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  1. Member
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    So I've been contemplating getting a new PC as the one I have is a bit old with only 1gb memory, pentium 4 processor, not even sure what everything is up to now.

    The main reason I wanted to upgrade my machine as doing those certain tasks like transoding/re-encoding video takes hours even days at times, and other little things like unraring big files takes sooo long.

    If I were to look at some newer machines would these tasks increase in the time it takes to do stuff on my current computer? I'm wondering if the upgrade to a newer machine would indeed encode/recode videos faster unrar faster and such? What makes those things faster?


    Thanks
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  2. Just checkout some of the CPU reviews/charts on Tomshardware or Anandtech. Look at the comparisons for the tasks you're looking to perform with that PC. Faster clock cycles, larger on die cache and multi-threaded enhancements will make some tasks faster with one brand CPU.

    If you use Adobe software mostly, you'll want an Intel CPU as the software is optimized to take advantage of the chips Hyperthreading and they have better implementation of SSE code. On the other hand AMD chips are cheaper and for non multi-threaded non optimized applications, perform just as well as Intel.

    I just built a machine exclusively to convert DVDs to Xvid with Autogk. I get up to 8 fps faster than realtime conversion, depending on the material being encoded. Only cost $120 to build using left over parts, only the CPU, motherboard and memory is new.
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  3. I don't think any current Intel part (Core architecture) supports Hyperthreading. The upcoming 6 core server chips will though. Six cores with hyperthreading looks like 12 CPUs. That CPU probably isn't in your price range.

    Video encoding is mostly CPU bound. Speed depends on CPU speed, number of cores, CPU architecture. Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad pretty much rule the roost now. AMD parts are only competitive at the low end. Not all encoders are multithreaded. The ones that aren't won't be able to take advantage of multiple cores. Check the encoders you use, or plan to use in the near future. The release version of Xvid is not multithreaded and doesn't run any faster on a 2 core or 4 core CPU. There are multithreaded builds in beta but they are not well multithreaded. Speed doesn't scale much past 2 or 3 cores. If a particular video compresses at 15 fps with Xvid and 1 core, at 2 cores it will increase to about 25 fps. With 3 cores it will increase to about 30 fps. With 4 cores maybe 32 fps. X264 on the other hand is very well multithreaded and scales pretty well up to at least 8 cores. That is, 8 cores compress almost 8 times faster than 1 core.

    UnRaring big files may be more disk bound than CPU bound. Creating RAR files is usually CPU bound.

    The latest charts at Toms Hardware don't list older CPUs anymore:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-q3-2008/benchmarks,31.html

    The older versions of the charts do:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2004/benchmarks,18.html

    Unfortunately, they seem to have dropped the charts from the years between 2004 and 2008. But those should give you some idea what to expect relative to your current system.

    Oh, the Q1 2008 chart has a lot of P4 CPUs listed:
    http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/cpu-charts-2008-q1-2008/benchmarks,16.html
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  4. Member Soopafresh's Avatar
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    For unraring, having 2 physical drives installed will speed up operations. Rar files exist on C: and are unrared to D: (Reading happens on C:, writing happens on D: )
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  5. Member ahhaa's Avatar
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    You might also check on what's running in the background.
    I had an issue with Trend a couple years back; it was rescanning everything during transfers- pre-scanning and then turning it off during processing speeded things up tremendously.
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  6. Originally Posted by Soopafresh
    For unraring, having 2 physical drives installed will speed up operations. Rar files exist on C: and are unrared to D: (Reading happens on C:, writing happens on D: )
    YES.
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