What processor for encoding?

[TheFluff]

Originally Posted by martino

*waiting for the new Intel platform before his new upgrade :P

Maybe if you can wait for a while... It could be worth it, but prices will be probably quite nasty at the start.

1) wait for new platform before new upgrade
2) watch old platform drop in price drastically since all the 1337 overclocker h4rdw4r3 experts wants the new bleeding edge crap
3) buy top of the line old platfrom CPU, get very good performance and save a shitton of money

[Nicholi]

Originally Posted by SirCanealot

But I've always filtered to a huffy file before encoding to 264. A quad core will far speed huffy-h.264, right? The main thing that annoyed me about encoding and 264 in the past is spending 4 hours encoding just to correct a typo. Main reason why I was thinking quad core.

LAWL! Please don't tell me you actually did this...you re-encoded an entire episode for one typo? Oh man....maybe I'm just being mean, but I don't think all the Hertz in the world can help you :P.

Personally I'd go with the cheapest "decent" dual core and save on cash, or to invest in other components. Many things (other then video filtering/decoding/encoding) are still not even threaded at all, some even limited to 2 (or 4) cores at most. But for the few things that do support 4 or more cores, like x264, it would be pretty amazing speeds.

[SirCanealot]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

1) wait for new platform before new upgrade
2) watch old platform drop in price drastically since all the 1337 overclocker h4rdw4r3 experts wants the new bleeding edge crap
3) buy top of the line old platfrom CPU, get very good performance and save a shitton of money

The problem with attitude is that is you end up waiting around forever. And my PC is doing some pretty weird things -- and reformatting AGAIN on this hardware is just going to be a pain... Have to see how my PC is performing in a few weeks, but it's just doing some bloody bizare things right now.

And I'm from the UK. I can't really see them dropping the price of the current crop of processor too much -- they are already EXTREMELY cheap for UK standards.

LAWL! Please don't tell me you actually did this...you re-encoded an entire episode for one typo? Oh man....maybe I'm just being mean, but I don't think all the Hertz in the world can help you :P.

Depends on what sort of typo. I've re-encoded for one or two typos and a comma or two before. The last time I was properly encoding, since it was .avi I'd just re-encode and splice the fix in, but I really don't like doing that...

I'm still thinking going with an E7200, mobo and DDR2 ram. The amount I can get this lot for is so silly and it still so far past what I have right now, it'll do for... probably another 5 years

[Dark Shikari]

Originally Posted by Nicholi

Many things (other then video filtering/decoding/encoding) are still not even threaded at all, some even limited to 2 (or 4) cores at most.

MT avisynth is your friend

[Merlin7777]

Wait, what's the new Intel platform you speak of? You don't mean Larrabee, or however the heck it's spelled,
do you? I thought that was only for graphics.

Edit: Oh, wait, never mind. You mean Nehalem, or whatever.

[dragon5152]

Originally Posted by TheFluff

1) wait for new platform before new upgrade
2) watch old platform drop in price drastically since all the 1337 overclocker h4rdw4r3 experts wants the new bleeding edge crap
3) buy top of the line old platfrom CPU, get very good performance and save a shitton of money

That's exactly what I did with my q6600.
Watched the new q9xxx come out and watched the q6600 drop in price. I got a nice OC (to 3.6ghz) in the process as well so it's speed comparable with the q9xxx as well

[Merlin7777]

Ditto on that one. Now, I just need to get a new mobo and my upgrades will be finished. 3.8 q6600 here I come!!

[SirCanealot]

I hate you all. Now I'm going to have to wait till Christmas for my upgrade.

Wait! Christmas? Christmas + Parents = presents. HMMMMMM!!!!!

[Ayanami9870]

Dual core = games
Quad core= 3D modeling, encoding

Quad cores don't perform as well as the higher frequency clocked duals at games, but things that exploit the parallel processing will be much faster on the quad. Things like h264 and Maya love quad cores.

As for the Q6600 vs. the newer Q9300, here's a question: Given that the Q6600 has a Front Side Bus (FSB) of 1066MT/s and the Q9300 has a faster one at 1333MT/s, has anybody determined how much of an overclock is needed for the Q6600 to soundly beat a stock Q9300 at encoding and rendering?

If the overclock is not much and the cooling needed to reach it is relatively cheap, then the Q6600 is the better choice given enough RAM. I hear the Q9300 doesn't overclock very much, and the Q9450 and Q9550 are hella expensive.

[Dark Shikari]

Originally Posted by Ayanami9870

Dual core = games
Quad core= 3D modeling, encoding

Quad cores don't perform as well as the higher frequency clocked duals at games, but things that exploit the parallel processing will be much faster on the quad. Things like h264 and Maya love quad cores.

As for the Q6600 vs. the newer Q9300, here's a question: Given that the Q6600 has a Front Side Bus (FSB) of 1066MT/s and the Q9300 has a faster one at 1333MT/s, has anybody determined how much of an overclock is needed for the Q6600 to soundly beat a stock Q9300 at encoding and rendering?

If the overclock is not much and the cooling needed to reach it is relatively cheap, then the Q6600 is the better choice given enough RAM. I hear the Q9300 doesn't overclock very much, and the Q9450 and Q9550 are hella expensive.

FSB is basically meaningless for encoding, at least with x264; the benchmarks I've seen from TechARP suggest that higher FSB at the same clock speed has a lower-single-digits percent benefit, at most. This isn't surprising, since x264 is pretty efficient with memory usage and so probably doesn't need as much bandwidth relative to the amount of processing its doing.

The Q9x00, however, is still better because the 45nm Core 2s have much faster SSE units (most importantly faster pack/unpack, shuffle, and horizontal arithmetic), significantly improving the performance of a lot of the assembly.

[Quarkboy]

Originally Posted by Dark Shikari

FSB is basically meaningless for encoding, at least with x264; the benchmarks I've seen from TechARP suggest that higher FSB at the same clock speed has a lower-single-digits percent benefit, at most. This isn't surprising, since x264 is pretty efficient with memory usage and so probably doesn't need as much bandwidth relative to the amount of processing its doing.

The Q9x00, however, is still better because the 45nm Core 2s have much faster SSE units (most importantly faster pack/unpack, shuffle, and horizontal arithmetic), significantly improving the performance of a lot of the assembly.

Also don't forget the heat/power saving benefits of 45nm. Maybe that's a secondary concern but energy ain't cheap.

I got me a Core 2 Duo E8400 a 3 Ghz a while back and it's plenty fast for encoding and also runs silent and cool. I'd definitely say go with the new 45 nm chips, whether it's 2 core or springing for the 4 core. Obviously 4 core is gonna be better for encoding, but you pay for it in price.
Heck with my chip I was getting 7-8 fps (on a 640x480 clip) on a modified HQ-insane with ME range of _32_ and exhaustive! (Yes, yes, I know there's no point to that, but I was just experimenting)

[SirCanealot]

So does anyone actually know when Intel's new platform is meant to hit? Does fall mean around X-mas or in a month or so?

[Merlin7777]

October, I think. Of course, this will be the initial roll out, which will be freakin' nuts, so waiting till christmas isn't a bad idea.

[SilentTweak]

Originally Posted by Ayanami9870

Dual core = games
Quad core= 3D modeling, encoding

Quad cores don't perform as well as the higher frequency clocked duals at games, but things that exploit the parallel processing will be much faster on the quad. Things like h264 and Maya love quad cores.

As for the Q6600 vs. the newer Q9300, here's a question: Given that the Q6600 has a Front Side Bus (FSB) of 1066MT/s and the Q9300 has a faster one at 1333MT/s, has anybody determined how much of an overclock is needed for the Q6600 to soundly beat a stock Q9300 at encoding and rendering?

If the overclock is not much and the cooling needed to reach it is relatively cheap, then the Q6600 is the better choice given enough RAM. I hear the Q9300 doesn't overclock very much, and the Q9450 and Q9550 are hella expensive.

http://www.techarp.com/x264_Benchmark/hd//results-1.htm

You can take a look at those results for comparisons of Q9000 vs Q6000 on x264 encoding. Overall the Q9000s do beat Q6000s at the same clocks. For a quick tibit:

Q9450@2.66Ghz was just as fast as a Q6600 overclocked at 3.00Ghz. This is a very mild difference seeing how Q6600@3.0 is pretty easy to achieve. However if you overclock the Q9450 it starts to pull away a bit more.

Q9450@2.66: 1:54 Min @ 16.10FPS
Q9450@3.00: 1:43 Min @ 18.00FPS
Q9450@3.20: 1:35 Min @ 19.65FPS
Q6600@2.66: 2:17 Min @ 13.47FPS
Q6600@3.00: 1:48 Min @ 16.89FPS
Q6600@3.20: 1:41 Min @ 18.13FPS

I guess overall it's roughly a 1FPS advantage. The build is fairly old I would think. So, maybe the Q9000 series will have a more of an advantage now? Not sure though unless Dark says otherwise.

[Dark Shikari]

Originally Posted by SilentTweak

I guess overall it's roughly a 1FPS advantage. The build is fairly old I would think. So, maybe the Q9000 series will have a more of an advantage now? Not sure though unless Dark says otherwise.

The main advantages of Penryn vs Conroe lie in the faster SSE unit, which improves speed of lots of things, especially transforms (DCT and SATD). Holger as part of SOC also has a lot of Penryn-specific functions going in, such as zigzags, intra prediction, etc.