PC for video rendering -- an observation

[Bob Rogers]

Not too long ago I got a PC with an 8 core Xeon CPU.

I finally had a need to do a video project (I just dabble in video). Watching the CPU Usage History, I noticed that when I rendered the DVD project, Sony Vegas used six of the eight cores heavily. So if you use Vegas and make DVDs, more cores is a good thing.

Interestingly, I later used Vegas to convert the video to Quicktime, and it only used one core for that.

Just thought I'd share.

[Adrian Wareham]

Also the new Intel Core i7 processors act like they are 8 instead of 4 core because each core supports hyperthreading. Anyway, if there are at least six heavy processes during rendering, then more cores is better. But each individual process will take an amount of time based on the CPU's core speed in a single core.

What speed is the Xeon 8 core? =)

-Adrian

[Bob Rogers]

Hi,

Windows reports that it is an Intel Xeon E31245 @ 3.3Ghz.

I have 12 GB of ram but W7 seems much more efficient at using it, so I rarely go beyond 4 GB. But it's so cheap.

Bob