Best processor for video work?

[dmsinger]

Just wondering if anyone's had a machine with the latest AMD and Intel chips and has been able to come to any conclusion of any of them surpass each other when it comes to video work.

[admin]

I talk to people about this all the time. Still INTEL, by a longshot. Better temperatures (easier to cool), higher stable speed CPUs, and an instruction set that really seems more optimized for video than AMD (which seems to be for graphics, like video games).

And then the best part: the Intel-compliant motherboards seem to work just so much better than AMD ones.

The longer I'm around this stuff, the more it seems the words "problem" and "AMD" go hand-in-hand.
What you often see is lots of IDE complaints. While, TECHNICALLY, this is the fault of the motherboard, there are just too many VIA motherboards for AMD.

If you can totally avoid anything VIA, and get yourself an AMD CPU, you'll probably be fine.

[dmsinger]

Interesting take. I keep reading about how AMD is doing better and better against Intel, but wanted a video perspective.

Semi-related: let's say I'm chopping up video for the web and rendering tons of wmvs - think Intel still has the upperhand (like a p4 w/hyperthreading)?

[admin]

"Hyperthreading" is really the key here. Yes.

[thecoalman]

Only if your running multiple threads will HT help, for the HT to take affect the software has to be able to utilize it. There was some basic benchmarking I was a part of, nothing scientific but still pretty straight forward and the consensus of the results were that disabling HT increased performance slightly encoding a single file using TMPGenc.

Although completely unscientific what was good about our tests was just that, they were tested like a normal user would use them in the real world. One of the biggest surprises was the wide range of results even from the same CPU's or in my case being beaten by a slower CPU. In this case all of my specs were higher including the RAM and we were both running mobo's with identical chipsets. The major difference was he was using a better mobo than myself which lead me to believe that my bottleneck lie in the mobo somewhere. Just felt I would point that because there's more to it than putting CPU to CPU in the real world.

[admin]

That's a very good point. The software and OS has to support HT for it to actually give any speed boosts.

Like coalman said, and I totally agree 200%, the motherboard is often the most important piece of the puzzle. CPU and RAM comes second, so don't skimp there either.

[dmsinger]

That's an interesting note, perhaps I'll do some tests on a couple of machines I have here. I generally use Vegas, which is supposed to take advantage of HT.

[dmsinger]

Since the concensus is "mobo is super important" - anyone have any suggestions?

[admin]

I use an INTEL board on my INTEL systems.
Avoid VIA. Nightmares.
Asus and Nforce seemed to be well liked.

I would defer you to Tom's Hardware for some reviews.
Just remember his site is not really "unbiased" however.

[dmsinger]

Heh, I have to admit I stopped reading a while back after I noticed some crazy swings in reviews.

I've always had Intel mobos, but a friend of mine has been pushing me to pick up an Asus.