Page 1 of What Cpu and Ram

A while back I was looking for a budget pc and got some great help. Thanks.

Now I need the opposite.

Pc will be used for encoding. Ie from my camcorder to dvd format as quick as possible.

Dont want to break the bank too much :)

Im sure I will need a fast processor. Looking at this.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 2.50GHz - 175 quid

But im not sure what Ram and mother board. How much difference will 800MHZ to say 1333MHZ be. Will 4 gb of 800 be better than 2gb of 1333?

The most important thing is the video encoding and doing it as quick as possible.

Also will the encoding software actually make use of the quad? or is this a waste.

Im very stuck on this as this is my first pc geared specifically to this.

aria are doing the older Q6600 cpu (2.4ghz) for £99 this is a great cpu for that money, & a real workhorse, very easily overclocked, even using the stock fan mine runs @ 2.98ghz :) not bad for £99 (i paid a lot more when i got mine)

Have a look at this, it will give you real-time hardware transcoding from dv to DVD compatible MPEG2.

Any ideas on ram?

I dont think i will be overclocking as pc will be used in Mauritius where temperatures will get upto 40 c.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?MBB-Q6680I

You may find, though that, depending on what you are using to encode, the program only uses 2 cores anyway. In a lot of cases you are better off getting a faster dual core, than a slower quad core because if a program doesnt use all the cores, you will actually be running more slowly.

Also - whilst a program may encode faster (e.g. CCE Encoder - super fast DV->MPEG2 conversion) the results are not as good as something that may be slower.

For example, I use both CCE & TMPG ...and find that the MPEG2 from CCE often looks washed out (colour wise) when comparing to the results from TMPG (which took about 4 times longer).

I`ve tried playing around with the settings etc. but still end up using TMPG when I want a good quality result.

"Build a man a fire, and he`ll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he`ll be warm for the rest of his life."
-Terry Pratchett.

I see what you mean.... But this still means that I need the fastest encoding components to come together at a reasonable price.

Im sure ill be going for the quad core.

But unsure about what ram and by how much if any will it speed up the process.

I will have to balance time and quality on this.

But any answers about the ram will be useful.

I think that you will find that NTG is correct - faster dual core will be quicker than a slower quad core. If you look around at sites like Tom`s Hardware you will see that the fast dual core processors are the generally the best for video encoding.

You will probably not see too much benefit by fitting more than 2GB RAM.

ok cool... so 2gb ram.

But from what i have read around, if I use a program that uses all 4 cores, then it will be faster than a dual. So it now boils down to what program I will use.:)

LOL

With 4 cores you are giving yourself a certain amount of future proofing because things will take advantage of it eventually, but in the short term, you are better off with a faster dual core.

As far as memory is concerned, im experience its best to spend as much on it as you can as for intensive stuff like this, its usually the bottleneck.