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  1. Solid State drives in the 120Gb range are available for resale. and the price has come down on new ones but not enough.

    I was wondering if many users here are using an SSD boot drive to do video conversions and how much if any it has enhanced the time taken to do one. It makes sense to me that the content would have to reside on the SSD as well as the conversion tool the same as a RAM drive.

    Who has had experience with these?
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  2. SSD drives are nice for boot drives. But for video convesion they only save you a second or two when starting up the software. Most conversion software uses a pipeline where the reading and writing of frames is handled by different threads than the encoder. So you only see a few seconds difference in encoding time over a multi-hour encode. The exception would be when working with uncompressed or losslessly compressed video where disk I/O can be the bottleneck.
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  3. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    I have three PCs with SSD boot drives and they do improve boot times. They don't do much for program performance.

    Video conversions are still mostly CPU intensive. Some codecs can use multiple threads to boost conversion performance.
    When I went with a 8 core CPU I saw quite a large speed increase for H.264 encodes. CPU speed also helps.
    RAM quantity, no real difference that I have noticed as long as it's at least 4 - 6GB.
    GPU/Video card performance not a lot, if any, conversion performance unless you are using hardware assisted conversions.

    For editing a SSD does help, but their size VS cost would be a limit for most of us. I prefer large HDDs for editing, in the terabyte range.
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  4. Thanks for these replies.

    @redwudz

    I normally do not see a lot of RAM usage but here you say that 4- 6 Gb is ideal.
    The ol' Biostar has 2 gb.

    What is the best way to see the usage during a run of Auto Gordian Knot for instance? I have CPUZ and Everest on system currently.
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  5. Originally Posted by loninappleton View Post
    What is the best way to see the usage during a run of Auto Gordian Knot for instance?
    Task Manager.
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    The more you write and erase an SSD, the shorter its lifespan will be. Using it to do encodes would be a great way to do exactly that.

    But if for some reason in the future you choose to get an SSD to do this kind of thing anyway, I'd advise getting 256 GB or larger if you can afford it. I saw some test results that showed that the larger the SSD, the longer it lived. Larger sizes provide more area to spread out the writes and erases so that the same areas aren't used over and over.
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  7. Yes I just got used to Task Manager to look at multicore activity on a replacement cpu.
    I'll look for memory monitoring there as well.

    The replies that come in the less likely I'm headed toward an SSD.

    More memory does still present an upgrade option.
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  8. Your profiles says you have an AMD X3 CPU. Can you enable the 4th core?
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  9. Mod Neophyte Super Moderator redwudz's Avatar
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    Most of my encodes only use about 300 MB or so RAM. When I encode H.264 with Vidcoder my RAM usage goes from 1.48GB at idle to 1.66 at 85% CPU on all eight cores.

    But 2GB RAM could cause problems if you have a video card using some of it, along with a program like Photoshop that holds a lot of data in RAM.
    Built in motherboard video chips can use a fair amount of RAM, maybe half a GB, so 2GB may not be enough.
    I usually suggest 4GB for a 32bit system and 6GB (Or more, depending on what else you do with the PC) for a 64bit system.

    For my SSDs, I try to keep at least 50% free space to give the SSD and OS room to move the data around to equalize wear on individual cells.
    Most all my SSDs are 120GB, which seems large enough for my uses. A 60 - 80GB SSD is a bit too small, IMO.

    You also need to keep the OS and your programs from writing temp files or other large files to a SSD and wasting space.
    At present my SSD is at about 75% free space. I move all my larger files off to one of my regular mechanical drives.
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  10. I agree with jagabo in most cases ssds do not really help.
    Scenarios where they do help are:
    • Multiplexing and demultiplexing
    • reading and writing lossless content
    Regarding RAM, personally I normally equip my systems with as much RAM as they support. (since I often run VMs on my system)
    For SD content and 1080p 8 GB is normally enough, for 4k/8k/.. content you need way more.
    users currently on my ignore list: deadrats, Stears555
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  11. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    Your profiles says you have an AMD X3 CPU. Can you enable the 4th core?
    That is something I surely would like to know. I've been in contact with CPU World.com (an excellent source) but did not address directly the issue for this cpu:

    AMD Phenom HD8450ODJBGH

    I have not tried this process on anything previously and don't know where to start for this BioStar board.

    On my other rig it was mentioned that MSI has a software tool to make this painless. That machine has an Athlon 3 core which is stock. However I don't wish to mess with that one.
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  12. Originally Posted by loninappleton View Post
    Yes I just got used to Task Manager to look at multicore activity on a replacement cpu.
    I'll look for memory monitoring there as well.

    The replies that come in the less likely I'm headed toward an SSD.

    More memory does still present an upgrade option.
    I'll start this Task manager thing with a fresh encode of a movie length DVD main movie and
    report back memory usage.
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  13. In Task manager for Win 7 x64 under Physical memory

    Total 1918 (constant)
    Cache 1156
    Available 1108 (these vary)
    Free Zero

    CPU average usage for AGK 75% for all three cores during compressibility test


    Memory Usage showed about 667 mb which is the speed of the installed sticks.

    Better than that I can't report details since they change all the time
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  14. You want to go to the Processes tab and see how much memory the encoding program is using. For example, on my computer, using the command line version of x264 encoding a DVD source with the slow preset showed x264 using about 100 MB of memory.

    Windows uses otherwise unused memory as disk cache, hence the "free 0". Most of that memory can be given to other programs when needed. Hence the "available 1108".
    Last edited by jagabo; 27th Oct 2014 at 15:13.
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  15. Originally Posted by jagabo View Post
    You want to go to the Processes tab and see how much memory the encoding program is using. For example, on my computer, using the command line version of x264 encoding a DVD source with the slow preset showed x264 using about 100 MB of memory.

    Windows uses otherwise unused memory as disk cache, hence the "free 0". Most of that memory can be given to other programs when needed. Hence the "available 1108".
    Ok.

    On Processes:

    CPU Usage 77 %
    Physical memory 38% during First Pass
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  16. Also noted:

    The MCP6PB sheet says up to 1066 x2Gb memory can be used.
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