the $50 upgrade

[deadrats]

i just had to share my experiences with my latest upgrade:

as some of you may remember i recently asked for some help in deciding between a couple of different upgrade options, as outlined in the post linked below:

https://forum.videohelp.com/topic363123.html

after thinking and re-thinking about it, i finally decided to just pick up an E8500 with a G31 based motherboard (one of these from ecs or gigabyte costs about $50) couple it with some ddr2 1066 and use that until the core i5's hit the market towards the end of this year. i figured for about $250 worth of upgrades i would end up with a rig that would run circles around my current phenom 9500/790/ddr2 667 setup.

anyway, since the local computer show won't be in the area until the end of the month, i figured i would buy the ram from microcenter pc now and buy the board and the cpu then.

as it turns out microcenter had some very good deals on ram and i picked up a 4 gig kit (2x2gigs) of ddr2 1066 from OCZ for $50 (and i get $10 of that back with a mail in rebate). since my current msi motherboard supports up to 8 gigs of ram and supports 1066 ram, i decided to swap out the old 4 x 1 gigs of ddr2 667 and see what, if any performance improvement this OCZ ram would give to my current combo.

i started by benchmarking with cinebench and the results were almost a statistical wash, with the new ram making only a minor improvement.

i then tried some general use "seat of the pants" tests, such as launching multiple apps and seeing how long it took to get them into a "ready" state and there appeared to be a slight improvement, with the sole exception being tmpg express 4.6 that seemed like it took longer to launch and seemed to have "lost" it's ability to import hi def mkv files.

i then decided to try converting a dvd to divx and h264 using the aforementioned tmpg express and that was i got my first shock: the encoding times were drastically reduced, i'm talking encoding converting a full dvd to divx at 2 mb/s at "insane" settings with mp3 audio in a touch over 4 hours versus in the range of 7 hours with the previous ram and encoding to h264 in under 3 hours versus 5+ hours. during all these encodes the cpu usage was at 100 percent.

then i decided to test with probably one of the most under rated transcoders out there, xillisoft video converter ultimate. i loaded the same dvd into xillisoft but as 5 separate vob's and chose to transcode using the "ps3 (480p) excellent" settings, with a few minor modifications: i chose variable bitrate encoding, average of 2mb/s, max of 3.5 mb/s, h264 video codec and aac audio codec and chose the source folder as the destination folder and hit "convert". and that's when i got a shock i still can't believe despite rerunning the test 3 more times with 3 more dvd's: in the background i had bit torrent going and i have about 20 downloads going at the same time, when i checked the encoding speed i saw that it was encoding at about 22 fps, which is pretty close to real time and saw that my cpu was being used to 100 percent. needless to say i was pretty happy with the results but as i looked closer i was stunned: xillisoft wasn't encoding the entire movie at 22 fps, it was encoding 4 different vob's at the same time and each one of them was being encoded at 22 fps!!!

i just couldn't believe what i was seeing so i opened up the folder where they were being saved and sure enough i had 4 mp4's that were increasing in size in direct relation to the rate at which they were being encoded, just like xillisoft was reporting. to further test what was happening i chose to encode just one vob and sure enough the app, at least using this profile, isn't all that multithreaded, as only 1 core was being used but with only 1 encode going it was achieving about 30 fps.

i don't know about anyone else but i personally find it amazing that using one app you can encode 4 different files simultaneously, with the source and target folder being the same for all 4 files, and be about 4 times as fast as an app encoding 1 file using all 4 cores.

i can't wait to get the E8500 and overclock it to hell (i figure it should be easy to run it with a 1600mhz fsb which would result in 3.8ghz, which should hold me until the core i5's become available).

[greymalkin]

wait till the GPU encoding matures some more..we could have 4x SLI encoding 4 video streams at 10x the speed of your CPU!

[redwudz]

I like OCZ RAM, but it sounds like your old RAM was mis-configured by the motherboard or wasn't working quite right. However, if your performance improved that much, that's the most important thing.

[INFRATOM]

It sounds like you already ordered your CPU, quads are better for video stuff and future is in quad. Overclocking IMHO is not good, money spent on cooling you could step up one grade on CPU. Buying a good CPU cooler plus extra fans for box and RAM will run you close to $100. Your G31 MB is a good stable office product but I don't think you can can overclock it like others because it is designed for low power and will have short life. Use a 64 bit OS and configure your C drive as RAID 0 will give you an extra kick. When you are in the middle of encoding and computer becomes unstable and needs a reboot time wasted will diminish overclocking advantage not mentioning overclocked computer will not last as long.

[deadrats]

It sounds like you already ordered your CPU, quads are better for video stuff and future is in quad. Overclocking IMHO is not good, money spent on cooling you could step up one grade on CPU. Buying a good CPU cooler plus extra fans for box and RAM will run you close to $100. Your G31 MB is a good stable office product but I don't think you can can overclock it like others because it is designed for low power and will have short life. Use a 64 bit OS and configure your C drive as RAID 0 will give you an extra kick. When you are in the middle of encoding and computer becomes unstable and needs a reboot time wasted will diminish overclocking advantage not mentioning overclocked computer will not last as long.

actually i haven't ordered the cpu or the m/b, i'm waiting for the local computer show which comes to my area around the end of every month.

quad cores are better for video stuff only under certain apps, particularly top of the line prosumer products like sony vegas and procoder, under some apps that not as thoroughly or properly multithreaded, a dual core with a much higher clock speed will come out on top.

as for why the E8500, i wanted something that supports SSE4.1 and has a large L2 cache and has a high clock speed while being relatively cheap (as i said as soon as the core i5 comes out i'm switching in a heart beat).

as for a 64 bit OS i already use XP 64 SP2 and as soon as windows 7 comes out i'm probably going to jump that the 64 bit version of that. in the mean time i performed an OS mod that jagabo made reference to in another thread, namely modifying boot.ini with the /numproc=4 option and i noticed a nice performance jump from that, so now i think i'll just pick up a 9850BE and bump the multiplier up a bit to get to about 2.8ghz and just use my current setup until i5.

i had thought about a raid 0 or even picking up a 10k rpm raptor and using that as my OS drive, but that would mean i would have to reinstall my OS and all my apps and i'm just so lazy right now that i just don't really feel like going through all that work.

[deadrats]

wait till the GPU encoding matures some more..we could have 4x SLI encoding 4 video streams at 10x the speed of your CPU!

actually as i mentioned in another thread, by the time gpu encoding matures, as it is progressing at a really nice rate, we will have cou's with the gpu integrated on the die and eventually on the core itself, at which point it will probably replace the fpu/sse hybrid that is used now.

according to intel's road maps the core i5 will feature an integrated pci-e controller in addition to the imc and the processor after that will be a dual core, with hyperthreading (for a total of 4 threads) and it will have the integrated memory controller, the integrated pci-e controller AND an integrated gpu.

you want to talk about a bad ass encoding chip, imagine what that thing will do with floating point defendant apps and with apps that support gpu acceleration.

you can bet your ass i'll be one of the first in line to pick up one of those bad boys...

[deadrats]

I like OCZ RAM, but it sounds like your old RAM was mis-configured by the motherboard or wasn't working quite right. However, if your performance improved that much, that's the most important thing.

you know what improved my performance the most? a simple little mod to the boot.ini file i learned from jagabo, basically you launch msconfig, go to boot.ini, advanced options, click the check mark next to /numproc and choose the number of cores you have (it's disabled by default and only allows you to choose a max number that is equal to the number of cores your cpu has).

to give you an idea of the performance jump, under cinebench r10 64 bit, with the old ddr2 667 ram this pc would only score roughly 4200, with the new ddr2 1066 ram it scored roughly 4800 and with the above mod (done after the new ram was installed) it scored roughly 6800.

running the same encode test with tmpg express 4 encoding to divx at "insane" settings and constant quality, with the old ram it would take almost 6 hours, with the new ram it took under 4 hours and with the boot.ini mod it took about an 1.5 hours (<---that's not a typo). the best part is that cpu usage actually DECREASED, without the mod cpu usage was at 100 percent during the full encode, after the mod cpu usage was at about 80 percent.

using xillisoft converter ultimate, the previously mentioned test resulted in some really interesting results: as i mentioned before with the new ram i could encode 4 vob's simultaneously, each in roughly real time and a single vob encode would only use 1 core and the rest were idle, with the mod the encoding frame rate jumped to 44 fps and now encoding a single vob uses 2 cores, about 50 percent total cpu usage.

but most impressive of all is the performance jump i saw with silent hill: homecoming. with the old ram, using a 7900 gt oc (256mb ram), at 1280x1024 with all the graphical setting maxed out, the game would play smoothly for a bit then freeze up for about 15 seconds then resume, almost as if data was being written to and out of ram and if a lot of enemies where on the screen at the same time the frame rate would plummet to about 1 or 2 fps and the game would become unplayable, the game would be choppy as hell. i had switched out the video card and put in an HD 3850 (512mb ram) and the game had improved somewhat but the problem still persisted and the image quality wasn't as rich as the 7900. i had started thinking that maybe there might be something wrong with my motherboard or windows install or even the cpu itself.

with the new ram the performance improved quite a bit, but it still displayed similar but less severe problems. after the mod all the problems are gone, the game is smooth as silk.

the performance improvement i saw with that mod reminds me of recompiling the kernel under linux which always results in a nice performance increase.

now i'm wondering about all the reviews i see on the various tech sites, they usually reveal their testing methods, such as using a clean install, stopping all background processes but i never once saw mention of this mod, considering most reviews show the phenom 2 940 as being competitive with Q9450's and the Q9550 being practically equal with the i7 920, i would like to see what the performance delta is between a Q9550 using /NUMPROC=4 and an i7 920 using /NUMPROC=8, based on my experiences i'm guessing there would be no contest between the two.