Hmm, how much does ram help encoding time?

[khai]

I have an Athlon(tbird) 700mhz w/ 128mb pc133 ram. I'm thinking of getting a stick of 256mb pc133 ram since it's very, very cheap now. How much (if it does) will it help encoding time on a dvd rip? I mainly do SVCDs.

[CLloyd24]

Lots of RAM is mostly important for multitasking because it allows for lots of applications to open without needing to cache memory on the harddrive which is extremely slow. So if the only application that you have open is an MPEG encoder and it uses 25 MBs and windows is using about 80 that means that only about 105 MBs of RAM is being used and thus adding more RAM will not affect encoding speed. On the other hand if you have other applications open at the same time these will bump your memory usage up over 128 MBs and the encoding speed will probably slow slightly. Also if you are using CCE it will definitely use all of your 128 MBs and as it is very memory hungry and getting more memory will certainly help, although I can't tell you how much but I wouldn't suspect anymore than 10% unless you are actively using the computer while encoding. Finally a good way to find out how much RAM you are currently using under Windows 2000 is to run Task Manager by typing taskmgr in the Run command. I don't know if other versions have an equivalent program but if you find that the all of your physical RAM is being used then more RAM is recommended but you usually won't notice large decreases in encoding time.

[spidey]

I run Win 2k w/ 512 meg.

TMPG relies mostly on the Processor. It usually is up around 100%, but memory tops around 30-40 meg.

The processor will be the only thing to make a difference I believe

[spidey]

Sorry forgot P 3 866 above......

CLloyd24 nailed it. You probably won't see a change. I had a very similar situation; 650 Athlon, 128 MB PC100, I jumped to 256 PC133 and saw no change. Encoding is processor dependent. I would like to try the new Dual Athlon systems that are coming. Sounds like an encoding dream!
Mike

[khai]

Thanks! You guys just saved me $50.

I guess I'll save that for a new processor + mobo.

[poopyhead]

i think i've mentioned it in other posts

i have 2 comps (older and newer one and i've compared the encoding speed of both)

old comp=650 mhtz athlon (not t-bird) with 256 mb pc100 ram and a 45 gig 5400 rpm hdd

new comp=1.2 ghtz t-bird athlon with 128 mb pc133 ram and a 40 gig 7200 rpm hdd

it takes my new comp nearly half the time to encode the exact same movie as my old comp....(double CPU power->reduce encoding time by half)...of course there are other factors like pc133 ram vs. pc100 ram and 5400 rpm hdd vs. 7200 rpm hdd....but i'm pretty sure if i stuck the pc133 ram and 7200 rpm hdd with my slower CPU, the faster CPU will still kick the crap outta the slower CPU

[ktnwin]

Encoding time is so CPU intensive (you can monitor this if you are running WinNT or Win2K). 128MB RAM is plenty for this task. More RAM would not help.
Hard drive performance does not play a significant picture here (however, UDMA does help since it free CPU time which is really needed for encoding)

[BeTa]

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On 2001-07-18 08:46:42, ktnwin wrote:
Encoding time is so CPU intensive (you can monitor this if you are running WinNT or Win2K).
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You certainly can monitor the same in Win98, also. I find it very useful (you can customize it)...

BeTa

[LighthouseJ]

It really depends on what bottlenecks you have on your system. If your hard drive array sucks, all the ram isn't going to help, etc...