OT : More CPUs or Faster CPUs

[Robin Laing]

Ian Malone wrote:
> On 05/02/2008, Paul Lemmons <paul.lemmons at tmcaz.com> wrote:
>> I am soon to purchase a new PC. It will run Fedora and its primary
>> purpose will be:
>>
>> 1) Transcoding my DVD library to xvid-avi's so that they may be watched
>> on my media player
>> 2) Editing training videos that I create and burning the finished
>> product to DVD for distribution
>>
>> To transcode I will most likely be using dvd::rip and for editing I will
>> probably be using cinerella
>>
>> Now that that is said and money not a limitless resource I have some
>> choices to make. One of those choices is CPU configuration. For the
>> tasks above, which is better:
>>
>> 1) A single very fast CPU
>> 2) Dual core CPU with combined speed greater than or equal to a single
>> CPU but each core slower than a single CPU
>> 3) Multi socket CPU with combined speed greater than a single CPU but
>> each CPU slower than a single CPU
>>
>> Bang for buck, option 2 sounds the best to me but I am concerned that
>> the process of transcodeing is single threaded and would not take
>> advantage of multiple CPUs.
>>
>> Thoughts? Suggestions?
>>
> 
> I don't know about the video editing, but transcode (the backend
> DVDRip uses) can use multiple cores to do the video encoding.
> On top of that there's always audio encoding as well.  That means
> two cores gives you a ~2x speedup (not quite 2x, as audio isn't
> parallelised). Comparing the prices of dual core CPUs with ones
> twice the speed it quickly becomes apparent which the better
> option for that application is.
> 
> In addition the faster processor makes more demands on the
> rest of your hardware: you may need faster memory and a more
> expensive motherboard for it.
> 

I do some of the same thing as this and went with dual core AMD.

I chose the fastest motherboard/memory combination and lots of ram over 
processor speed.  The motherboard will also handle upto 6 SATA drives 
for a decent RAID array (later).

I chose 4Gig (2x2) for the RAM as it allows me to expand the memory to 
8Gig in the future.

I spent just over 1200 for a full system.  None of the system is overly 
expensive.



-- 
Robin Laing