Hi, I do alot of Video Conversion on my PC and my current PC is not fast enough for my liking.
I currently have an Asus P5n-mx MOBO and 4gb Ram with an Intel Core 2 Duo E8500 Processor.
I upgraded my Processor not that long ago and got a slight speed boost but I need something more powerful.
Is there any way I could get any more speed out of my current PC or wouuld I be better off with a new PC?
If you think a new PC is in order what should I be looking to upgrade too(What could I get for the price range of say £200 -£300),any recommendations would be appreciated.
Many Thanks!
not suggesting you get that bundle, it is just to give you an idea, you could probably get the parts cheaper if you look around,
i know the speed a file takes to encoded can vary greatly depending on the software and operating system used too, for example not long back a friend of mine ran a test on the same i7 laptop encoding the same video file, handbrake used to encode at default settings in both, win7 took over 100 minutes and in linux it took 25 minutes.
so also might be worth experimenting with a linux operating system if speed is important.
In addition to Terry's excellent advice, I'd like to add that maybe you should be looking into a GPGPU solution.
Both AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards are capable of encoding/converting video. AMD even bundles their own Video Converter with their display drivers.
Mainstream software developers (Cyberlink and Roxio are two examples) also have support for GPU accelerated encoding.
It might also be cheaper to buy a new graphics card than to replace the whole system.
Cheers,
Nahumi
Yeah, NVIDIA is the way to go at the moment.
To be honest, though, I think that comes down to developer laziness instead of hardware quality. NVIDIA makes it easy for developers to use their GPU through CUDA. The support is there for developers to interact fully with all the hardware without having to build it from the ground up. The story isn't really the same for AMD cards, which uses OpenCL. The new 69xx series has an insane amount of Stream Processors (the same as CUDA cores really), but actually using them is a pain.
Here's a big but though…
If the developers could consistently implement OpenCL for video encoding, AMD cards will blow NVIDIA out of the water. AMD packs nearly three times the Stream Processors in it's 6970 than NVIDIA gets in the GTX 580.
Whether this will produce better results or not is the real question. No one seems to be sure why the quality sometimes degrades when using GPGPU's, but it often seems to be related to the software that you use. I haven't found any recent articles, reviews or forum posts on the newest series from either company. I'm guessing that the poor quality in the past means that a lot of consumers have simply lost interest.
Good luck with the build!