Best CPU for the money for video encoding/decoding/editing

H

hegulator

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 27, 2005
Messages
302
Hi everybody,

I have a quick question. I'm looking for the best CPU for video encoding/decoding/editing tasks. I have a friend who is looking to build a system that will be used mostly for taking old home movies (VHS), transfering them to the PC, then editing them, then burning them to a DVD. I know intel's CPU's have always been better at things like this than AMD's, but which CPU would be best out of intel's lot? I'm looking at a low end pentium D, since I would assume most video editing/encoding/decoding software is multi-threaded? Is this a correct assumption? Also, I assume a low end pentium D would do better than say a hyperthreaded P4? Is there anybody out there who uses their PC for stuff like this that could maybe give me some tips on the key components?

Thanks!
 
You know, I'm not sure if dual-core is the solution. While it is very nice, if he's just going to throw in a DVD, shrink it and burn it, and not do anything else in the meantime, then fuck it, buy a high-end Athlon 64.

However, with an Athlon X2 4400, you can shrink two DVDs at the same time, or decrypt one and burn one, or, or. . .

What kind of budget does he have? (But yeah, I don't want to be like, "Screw Intel, tehy = lamxx0rz," but they're simply not at the top of the game right now, especially when it comes to, er, computing.)
 
Yeah, i'm no intel fan at all.... i'd much rather go athlon... I just remember hearing that the one area intels are better is things like video encoding/decoding/editing. Is this not the case anymore?

As far as buget goes.... the whole system should come in ~1000. So probably ~200-250 for the CPU.
 
Yes, with some cases Intel outperforms AMD for encoding, but here's the cincher: not for the money. AMD tends to lose out when it's single large-bandwidth operations, not when it's many small ones, and that has to do with DDR vs. DDR2, if I'm not mistaken. But ripping and encoding DVDs is one of the encoding things they do about the same. And again, not for the money. AMD is cheaper, in the good way.
 
For the most part the higher the ghz the faster the encoding. It's not an exact science so no flames please. Anyway, get the most ghz he can afford, check out some prices.

 
For the most part the higher the ghz the faster the encoding. It's not an exact science so no flames please. Anyway, get the most ghz he can afford, check out some prices.
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I can't let that by. Sorry, that's just not accurate at all. That's like saying a motorcycle is slower because it has a smaller engine than a truck. It's about design and purpose and efficency. Hey, I'm not trying to flame, I just would like to clear the waters from that construct.

I'll get some benchmarks tomorrow morning at work. While on breaks, yeah, breaks.
 
Not enough encoding apps are SMP aware yet, though the ones that are SMP aware are scarily fast now :) I only get an average of 2-4fps thanks to my filtering via AviSynth, and you don't get much more with a X2 or similar when doing really heavy encoding using a filter chain or similar. Even this rig though, (P4 3.2C/1.5GB RAM) can do realtime XviD, and MPEG-2 encoding is conservatively .4x realtime. Not getting dual cores would just be dumb for the future :p Most good apps have at least SSE opts, most SSE2, and Premiere Pro is the only one I know w/ SSE3.
 
Axman said:
You know, I'm not sure if dual-core is the solution. While it is very nice, if he's just going to throw in a DVD, shrink it and burn it, and not do anything else in the meantime, then fuck it, buy a high-end Athlon 64.

However, with an Athlon X2 4400, you can shrink two DVDs at the same time, or decrypt one and burn one, or, or. . .

What kind of budget does he have? (But yeah, I don't want to be like, "Screw Intel, tehy = lamxx0rz," but they're simply not at the top of the game right now, especially when it comes to, er, computing.)
Click to expand...

You should really read the OP before you post your opinion.

If you read, you would've seen that his friend isn't wanting to rip and burn dvd's. He wants to capture, edit and burn *home movies* from VHS to DVD.

OP: I would tell him to also look into software that can clean up the video. Old vhs camcorder tapes can be pretty low quality
 
You should really read the OP before you post your opinion.

If you read, you would've seen that his friend isn't wanting to rip and burn dvd's. He wants to capture, edit and burn *home movies* from VHS to DVD.
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Don't be asinine, I was pointing out the difference about multitasking with two cores, not building a treatise on amature video editing.
 
Thanks for all the help, guys. It looks like an X2 3800+ would be a great CPU for all that, plus it doesn't end up sucking so bad in other stuff like the low-end pentium D's do.
 
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