Quad Core used with Pinnacle 11 & Mpeg Editor 3

[jaffacaique]

Hi, I am thinking of upgrading my PC to to the intel Q9450 processor. I currently use have an old AMD 3800X2 at the moment, the software I use mainly is Pinnacle 11, Mpeg Editor 3 and DVD author 3.

I realise any recent processor will be an improvement. But I would appreciate ANY fee back from others who have followed the quad core route and if they can confirm that these programs will show any improvement and utilise the extra cores to increase the speed of the process when used individually. (I will not be running any extra programs if the background other than what is installed with Vista Ultimate 32bit and all editing is done on a different - non system drive)


I will be using 3.5GB of DDR2 ram. The upgrade will either be to a Q9450 or to the dual core E8500.

Thanks for your help.

[jagabo]

I don't know those programs in particular but many encoders don't scale all that well above 2 cores.

[jaffacaique]

In case any one else was interested like me....

Quadcore does work well with Pinnacle 11 and Mpeg Editor 3. All 4 cores appear to be in use when checking in task manager there is also a speed difference of about 4 times that of my old setup. Vista also displays 4GB ram under Windows System Properties, although under Task Manager Total Physical Memory Availble is 3.3GB. Very impressed with new setup which more than meets my expectations.

[jagabo]

Quadcore does work well with Pinnacle 11 and Mpeg Editor 3. All 4 cores appear to be in use when checking in task manager

Are all four running at (or near) 100 percent? Even if only one core is being used Task Manager would show activity on all four because Windows switches tasks between cores. A single thread running full out will usually show about 25 percent on each of the four cores (and in the total current usage). Two threads running full out will show up as 50 percent on each core. Four threads running full out will show 100 percent.

[SCDVD]

I would appreciate ANY fee back from others.

We aren't going to give you any money. Seriously, you are making a good choice to upgrade to a quad core. Over the useful life of a computer, most software will take advantage of multi cores even though some may not at the moment.

[jagabo]

Lol, "fee back"!

But seriously, I'm not trying to discourage anyone from getting a quad core. I use one myself. I just wanted to make sure people are aware that quad core doesn't automatically run twice as fast as dual core (at the same clock speed, with the same architecture).

With clock speeds topped out for the last several years, and likely for the foreseeable future, more and more cores is the way forward.

[jaffacaique]

Hi Jagabo & SCDVD

Thank for both for taking the time to answer. Each core is being used at around 15% on average, the main reason for the upgrade was to pass on my old PC to someone else and to future proof my PC for a while a least, I know not many programs utilise all of the cores at present but a least I'll be ready and waiting when they do.

I agree with you SCDVD with the processor speed statement, so long as the new up coming software is beginning to use the extra cores available we will be ready for them.

PS no fee required for this onejavascript:emoticon('')

[jagabo]

Each core is being used at around 15% on average

While rendering to MPEG2 or MPEG4? Even a single threaded MPEG encoder should be able to hit 25 percent on your quad core CPU -- as long as there isn't some other bottleneck in the system. Is your source uncompressed video? That would explain it (disk I/O bottleneck).

[jaffacaique]

I'm using Pinnacle 11, and using MPEG 2. I'm not quite sure what uncompressed is, does it mean that it is direct from the capture card and unedited?

[jagabo]

If your capture card outputs uncompressed video the video can be saved that way. Uncompressed 720x576 25 fps RGB video would be about 112 GB/hr. If saved as YUY2 (or some other 4:2:2 subsampling) around 75 GB/hr.

Lossless compression with HuffYUV usually gets that down to about 30 GB/hr. If you capture from a DV camcorder your files are around 13 GB/hr. Capture devices that save directly as MPEG are usually in the 2 to 4 GB/hr range.

Note that the very slowest hard drives you can get now run about 72 GB/hr (20 MB/s). More typical is 144 to 288 GB/hr (40 to 80 MB/s). So the slowest hard drives have no problem keeping up with any compressed standard definition video. It's only when you use uncompressed video that the drive can become a bottleneck.

There is one other possibility: if you drive is running in PIO mode rather then DMA mode its throughput will be cut down to 1/10 or less.