CCE Transcode with Athlon 64

[VinnySem]

I am curious, has anyone transcoded on an Athlon 64 using CCE? If so, how many passes did you run, and what was your time like?

Currently I have 2 AMD systems, one a Barton 2500 that I have OC'ed to 2.4 ghz, and a TBred 2400 I have OC'ed to 2.2ghz. A 4 pass CCE transcode takes about 3.5 hours. I am considering building a new system based on this CPU, mainly because of the SSE extensions, not because of the 64Bit architecture.

Damn NVidia for not putting SoundStorm in their NF3 chipset

[Gurm]

I think you're confused. CCE does not, in any way shape or form, transcode.

- Gurm

[dcsos]

And when I tried to load CCE on a computer equipped with a CELERON processor, CCE returned an error that it only works on Pentium 3 and 4 systems

Are you sure it even loads on an athlon system?

[troyvcd1]

CCE needs a processor with MMX. Some of the newer celerons have this but some of the older ones don't. A PII does not have MMX while a p3, p4 does.

[Faustus]

I promise that CCE will load on an Athlon. The only issue I've ever heard was the sound bug, where you have to specificly tell it no sound or it will crash on an AMD.

But I don't own an Athlon 64 so I can't answer the main question. The problem I see if if you are Frameserving to CCE and not just doing a traditional encode would be that in order to get any great gains not only would CCE have to support your 64bit cpu but also the frame server, and if only CCE did then you'd be fubar because in the case of frameserving usually the frame server is the slowest part and thus you'd lose any gains.

[VinnySem]

OK then, my mistake. I am using DVD2DVD (DVD2SVCD) to back up the main movie only. I am frameserving with DVD2AVI to CCE. DVD2AVI can take advantage of SSE intructions, apparently, which my Athlons do not have.

[Faustus]

Unless I'm mistaken the Athlon should have SSE, just not SSE2.

[indolikaa]

Unless I'm mistaken the Athlon should have SSE, just not SSE2.

That's the way I understood it. SSE2 is the domain of the P4...

[Faustus]

Because of the Frame Server I suspect the best thing to speed up encode times would be getting the fastest FSB you can.

[Vejita-sama]

I've got an AMD Barton 2500+ (OC 11.5x215) and normally get encode speeds in CCE of ~0.3x source runtime per pass (ie. 3~3.3 MBPS encodes). That's fast enough for me.

The Althons will run CCE. In fact I was able to run CCE on my old K6-2 333. All you need is MMX (not SSE). I didn't know that the A64 had SSE2, but I still think it's the CPU speed (mostly FSB) that affects encode times more than MMX, SSE or SSE2. Could be wrong thou

[proxyx99]

As I recall encoding efficiency is one of the standard criteria used for eval. of CPU's. Anandtech.com as well as Tom's Hardware may have an answer for you. For encoding P4 is hard to beat. But is the time difference of say 10% worth the price of constant upgrades. I don't think so.
Maybe dual CPU is the way to go. I think, only for pro's. Home movie enc. etc. is not a race and as long as you have fairly recent system you're OK.
Hardware ages so quickly now....