Is dual Athlon MP worth the expense for video?

[ray08]

I have been encoding home movies to both MPEG2 and Divx, then burning to DVD. WOW! Does it ever require the CPU cycles! I have an Athlon XP 2400 and plenty of RAM. So if I upgraded to dual MP's, what could I expect? Anyone gone from XP to MP (for video work) using close to same clock speeds? Was it worth it? Feedback is appreciated.

[Gazorgan]

It depends.

Does your OS support MP? You need Pro versions of W2K or XP.

Not all Video/Audio apps will support MP. This can be worked around by running two encoding sessions at once (faster, but not 2x faster). You can expect increase in performance from 1.9x all the way down to .9x (yes, running slower than a single cpu, see hyperthreading benchmarks for expalanations on the effects of MP), it just depends on the apps and how you configure everything.

Sometiems it's cheaper to run 2 barebone encoding systems (MP boards can be expensive).

[jtommyj]

I'm in the process of upgrading my dual mp 1900 machine to a dual Xeon machine. I do major video conversion and want the extra headroom.
When I encode on a single processor system, it just seems to bog down the computer too much for my liking and since some encodes are 10 hours plus, dual solution works best for me.
For example, 1 system is P-4 2.4, 1 is XP 2400 @2.4 Ghz nad 1 is Tyan dual mp 1900.
With Tmpgenc, dual system takes between 1/2 and 3/4 of the time that the P-4 single and XP single do. Plus I can use Newsbin to download from newsgroups, surf the net or whatever with no bogdown.

[ImaWeTodd]

I gotta say I love my dual when it comes to encoding. MainConcepts. However, there are new problems you encounter. I've had problems with Vdub, Avisynth, Morgan Mjpeg (I think), and Maestro. All because of SMP.

Also, as Gazorgan said, dual amd boards are not cheap. However, did you know you can mod XPs to run as dual. That's if your are cheap and like to play.

I've been running dual XPs in a Tyan for about 6 months now. No problems.

Check out the forum at http://forums.2cpu.com/

[BJ_M]

Vdub, Avisynth, and Maestro all run fine on dual systems .... do it all the time ..

Maestro sometimes gives you an invalid frame rate error on the menu compile .. but all you have to do it set the Maestro.exe to affinity cpu=0

Vdub, Avisynth have no speed advantage on duals though ..

[PJV]

I think that the AMD Athlon MP chipset is extremely dated, and unless your going the way of twin Xeons or Opterons, your probably better off with an extremely fast single P4 at the same cost minus possible headaches. P4's are a bit better when it comes to audio/video encoding vs. Athlons.

[jtommyj]

I think that the AMD Athlon MP chipset is extremely dated, and unless your going the way of twin Xeons or Opterons, your probably better off with an extremely fast single P4 at the same cost minus possible headaches. P4's are a bit better when it comes to audio/video encoding vs. Athlons.

I agree totally. There really hasn't been a new MP chipset made for over a year and obviously with Opteron they're is nothing else coming down the pike for Athlon.

[ImaWeTodd]

Vdub, Avisynth, and Maestro all run fine on dual systems .... do it all the time ..

Maestro sometimes gives you an invalid frame rate error on the menu compile .. but all you have to do it set the Maestro.exe to affinity cpu=0

Vdub, Avisynth have no speed advantage on duals though ..

I would have to humbly disagree with most of your statements. All run fine for you... probably because you have good experience to spot and overcome problems.

- All you have to do with Maestro is to not have it run on 2 processors (set affinity) and you get no errors. I'd say this is a dual problem that can bite ya.

- Speed advantage of Vdub and Avisynth is to get different processes to run on different processors. I believe if you run both programs at the same time (ie open up an avs file in vdub) you get some advantage.

- As far as vdub and avisynth running fine. Well there are many versions of these 2 great programs. And many plugins/filters to both. I never said they do not run. But I have most definately seen frames corrupted that never occured on a single processor machine.

I was just trying to point out that in my experience, dual processors come with some hidden surprises. But you can't beat the speed.

[ImaWeTodd]

I agree totally.

I'd trade my Athlon dual for a hyperthreaded P4.

[The village idiot]

I just wish I had room and money for a new dual processor machine The speed for some things is fantastic, and if the software doesn't support dual processors, just run something else along side it, or it self twice with different tasks. But there are some tricks to making some software run each instance off of seperate cpu's. Like you might have to run one from the normal installed place, and one that is installed to the desk top. Very odd, but I had to do that with the SETI software so that I could run it on both processors. Photoshop loves dual cpu's, as does any other software written to take advantage of dual cpu's. For me it is mostly room right now, and I'm not doing as much as I used to do, so it isn't really needed. But those dual Optoron machines are really tempting, I bet they are expensive though.

Between AMD and Intel, I would probably chose the Intel. It is really too bad that they didn't make the regular P4 multi capable, that would bring the price back down. But last time I checked (over a year ago) they only had Xeon P4's in dual configuration. If you really want oddball, the newest Via chip is multi capable, the 1Ghz cpu with the newest core. Haven't seen any boards for it yet, but it should be ultra cheap. Just build a 4 or 8 processor machine, of course then you will need to buy a special version of windoze since the regular versions only support up to 2 processors, or you could run a unix OS.

[The village idiot]

Here is some super computer power for you:

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