by VicBond007 » Mon Aug 23, 2004 8:34 pm
I've built quite a few machines for video editors before, so I'll try to shed some light on this subject.
AthlonFX will 0wn anything out there right now, hand's down. That being said, know that the "cheap as hell" price for an OEM FX-51 is $740 for just the CPU. With that investment, you're not only buying kickass performance now, but when 64 bit really works it's way into the home market (I give it about 18 months. MS has got their end taken care of, it's mostly waiting for the hardware support from everything else, and of course apps), you'll get a nice performance boost from that.
The Athlon64 is praised a lot on the interweb for things like "OMG Doom3 SO FASTZ0R!" and I won't deny it. I'll put an A64 in a gaming rig and not think twice about it. Problem comes around when you try to do real work. Having the onboard memory controller definately has it's advantages, but it still presents only single channel memory access. When encoding/decoding, memory bandwidth is extremely important. Fast hard drives are nice, but they'll only help in writing your final video to disk, and quite frankly, that's gona take a while regardless of what you have, so you might as well grab a meal or something while you wait. You're gonna spend 90% of your time ACTUALLY EDITING and the A64 comes up rather short in the performance department here.
My advice right now is to stay away from the Prescotts. Their core is more mature (I made a rhyme that time!) and they are theoretically marginally better performers than last year's Northwood cores, however they run very hot, and the available motherboards right now are nothing short of problematic, Southbridge recalls or not. If you don't want to sell your reproductive organs in exchange for performance, I recommend a P4 "C" (Northwood) with a motherboard running the i875 chipset (Asus and ABit are my two top choices for that chipset). Invest in a nice HSF (Zalman CNSP7000a-AlCu) and get a cheap P4 (2.4/2.6) and overclock it up to 250FSB or beyond (provided your RAM can take the beating. Using CPU/RAM ratios KILL editing performance). The performance you'll get while editing is unrivaled by anything running under $700 a chip. for memory, 512MB of dual channel pc4000 is good, in fact that's what I use now, though once you get hot and heavy into After Effects, you may run into problems (like me!) where you'll get frames that will not render because they'll exceed 300MB/frame due to the complexity of the scene. 1GB RAM is very good, if you're willing to pay.
I go sleep now.
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