Monday, July 03, 2006

Pricing for dual-core dual-CPU video editing

Currently, I use a dual-CPU Opteron 246 system with 3GB of RAM for my video editing and conversion. It's been holding up very well for being 18 months old. At some point I plan on converting the old dual-CPU system into a Linux server and building a new dual-CPU dual-core Opteron box. Why? Because when it comes to video encoding, there's no such thing as enough speed.

(I'm currently working on converting a bunch of taped shows to DVD again and encode times are around 4-5 hours for every hour of footage. Plus the time spent creating the PAR2 data for the final disks. It's gonna take me a few weeks of running the CPUs 24x7 to plow through everything that I currently have lined up for encoding.)

The 246 CPUs are 2.0GHz and can be had for around $180 now. The fastest that the single core CPUs have gotten is the 252s which are 2.6GHz (30% faster) for $470 or so. But the 2.0GHz dual-core Opteron 270s are also around $470 and would have roughly 2x the performance of my 246s.

Unfortunately, my current motherboard can't be upgraded to work with dual-core CPUs. Besides, it's a good chance to move from PCI/AGP to PCI/PCIe as well as getting a better memory layout. The problem with my existing dual-CPU system is that all of the memory is hung off the first CPU. The second CPU has to go through the first CPU to access its memory.

Rough pricing for a MB/RAM/CPU core:
$0940 (2) Opteron 270 dual-core 2.0GHz CPUs
$0300 TYAN S2877ANRF motherboard (ATX)
$0440 (4) 1GB 184pin DDR 400 PC3200 ECC Registered
-----
$1680

Note: In reality, there's no real point in putting more then 3GB into a WinXP box. I'd have to wait for Vista or use Win2003 server setup in workstation mode. So instead of (4) 1GB modules, I'd probably go with (2) 1GB and (2) 512MB modules to take me to 3GB of system RAM. (Which is what I currently have in my existing box.)

I keep hoping that the prices on the Opteron 270s will drop a bit now that Intel is releasing dual-core Xeons. Even AMDs dual-core Athlon64s are still $300 while the cheapest Intel dual-core is only $120. Although I expect that the low-end Athlon64s are faster then the low-end Intels.

Maybe once the Opteron 270s drop down to $250-$300 each it will be worth the pain of the upgrade. I figure that will be sometime next winter. Would be nice to cut my video encoding times in half.

Other parts that I'll need are:

$0130 Antec p180b case
$0140 EPS12V 600W power-supply
$0100 misc parts
$0500 (2) 500GB drives

I can get a total of (10) drives into an Antec p180b case. So there's lots of room for expansion. The two drives I'm listing there are actually starter drives for the Linux server.

My current vid box has a trio of 500GB drives used for video editing. Everything on the primary 500GB gets copied to the second 500GB daily and any deleted files get moved to the tetriary 500GB drive. This gives me speed and safety against the primary spindle failing. The tetriary or "trash" drive is my failsafe in case I delete something off the primary drive and don't catch it before the daily sync wipes it off the secondary drive.

Another nice trick is that if I sync first, I can use the mirror drive as the source drive for video encodings. That gives me better speed for situations where I'm disk-bound instead of CPU-bound.

Labels: 2006

posted by Wuphon's at 12:54 AM