Building new puter want system advice for FAST encoding...

[daddy_taz]

Hi,

I encode movies to mpeg 2 using tmpgenc. They are either in Divx or mpeg 1 format, currently on a P4 1ghz laptop with 384 megs of ram.

Im building a new desktop.

Looking for advice on the following

Setup with Win XP Pro,

Am i better to go for lots or processor and ram, or get like to 60gig drives with a RAID card for through put?

What would be the best hardware config? i'll also be switching to encode divx from mpeg, or vcd, svcd soon.

[Faustus]

CPU is where its at man, I'm on a PIII 1ghz like you and hear some amazing results from the Athlon XP poeple.

Long as you have a good bit of ram (shoot for about 512) and a decent video card then go for CPU speed.

My rule of thumb being a PC and Mac person is this: macs encode at decent speeds because their hardware and software is built smart and can do so. PC encode fast becuase you can through sheer power at it for cheap.

[coda304]

http://www17.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q2/020610/thoroughbred-16.html

[daddy_taz]

Ok..
so based on the Toms Hardware, a athlon 2200 is the way to go for $maxing..

what about the rest of the system, and how much effect does the video card really have ?

I just rip vcd/svcd to cd and watch them on my dvd player......

[man_friday]

Vid card low on the totem pole for requirements IF all you are doing is encoding. If you intend to use the new killer box for other things such as a occasionall game or to capture some vid from various sources that the vid card can be important. A radeon 8500 AIW would cover all your bases for an all round card. As for disk, get as much as you can but it doesn't need to be raid.

[vhelp]

daddy_taz,

I have TWO XP pc's running.
One for mainly encoding and the other I do pretty much
everything else on it from capturing/encoidng/surving...
you name it.
Both these pc's are running Window 98 only. Maybe I could
get a little bit extra performance if I went to 2000 but
about the only thing I an see w2k doing for me is allowing
for the no limit filesize.

CPU:
my 1st pc is an XP 1700+ (1.4Mhz speed)
my 2nd pc is an XP 1800+ (1.5Mhz speed)
Thiers no difference in speed other than a few seconds give
or take. The 2200 will prob be about 400Mhz faster

MEMORY:
I use 256 DDR memory in both my pcs.
If you wanna increase your encoding speed? Adding more memory
will not do it. I read somewhere on this FORUM yesterday,
that in CCE, the more memory you have, the more it will CACHE
the AVI to it, but I don't know how that's gonna effect the
speed by much just because it cashes the AVI. After all, it
has to take the time to cache it in/out to memory
Installing as much memory you can, you WILL benefit from
this move. For example, you'll be able to open more apps w/
out your harddrive grinding due to memory swaping in and out
to your harddrive. Video editing will be more of a bries
cause you can CACHE or load in more AVI data into these apps.
But that will depend on the app you use, cause some apps may
have a limit on how much they will load into memory, ie, would
be 10mb or 50mb, etc.
I would recommend getting 1Gig if you can affort it. Simply
for the above.

The only way to speed up your ENCODing projects is to get a
NEW motherboard and CPU, as fast or latest possible. 3 months
later though, it'll be slower cause they'll come out with
something even faster. That's the way it goes.

-vhelp

[vcdfreak]

If budget allows, get a dual cpu (athlon mp) system. It might boost the conversion performance by 20-30% as TMPGEnc support multi-threaded processing.