Increasing the speed of encoding.

[Shifty268]

Hey there im after just a bit of knowledge about decreasing encoding time. at the moment im running a AMD Semptron 2600+ (1.6 GHZ) socket 754, i have a gb of ram and a Radeon x600 seconday series.

Im just encoding some videos and i just want to shorten the times it takes to do general video encoding. Would time be shortened if i got a bigger prosessor or better graphics card or what?

[Cobra]

Graphics cards have no bearing whatsoever on your encoding speed. It is purely down to the CPU.

Your best bet is to upgrade your CPU to a Socket 939 Athlon64 or one of the latest Intel offerings.

[budz]

you could overclock that SEMPRON 2600+ socket 754 processor to move the encoding a bit faster than the 1.6ghz speed that you have now. i overclocked a 1.6 ghz SEMPRON AMD 64 2800+ socket 754 to 2.4ghz with no problems. although you would have to use a motherboard that has nforce chipset. via chipsets have no or much ability to overclock.

[Cobra]

I don't know - my VIA K8T800 does a good job (shame about everything else it tries to do, though).

Be aware of a few things if you're going to overclock:

- You need patience
- You might ruin your kit (not likely, though)
- You will need to learn how to do it safely (I can help, and by the sounds of things, budz can help more)
- You may not get the same astronomical results that budz has as some CPUs overclock better than others

My machine is overclocked, and is running quite nicely. Has done so for the past 18 months.

[Shifty268]

would a bigger semptron do the job!

[Shifty268]

you could overclock that SEMPRON 2600+ socket 754 processor to move the encoding a bit faster than the 1.6ghz speed that you have now. i overclocked a 1.6 ghz SEMPRON AMD 64 2800+ socket 754 to 2.4ghz with no problems. although you would have to use a motherboard that has nforce chipset. via chipsets have no or much ability to overclock.

Where do i start?

[budz]

you could overclock that SEMPRON 2600+ socket 754 processor to move the encoding a bit faster than the 1.6ghz speed that you have now. i overclocked a 1.6 ghz SEMPRON AMD 64 2800+ socket 754 to 2.4ghz with no problems. although you would have to use a motherboard that has nforce chipset. via chipsets have no or much ability to overclock.

Where do i start?

I was able to overclock that AMD 64 SEMPRON 2800+ by using a ECS nforce-3 motherboard, & 512mb corsair ddr 400 ram. That motherboard had options to change the settings in the BIOS to overclock. I no longer have that pc because I sold it to a friend. redwudz was helpful in finding the links on how to set the BIOS to overclock it. This is from some notes I had scribbled:

BIOS SETTING:

CPU OVERCLOCK 250
AGP OVERCLOCK 66
HT FREQUENCY 3X
DRAM CONFIG> MAX MEMCLOCK 166
1T/2T MEMORY TIMING=2T
EVERYTHING ELSE SET TO AUTO

This was done by using the ECS NFORCE-3 motherboard. From what I've learned not every motherboard can overclock due to restrictions in the BIOS setting. I was just lucky that this mobo combo worked without any problems. Here's the link from newegg.com for that motherboard. I actually bought that motherboard combo from Fry's electronics from last year's black friday sale for $120.00 including the memory.

P.S. I forgot to mention the overclocking was done with AMD stock heatsink and fan!!!!

[Cobra]

Budz - Why is the memclock 166? Try 200 (if it's PC3200 RAM) and disable the 2T command - you should notice a significant increase in performance. Also try setting the CAS Latency (CL) to 3 if you have stability issues (which you shouldn't do) - the loss in performance with the looser timing is insignificant.

P.S. I forgot to mention the overclocking was done with AMD stock heatsink and fan!!!!

[evil mutterings]

Shifty - If you are going to replace the CPU anyway, why not try overclocking it and see how it goes. If you're going to upgrade it, and don't want to upgrade your motherboard too, try looking for a Socket 754 Athlon64 - they might still be around. I'd definitely consider upgrading the motherboard, though - Socket 754 has been discontinued for all the newer processors.

You never know with overclocking - you may well get your upgrade for free, but then again, you may lose data and destroy your machine. It's a gamble.

I've just taken a look - I know you're not in the UK - the quickest Socket 754 CPU you can get here is £120, being an Athlon64 3400+. A reasonable speed increase will set you back £74 for a Sempron 3300+.

£180 will score you an Asus A8N-E nForce4 motherboard (rock-solid, that motherboard) and a Venice-core Athlon64 3500+. Basically, the quickest CPU you can get for Socket 754 is the same price as a quicker, cooler and more modern Socket 939 (the Venice CPUs run so cool that the stock heatsink doesn't even have a copper core in it). Maybe it would be worth considering the upgrade?

It's really up to you. What would you prefer?

[budz]

Cobra wrote:

Budz - Why is the memclock 166? Try 200 (if it's PC3200 RAM) and disable the 2T command - you should notice a significant increase in performance. Also try setting the CAS Latency (CL) to 3 if you have stability issues (which you shouldn't do) - the loss in performance with the looser timing is insignificant. smile.gif

Thanks for the advice but I no longer have that computer because I sold it to a friend. That pc has PC3200 RAM but in order for it to run stable those are the settings I had to use. Here's one of the links that redwuz gave me for this mobo combo.
http://forums.extremeoverclocking.com/archive/index.php/ECS_NFORCE3_Motherboard-t-193877.html

I may build another pc with that mobo combo since overclocking it seems easy enough and it's reasonably priced. It makes a good budget system.

[SingSing]

You can reduce the encoding time by half, if you have two hard disks. Source from one hard disk, and encode the result to the other hard disk, will reduce the encoding by half.

[ZippyP.]

You can reduce the encoding time by half, if you have two hard disks.

Not normally since encoding is all CPU power. Having 2 disks might help if have a system that is bottle-necked somehow.

[thecoalman]

You can reduce the encoding time by half, if you have two hard disks. Source from one hard disk, and encode the result to the other hard disk, will reduce the encoding by half.

Although a good practice that will only give significant improvements where the read/write time exceeds the processing time such as if you have edited a DV-AVI and are ouputting as DV-AVI. There's little processing in a operatin like that and in essence most of the time required is essentially to copy the file. Most encoding times far outweigh the limitations of the drive and you won't see much benefit if any from doing that if for example you are going from DV-AVI to MPEG especially in his case since he has such an underpowered CPU for encoding.

[smitbret]

I get about a 30% decrease in encoding times by putting the source/destination files on a different drive than the temp folder (with DVD-Rebuilder). That's with an AMD 2500+ Barton and 1 GB of memory.
-Brett