hold by a woman who obviously didn't have a clue and she came back and said she thought that my system could only be updated to a single core 3.8ghz and the only way to get multicore was get a new system. Does this sound correct? Thanks. J

[Marcus Marchesseault]

That is correct. The multicore processors require a different motherboard and maybe even different memory. If you know how to build a system, you might be able to order the parts and do it yourself or have a tech friend do it for you. If you already have all the hard drives and a PCIX video card, you have about half of the parts you need and can get the rest for about $500-600. This is assuming your current machine isn't junk with an insufficient power supply.

[John L. Miller]

I notice my computer does support Hyperthreading techonology. Is that something I can take advantage of with Vegas? Separating into two logical processors?

[Mel Enriquez]

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

I notice my computer does support Hyperthreading techonology. Is that something I can take advantage of with Vegas? Separating into two logical processors?

Hyperthreading isn't that important anymore with a multicore processor. It's basically just marketing doublespeak that doesn't really help much in speeding things, and if it did, it is only marginal at best. That's why it isn't spoken of anymore with multicore processors.

Now, I presume you are running a Dell Desktop (sorry I am not familiar with the models), so as the previous poster said, you can just install some new parts in there. I see at least 3 components that need upgrading.

1. a cpu2 (core 2 duo or if you want you can pick an AMD solution, but core 2 duos are faster at this time). the lowest is 1.8ghz but the most bang for the buck is the 2.3 or something speed. Don't let the numbers deceive you. Even if you overclock your current system to 4 or even 5ghz it still won't be fast enough for these core 2 duos.

2. a motherboard that support core2duos with still remnants of IDE aside from SATA.

3. DDR2 memory. Preferably get at least 1 gb, with 1.5gb or 2 gb being better.

The rest you can still use, unless I missed something.

Trust me, when I say that moving to a core2duo will be BIG, BIG, BIG improvement in speed of render times, and processing with Vegas. It is worth the money you put in there.

I had a 4 year old AMD 2200 athlon and in one project, it took about 30 min to render that 3:30 clip. with the 2ghz core 2duo, it was just under 7 min. I use a Dell 1505 notebook with 1gb of ram. This clip had lots of color correction, some layers and some cropping, etc.

Another project I had was to render would take about 7 hours to render. It took only 1hr and 12 min to render in my Dell notebook. The clip was 1 hr 27 min long. So, I was getting more than 1:1 performance for simple cuts, dissolves and minor color correction on some small parts. That's how fast core 2 duos are.

Go for the core 2 duo (not dual core or Pentium D). It is really worth it. :-)

[Jason Robinson]

To show ou how virtually useless Hyperthreading is I present the following (which I have posted many times here in the Vegas Forum)....

I have an old AMD Dual Athlon MP system that I custom built for 3DS Max rendering back in the way. That sstem has two 1800+ MP chips (1.5GHz) and 512MB of DDR1 RAM. It also has a 64bit hardware PCI RAID card running RAID0 (stripe).

I also have a 1.5 yr old Alienware running a 3.0GH P4-HT with 2.5GB of DDR2 RAM and software RAID0.

I copied the exact same project files and source footage to both systems and told them to render the same project. I timed them both and the new Alienware only came out 3% faster. Even though it was a hyperthreaded system at 3GHz it basically performed clock-for-clock the same as my true dual-cpu system. The Dualie had basically 3GHz worth of processing power and the P4HT still only had 3GHz worth of processing power. I suspect the only difference was due to the RAM limitations on the dualie.

More info can be found at my post here.

One of these days I will also get around to running the same veg through my newest system (loaner from work) a core 2 duo @ 2Ghz. I haven't run similar renders on it yet but it seems to handle similar projects at no less than 2-4x the render speed. Amazing improvement.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by John L. Miller

I notice my computer does support Hyperthreading techonology. Is that something I can take advantage of with Vegas? Separating into two logical processors?

See my post below and on this thread. Lots of info about HT vs non HT vs true dual CPU vs core 2 duo.

The short of it..... HT is nothing more than a marketing trick when it comes to media rendering & encoding.

jason

[John L. Miller]

Thanks Jason, and all the rest..at least I feel I can upgrade now..Dell and others had me believing I needed a new system. I think My Memory is DDR2, so motherboard and cpu should get it done! J