Will dual core be faster than this setup?

[junglemike]

Hello everyone. I'm encodig video in x264 all the time. all my computers are working 24/7.
Currently I have these computers:
1) Pentium4 celeron 1700mhz/512mb sdram
2) PIII-1000mhz/256mb
3) PIII-800mhz/128mb
4) PIII-500mhz/128mb
By the way P3-1000 encodes faster than celeron 1700. Strange.
Anyway. I'm thinking about buying some very cheap dual-core. For example Pentium D 805 2.26ghz. I don't have much money, so I can't afford expensive cpus.
The question is - will this cheap dual-core (or other dual-core) will outperform all these 4 comps combined?

[jagabo]

All four combined? No.

[sam9s]

Hello everyone. I'm encodig video in x264 all the time. all my computers are working 24/7.
Currently I have these computers:
1) Pentium4 celeron 1700mhz/512mb sdram
2) PIII-1000mhz/256mb
3) PIII-800mhz/128mb
4) PIII-500mhz/128mb
By the way P3-1000 encodes faster than celeron 1700. Strange.
Anyway. I'm thinking about buying some very cheap dual-core. For example Pentium D 805 2.26ghz. I don't have much money, so I can't afford expensive cpus.
The question is - will this cheap dual-core (or other dual-core) will outperform all these 4 comps combined?

Hi P-D 805 is a very cheap dual core. Its has a very inferior dual core architechure unlike AMD X2 or Intel Core 2. Beter stick with celeron or u can go for AMD Athalon X2 64 4200+ with 1 GB RAM its a beast and pretty cheap too specially after the release of latest Intel core 2 duo. U can check out at www.techtree.com for all kind of beanchmarks to make your decission easier. Hope this helps

[junglemike]

Can I measure mhz's like 1:1, for example
1700+1000+800+500=4000mhz
2600+2600=5200mhz - faster
Does it work this way?
I've read this article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/
and saw that this D805 can beat almost top of the line processors when little overclocked.
What do you say?

[sam9s]

Can I measure mhz's like 1:1, for example
1700+1000+800+500=4000mhz
2600+2600=5200mhz - faster
Does it work this way?
I've read this article:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/05/10/dual_41_ghz_cores/
and saw that this D805 can beat almost top of the line processors when little overclocked.
What do you say?

I dont think we can combine mhz like this, even if we can how are we suppose to use the added speed practically. Its not possible. I went through the article you mentioned. As I was saying AMD X2 4600+ still beats the 805 though I was talking about 805 2.5 Ghz with DDR2 533, and not 4.1 ghz. considering the same config ie 2.4 Ghz with DDR1 AMD X2 4600+ is way way far ahead than its counterpart. it even beats the 805 4.1 Ghz, so you see. And secondly as I said the dual core architucture of P-D is pretty inferior to AMD thats why Intel reworked on the entire dual core architecture and came out with Intel core 2 duo which I presume is by far the fastest dual core processor. But as far as value for money is concerned nothing can beat AMD X2 4200+ or even 3800+. Check out this beanchmake with the original 805[url] http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2005q3/athlon64-x2-3800/index.x?pg=9 [url]

[jagabo]

Can I measure mhz's like 1:1, for example
1700+1000+800+500=4000mhz
2600+2600=5200mhz - faster
Does it work this way?

No. Your own observations make that obvious: the P3 1000 is faster than the P4 Celeron 1700. But lets say those two are roughly the same speed. That means you can multiply you P3 speeds by 1.7 to get an estimate of how fast they are relative to the Celeron:

P4 Celeron 1700
P3 1000 1700
P3 800 1360
P3 500 850
---------------
sum 5610

Each core on the P4 805 is roughly comparable to a P4 Celeron of the same clock speed. So lets say 2660 * 2, or 5320, is what you can expect out of the 805. As you can see that's a little lower than the sum of the other processors.

There are other issues too:

Each CPU in your P3/Celeron collection has its own memory accessed via its own front side bus, it's own hard drive, etc. But the two cores on the 805 will share those items -- so they are likely to become bottlenecks on the 805.

The x.264 codec is moderately well multithreaded. On my Athlon 64 X2 3800+ I encoded (using VirtualDubMod) a single video with x.264 with a single thread, then with two threads. With 2 threads I got a 60 percent gain in throughput (more threads did not improve the throughput). But running two instances of the encoder at the same time (ie, encoding two different videos at the same time), with one thread each, I got nearly a 100 percent improvement. So if you can't run multiple instances of your encoder at the same time, or if you only encode one video at at time, you'll be limited to how much improvement a dual core processor will give you.

Obviously, overclocking may change the situation, depending on how much you overclock. But keep in mind, you might get a "dud" processor which doesn't overclock by much.

[jagabo]

But as far as value for money is concerned nothing can beat AMD X2 4200+ or even 3800+.

The Core 2 Duo 6300 is a little faster than both those processors at video encoding and is currently comparable in price to the 4200+.

http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2802&p=8
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=12
http://www.techreport.com/reviews/2006q3/e6300-vs-sff/index.x?pg=8