Does More RAM = Faster Encoding?

[Sturge33]

I have an Athlon 64 3000, nforce3 Motherboard, and 1gb of ram. If I add another 1gb of ram, would it encode faster?

[redwudz]

No, it might even encode slower, depending on your setup. Some systems will slow down when having to address larger amounts of memory. Unless you are using programs that can use that amount, such as Photoshop, you are just wasting money. EDIT: Well, not wasting money, but the money would be better invested in other parts of your system.

Encode speed is mostly dependent on CPU speed. That will give the biggest gain. However, you may be able to optimize your system for encoding by memory timing settings, fast hard drives, keeping other programs from running in the background and stealing CPU cycles, or if you are adventurous, some overclocking of your CPU or your bus speeds.

[jimmalenko]

The processor speed is the single-most important factor in encoding speed, but your RAM and hard drive play a lesser yet still significant part. I'd say with reasonable confidence that with current programs and OS's ATM, there's not much speed difference between 512MB and 1GB. Based on that, I'd say that it may well encode slightly faster, but hardly faster enough to justify the purchase of the extra RAM.

I doubt you would be using anywhere near your current 1GB of RAM when encoding ATM, as you'd be more than likely experiencing bottlenecks across your IDE channels which would be slowing you down at the moment anyway, and increasing your RAM isn't going to "single-handedly" make those bottlenecks go away.

[alsyed]

your computer specs say only a 60GB HDD. Before you go upgrading ram, put another HDD in the system, preferably on an independant channel. Your encode speeds would be greater then, reading from one source disk and encoding to a physically different disk.

[thevoelk]

My secondary workstation at work (I got a new one Friday) is a P4 3.4 w/ HT and 2 GB of RAM. My Athlon 64 3000 w/ 1GB of RAM at home is still faster at encoding. The only times I've seen an increase in speed is when I go to Task Manager and give Vegas/Canpous/Encore/TMPGEnc processes Above Normal or Realtime priority. While it does encode faster, it's probably not worth the slight time gain since you can expect your workstation to slow to a crawl. Follow what the rest of the posters said: Get yourself a faster processor. If by 1.4 for your processor you mean 1400, your board should support easily a 2000. It's really a 1.4, I think that's an Athlon XP 2200, you should be able to go to a 2600 with no issues, except for maybe changing a jumper for the bus settings. Also, get a faster drive, as big as you can afford.

[Sturge33]

Sorry, those specs were from my old computer, I have updated them now. It isn't slow at encoding by any means but my pc can never be fast enough for me. On average, I'd say it takes around 10-15 minutes to encode a DVD backup after I get rid of the menus and all that other junk. I have a Digital 8 video camera and those files take a bit longer to encode if I do any editing.

[thevoelk]

Do you mean encode (i.e. DivX to DVD) or shrink? If you just mean shrinking/re-authoring, 10-15 minutes is porbably as fast as you're going to get. Keep in mind, you're shrinking a movie from probably 7 to 9 GB down to 4.3/4.7 GB. While it's not taxing going by your specs (didn't see the Amd 64 3000+ in your first post), we have similar machines, and that's what I average. I'm guessing it takes you 10-15 to rip, 20 (tops) to remove menus, etc, 15 tops to shrink, and about 10 to burn. 1 hour for a DVD is not bad, some people are still ripping at 2x.

[vhelp]

I would say, (based on my experience) that upgrading as you indicated
in your first post, would only help to reduce the SWAP file back and
forth. On a well tuned system, your swap file (on startup) should be
a ZERO. ( ie, WIN386.SWP = 0 ) And, the more ram you have, the better
it is, that it will remain at ZERO, until something requires a lot of
memory work. Images/Video require such.

In my Windows 98 setup and 256MB ram, my current swap file is: 282 Megabytes.
I just installed a 512MB chip (long story short, when my pc locked up
last night, out of pure madness, I ranked out the ram 256mb ram chip
from the mobo, but too slow I think.. and it sizzled and my machine
went off - I've pulled out my ram chips before, but fast, and no issues)
So, I had to replace w/ a new chip. But, not because of the chip, but
rather because I damaged the first two memory rows on the motherboard.
Good thing I have 3 rows. I'm using the one closest to the edge. All
is working. Anyways

I have yet to see how much this reduces my WIN386.SWP file. But, I do
hope it reduces greatly

Anyways. The less harddrive activity, the more effience your applications
will run. That means, reduce process time.. which will vary from system
to system. (I wish I hadn't yanked out that chip - I regret it)

-vhelp 3386

[thevoelk]

You're right, but a lot of applications that are desinged for home use aren't designed to use over 1 GB of RAM, and many I've seen can't. The AV Team at the military post I work at has probably every decent authoring/editing app talked about here, (which entitles me to use them for free due to the way our site license is negotiated with the vendors) and nothing they have, save for their Avid network, has a justifiable performance increase with over 1 GB of RAM. In two years, 2 GBs of RAM will probably be the minimum for some applications such as Avid, but you should be good for now. As of now, with 1GB of memory, your pagefile is 1.5GB. You can try increasing that to 2GB, but you probably won't see much of a difference.

[Josef K]

I ranked out the ram 256mb ram chip from the mobo, but too slow I think.. and it sizzled and my machine went off - I've pulled out my ram chips before, but fast, and no issues)

While your computer was still on?!?! Presumably if you did that then you certainly didn't earth yourself beforehand, either...