CPU

[oldlag]

I'm considering building a machine dedicated to converting home video tapes to DVD. Is it necessary to use a P4 or Athalon CPU or will a fast Celeron suffice?

[holistic]

......a fast Celeron WILL suffice

Until recently ,I was encoding with a PIII 700 o/c @933 with 384Mb ram. I did the job .... slowly.

To compare my old system to my new.

CAPTURE : No difference since it is firewire and a 'transfer' of data @3.7Mb/sec
EDIT : No noticable difference in response times to my editiing.
ENCODE : Well big difference here . What would take 8 hours now takes less then 2. [ 933MHz versus 2100 Mhz. ]


So in summary , YES you can but it takes time.....patience.

][

[oldlag]

Ok, thanks. Is the 2100 MHz a P4, Atherlon or Celeron?

[lordsmurf]

I use a P4 1.8 and a Celeron 1.7 ... both work well. But the P4 is faster and runs cooler, as it should be.

[redwudz]

Holistic is running a AMD XP2500 Barton as I am. P4 2.66= $173US with heat sink. XP2500 Barton= $93 with heat sink. Celeron 2.66 W/O heatsink= $93US. Something to consider. I believe the P4 to be slightly faster, but the AMD is a whole lot cheaper and no matter what you buy, it may be somewhat obsolete in a year or two. Save some $ and spend it elsewhere on your computer (This is a completely unwarranted and blatant plug for AMD ) . I think the AMD is a better choice than a Celeron.

[donpedro]

I am also planing to do same (not sure if I realize plan). Due to budget constraints I choose

AMD Athlon XP 2500+ "Barton", 333 FSB, 512K Cache Processor $85

becaouse it is 333FSB and based on what I saw that makes big difference.

In case that I will go with cheaper version, I will go with

AMD Athlon XP 1800+, 266 MHz FSB, 256K Cache Processor $51

[oldlag]

Many thanks for everyone's advice. I'm also trying to decide between the Canopus ADVC100 and the ADCV50. The latter is alot cheaper but the former gives the option of monitoring from the A/V output whereas the other doesn't? Would this be a useful feature?

[rallynavvie]

Werd, the Athlon 2500 Barton is a very economical processor. It is also a very stable overclocking candidate if you ever decide to do that. I recommend it to anyone looking for an "entry-level" system.

The ADVC-100 is fantastic, but unless you're going to do a lot of conversions back and forth the ADVC-50 will do.

[thayne]

I believe the P4 to be slightly faster

That's not true, Athlon XP's are way faster to comparable P4's, WAY FASTER!

My Athlon XP 2500 smokes my 2.6GHz P4 at encoding; Not quite twice as fast, but close.

[redwudz]

donpedro: I had a XP1800. Good processor, but no comparison with the XP2500 Barton. Maybe my new motherboard, faster memory?; but the Barton encoded with DVD2SCVD almost twice as fast. I went from a 1.4 CCE encoding speed to a 2.6. Could be the newer version of DVD2SVCD or other factors, but I was impressed.

[VideoTechMan]

My opinion though, I wouldnt recommend a Celeron. They are fine if you are doing a basic "internet email and word-processing" type work, but for heavy duty stuff I would go with the P4, or the AMD if that is your preference. From what I learned about the Pentium and the Celerons is that the Celerons lack the cache chips that the Pentiums have, thus the price difference. Thats why the Celerons are much cheaper than the Pentiums for that fact.

VTM

[Piccoro]

And how Intel's chips work, they basicly have their cache reduced even further.
A copy of the L1 cache is stored in L2 cache.

[holistic]

blah blah blah............

The disadvantage of the Celeron is not the cache but the lack of the Hyper-Threading

That said, a 2.4Ghz celeron will be a close match* to a 2.4B P4 for half the price. (*avi - mpeg2 encodes)
** different encoders will perform differently to L2 cache.

][

[rallynavvie]

Yeah, as far as simple video encoding goes cache size doesn't matter much. A Celeron will be just as fast as a similar clocked P4. But the AMD costs about the same as that same Celeron and will be able to do all the things the P4 can

[Scobo]

I'd like some clarification on this too as I'm considering buying a Celeron laptop.
Are we saying here then that a 2Ghz Celeron will encode about the same speed as a 2Ghz P4 or a 2Ghz Athlon ?
I would have thought the Athlon at 2Ghz would be way faster.

[donpedro]

Look at this

http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20031223/cpu-guide-17.html
http://www20.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040201/prescott-14.html

[donpedro]

Let me see if I can link one of the results from www20.tomshardware.com website... I hope they don't mind...

[donpedro]

And this might be the best link

Battling Brothers - Celeron vs. Pentium 4

[Scobo]

Nice one donpedro.
I guess the part "It makes no difference whether you have a Pentium 4 or a Celeron under the hood when processing video streams - the larger cache on the P4 hardly matters" kind of answers my question !