P4 or Athlon XP which is better for encoding....

[epic47]

I'm planning to upgrade my machine in a few months....in ur opinion which is a better CPU for encoding P4 or Athlon XP?

[Dhruv]

I'm also going to upgrade. I would guess that Athlon XP is better because of all the comments on this site.

[tinycorkscrew]

Both will do a good job. The AMD 1900XP is currently the fastest processor on the market. Yes, it's faster than a P4.

However, if you primarily use TMPGEnc, be advised that it's one of the only programs in existence that is optimized for Intel's SSE2 instruction set. The AMD processor supports SSE, but not SSE2. Therefore, TMPGEnc might run faster with a P4. I have not seen any head-to-head tests in which TMPGEnc was used as a benchmark, so I can't say for sure.

If I were buying a processor right now, I'd buy an AMD 1900.

[LP209]

For the people who have upgraded to the P4 or faster AMD's, do you guys notice a big difference in speed when it comes to using the video editing softwares here at VCDhelp?

For example, it takes me 3-4 hours to convert a 650mg avi file in TMPGEnc so that it can be converted to a VCD. Currently I have an 800MHz, 512RAM computer and was hoping that upgrading to a faster computer would greatly cut down on the time. Or does come down to the limition of the programs themselves?

[tinycorkscrew]

Well, I sure noticed a big difference in TMPGEnc after getting a dual AMD computer.

I used to use a 700mhz PIII, and it took 6 or 7 hours to do a 90 minute standard-compliant VCD with high quality settings. With my dual AMD 1.2ghz MP, it takes less than 90 minutes. I can usually do a 90 minute movie in 70 minutes or so.

Processing power makes a huge difference in encoding. RAM and hard drive speed aren't really very important for encoding.

If you do a lot of editing (with programs like Premiere), adding RAM will make a noticeable difference. And, of course, for capturing, hard drive speed is the most important factor.

[LP209]

That's GREAT to hear!!!! Thanks for replying tinycorkscrew. I kinda assumed that it would help somewhat but I didn't think that it would cut down on the time that much!

I'm currently happy with the performance of my PC except when it comes to video editing. I didn't want to get a faster computer if the performance increased only a little.

I guess it's time I start saving for new computer. Thanks again tinycorkscrew.

[sommersby]

My new AMD1600xp cut my encoding times by about 40% over my 1g tbird, from 4hrs to 2 1/2 hours for a 2 hour movie. And its a cheap upgrade, I got the system with 40g hd, 16x dvd and 256mb ddr ram for $418 total at a recent show.

[leera2]

To tinycorkscrew and sommersby, Can you guys post your system specs, I'm looking to upgrade from my 1.1 bird, as it currently takes 8-9 hours to encode a 2hr movie, I would like to be able to do this a quick as you are saying.
thanks.
leera2

[tinycorkscrew]

leera2 -

Some of my specs change every few days, but here's what I'm using right now:

2x AMD 1.2ghz MP processors
2x Volcano II heatsinks
Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard
1 gb Crucial DDR RAM
18 gb Seagate Cheetah 15,000 rpm SCSI hard drive
60 gb Western Digital IDE drive for storage
16x IOMagic CDRW drive
4x HP 8100 CDRW drive
Geforce 256 DDR in AGP slot
NCR 22 inch monitor (rebranded Mitsubishi 2040u)
onboard ATI video card
14 inch MAG Innovision monitor
Soundblaster Live 5.1
2x onboard LAN ports - one for home networking, one for cable modem
Yamaha speakers (from my last computer)
IEEE 1394 PCI card (for capturing from my camcorder)
Addtronics W8500 case w/ 9 Panaflo fans
NMB 460 watt power supply

I think that's it. TMPGEnc uses both processors when encoding, so it offers a big performance gain that you wouldn't see in most other applications. Same is true for Premiere. The main reason I like dual processors is multitasking. I can burn a CD while encoding a movie and downloading from 8 different sources while playing a game.

[Macros746]

EVeryone should check out THIS article http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=888
To find out some of the truths behind the marketing. I had no idea the numbers listed were far from the actual speed of the chips...dishonest bastards...


Mark

[Nerk01]

before you go ripping into AMD because of their marketing techniques think about why they have to do it. Intel took some shortcuts in the design of the P4 to ramp up the clock speed in doing so they lost some of the performance. Intel did this so they could trick joe blow into thinking that Intel processors are faster/better. This is not true. AMD only had one option in order to not lose the customers that don't know better. Rating system. They label AthlonXP processors based on how they perform compared to the P4's. and trust me they didn't get that right but instead AMD shortsighted themselves with those ratings.

[loudanddeep]

AMD is not trying to trick you...
INTEL is.

They claim to have the fastest processors.
IF you are talking internal processor frequency, yes the clock speed is faster.

However, today, higher clock speed does not equal better performance.

TO compete with this marketing trick, amd attempted to come up with a number that comes close to comparing the chips...

(No, I am not an AMD fan, I use intel.).

dp

[epic47]

let's put the arguing aside and stick to the facts, just please just say which one is better in your opinion.

[Vejita-sama]

AMD XP is better than P4 for encoding.

[mole]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
tinycorkscrew wrote:


here's what I'm using right now:

2x AMD 1.2ghz MP processors
2x Volcano II heatsinks
Tyan Thunder K7 motherboard
1 gb Crucial DDR RAM
18 gb Seagate Cheetah 15,000 rpm SCSI hard drive
60 gb Western Digital IDE drive for storage
16x IOMagic CDRW drive
4x HP 8100 CDRW drive
Geforce 256 DDR in AGP slot
NCR 22 inch monitor (rebranded Mitsubishi 2040u)
onboard ATI video card
14 inch MAG Innovision monitor
Soundblaster Live 5.1
2x onboard LAN ports - one for home networking, one for cable modem
Yamaha speakers (from my last computer)
IEEE 1394 PCI card (for capturing from my camcorder)
Addtronics W8500 case w/ 9 Panaflo fans
NMB 460 watt power supply
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

What's with this creamy sticky wet stuff in my pants????

[Sefy]

Macros746, AMD are not being Dishonest, if you go to their page they explain exactly what they did in their marketing scheme, and if you don't know, then i'll tell you, the numbers you see on the AMD (1600/1700..1900) are numbers taken from the SAME program Intel uses to number their own CPU's all these years! it's the Spec2000, which is a world standard, AMD is beats Intel in their OWN game!

As for lying, I remember in some old posts, people say 266mhz bus is bullshit, and how about "400" mhz bus ? that's not bulshit ? that's 100mhz bus QuadPumped! the P4 bus is actually lower then even a P3! which is why a P3 beats a P4!

Lastly, just like Nerk01 said, AMD isn't at fault here, it's the uneducated person that believes a MHZ represents the speed of the CPU, it may have been true in the past, but this is a new era, and people need to start thinking diffrently.

epic47, everything I say IS a fact, you can check it yourself if you believe I am misleading you.

[epic47]

So at this point, it looks like AMD is winning with a land slide....what about a dual PIII system??

[Douglesh]

Dont be fooled by AMDs chips names, athlon XP 1700 is actually 1533mhz clock speed, not 1700. All i can say for the author of this topic is:

1) P4 bus speed is better than AMD bus speed (400-266) quad pumped or not
2) no point using a P4 without RIMM's, P4 with RIMM = WAAAAY better than AMD with DDR, and i dont think anyone can argue that.
3) P4 has better bandwidth throughput per second as opposed to AMD
4) AMD chips run very hot , so dont buy one without a socket A cooler, or you wont have one for long
5) P4 uses SSE2 instruction set, not sure if AMD does, i think it would

[tinycorkscrew]

Douglesh -

According to every recent head to head comparsion, the fastest Athlon XP smokes the fastest P4 in real-world applications. In everything from games (Quake 3, Serious Sam, Max Payne, you name it) to office applications to MP3 encoding, the Athlon is faster. I don't care about the benchmarks (memory bandwidth, for example) that have no bearing on actual performance.

I do agree with you, though, about using a P4 without Rambus. If you're going to buy a P4, you really ought to get the memory that was designed for it.

[Shabubu]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-12-04 19:32:16, Sefy wrote:
As for lying, I remember in some old posts, people say 266mhz bus is bullshit, and how about "400" mhz bus ? that's not bulshit ? that's 100mhz bus QuadPumped! the P4 bus is actually lower then even a P3! which is why a P3 beats a P4!
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

And DDR 266 is dual-pumped 133. This argument will carry on, if your building a system, go AMD. If your buying ready made get a system you like the look of. Don't just count numbers, choose a package your happy with from a shop you can rely on. They'll perform roughly the same, the difference is noticable on benchmarks, but in reality you won't notice THAT much of a difference, it won't be the same as say a P1 vs P3.

[Betamax]

I'd like to put some appendum to this, first my configuration :
- Athlon 1.2Ghz (9x133Mhz), 1200 internal and 133 external
- 256SDR
- (1x40Gb) + (1x60Gb) ATA100 7200rpm
- CD + DVD + CDRW at ATA66

Currently I only can capture analogue, while I'm using standard VHS, into VCD mode. Whenever I try SVCD (or better) I get worse results even getting my system to crash!

Because I'm only happy with the best results, TMPGenc takes about 12hours for a standard movie of about 1h45, but then again, the resulting VCD I get is sometimes the same or better quality than the original vhs-movie.. No blocky's and no noise, good audio etc. It's fun watching these vcd's onto my tele instead sticking with the 'old' vhs-tapes.

Whenever I'll upgrade, I think I'll take Intel again. Although I took Athlon (1 year ago already) because it was a lot cheeper than Intel. But like it always was, Athlon is only for about 99% compatible with Intel. And I notice this while using some specific software (like XP of M$) and with some hardware (specificly capture-cards).
To what I'll upgrade, I don't know yet, it will be for about a year or two (got to have some money first).

[Sefy]

Betamax, just for the record, Microsoft and AMD worked together on the source code of XP, so it is more optimized for AMD then for Intel, and even if you go back to the 486 days, AMD had a Windows Certification of Compatibility printed on it's CPU's, and Intel never had one, and on top of that, AthlonXP is even better then all other CPU's cause it even support SSE! so the compatibility level is even higher.

Shabubu, yes, the argument can go on forever if you ignore the facts, a 133 dualpupmped to 266 is still higher then 100 quadpupmed, cause all the system communicates at 133 and not 100.

Douglesh, you have no idea what you are talking about as you are ignoring the facts all together, a CPU with a 133 will be much faster then the one with 100, because it has 33% faster communication with every other peripheral on your PC.
As for Memory bandwidth, yeah, that's the only thing you said right so far, but which application requires this today ? in the real life, you won't ever need it.
P4 uses SSE2, so ? big deal, how many applications support it at the moment ? 1 ? 2 ? 3 maybe ? and AMD's next CPU will also suppose SSE2, so what's the big deal ?

epic47, Why do you want to spend money on a dead end system ?
P3 is not going anywhere, Intel is phasing it out, haven't you noticed the P4 sales are finally getting up ? well, it's not because people want to buy it, it's because Intel stopped making P3, so they can't buy a P3 anymore.

[gf]

I don't want to start an Intel/AMD war but I would like to ask one question Douglesh? If the Intel P4 @1.7 Ghz is WAAAYYY better than the AMD with it's SSE2,RIMM's,quad pumped front side bus, then why does AMD @1.533 Ghz with it's DDR 133 beat or equal Intel @1.7 Ghz in most benchmarks ? And why does a Pentium 3 @ 1.0 Ghz beat or equal a Pentium 4 @ 1.5 Ghz ? I would think if the processors speed is 1.5 x another processors speeed it should have 1.5 x the performance. Guess that's why the AMD chip @1.533 Ghz is call +1700.

[Sefy]

Here I am trying to give such high details, while gf put it in a much simpler way, how do you comment on that Douglesh ? if the P4 is soooo much better in every aspect, how come it can't outperform a much much more simpler and defective CPU ? even P3 beats the P4, how come ?

[sommersby]

Well, here's mine, not as nice, but it works for me and since it well depreaciate by 50%, (as all puters do) in 6 mo, so I'm not out $1000.

Amd 1600+ xp cpu w/amd approved fan
512 mb DDR ram
Jetway MB 835 I think, but may be wrong, I know it is the newest ver out.
ATX case with 350watt PS and 2 extra fans installed.
2 7200 40g WD hard drives.
Sony 16x dvdrom
TDK velo 16x10x40 cdrw
ATI AIW radeon
linksys lan card, I run a home network.
17" princeton LCD flatpanel.

[epic47]

If XP is good, then a Dual XP must be better, any opinions??

[Sefy]

As long as that's an AMD XP and not a Dual Windows XP

[SatStorm]

Yes, it's better BUT there are no motherboard solutions....
Only one, and it is not cheap....
Hope this change soon...

[Macros746]

I'm sorry everyone thought I was knocking AMD processors...looking back at my post I was really unclear. I am a die hard AMD fan. My point was actually that AMD HAD to market their chips that way because of Intels earlier scheme. No one would believe that the AMD 1.3 could beat the Intel 1.8 in most tests. But would they believe that the XP 1800 can? Sure....it sounds more dramatic. I think the whole thing is VERY dishonest but I don't blame AMD at all....just giving Intel a taste of their own medicine.

[FilComArt]

I'm waiting for the new AMD760MPX chipset and new motherboards from ASUS, Gigadyte and MSI. And I will change my Gigabyte7DXR. This new mobo will be available in December of 2001.