Help upgrading my system...

[ChasBetts]

I was wondering if anyone could offer any insight in to what would best boost performance in my editing system.

Currently I am running:

Pentium 4 2.6 GHz
1 GIG of RAM
80 Gig Boot Drive
60 Gig External for Video
ATI Radeon 9200 VIVO

I have a DVD burner and such, but I'm not worried about upgrading that. I run Vegas 5.0, and Adobe Premiere Pro.

Wondering if I should upgrade the processor... the video card... RAM, ect... and what each upgrade will do for me. Any advice to get better performance out of my machine would be great.

[J.R. Hudson]

I just ordered a new one with the Pentium XEON L2 Cache (800fsb) and 1 Gig of Ram. I'd at least move up to P4 3GHz...

[JohnnyRoy]

Better Vegas performance would be seen by upgrading the processor. Vegas really doesn’t care about your video card and more ram would just allow for larger buffered previews. Rendering video is very CPU intensive so I would concentrate on that. If your motherboard will accept a P4 3.40E, that would be your best investment without buying a new motherboard.

Just a word of caution: The new Intel Prescott processors run much hotter than the older Northwood cores. I would make sure you have adequate cooling in your case to handle it.

~jr

[vovka]

Assuming you running XP.
Upgrade CPU will give you boost in preformance, but first upgrade your memory to 2 Gbt, and change option in vegas to assign more memory for prerendering.
Second, replace your hardrives with Serial ATA drives , best get 2 of them and set in RAID 0. When you work with large files, HD is your bottleneck in preformance.
Video card you have will work fine for many years to come, if you not starting playing HL2 or Doom3.

[cba]

when u say more ram for prerendering, do u mean for dynamic ram preview?

[vovka]

Selectevly prerender video Shift+M and
Build dynamic RAM preview shift+B
If you read manual, they have sugtetions there how to increase productivity of application.
Also using windows is tricky, if you run Vegas as stand alone application you propobly will be ok with 512 Mbt, or even 128 Mbt system RAM (I did on one laptop, it does work).
But if you like me and run at same time multiple apps and jumping between them, more memory will help.
Worst thing can happen it's when windows run out of memory and start using swap memory on hard drive, and your system start working slow like back to 8086 days

[Soliton]

You should also be sure the HDDs and any CDROM/DVD drives are on separate IDE channels. Home builders (and sometimes even pros) make this error and it reduces HDD performance to the level of the CD or DVD drive it is daisy chained with. Even two HDDs of different performance ratings on the same channel will run at the slower rating of the two. Correct system configuration is at least as important as clock cycles and RAM reserve.

[JohnnyRoy]

In addition to that, data is serialized over an IDE channel. That means if you have two physical hard drives on the same IDE channel and you copy a file between them, it will read from one and then write to the other in a serialized fashion. If, however, you place the same two drives on separate IDE channels, it will write to the second drive while its still reading from the first (in parallel). This will give you a significant boost in disk performance (2X).

What you should really use is the newer SATA drives. The SATA bus has no such limitation and so copying between drives on the same SATA bus is always in parallel. (there are no channels or master/slave relationships to worry about)

I have an IDE boot drive and an SATA capture drive for video. As I add more drives, they will be SATA. My DVD burner is on a separate IDE channel from my IDE hard drive.

~jr

[BEENYWEENIES]

In addition to that, data is serialized over an IDE channel. That means if you have two physical hard drives on the same IDE channel and you copy a file between them, it will read from one and then write to the other in a serialized fashion. If, however, you place the same two drives on separate IDE channels, it will write to the second drive while its still reading from the first (in parallel). This will give you a significant boost in disk performance (2X).

What you should really use is the newer SATA drives. The SATA bus has no such limitation and so copying between drives on the same SATA bus is always in parallel. (there are no channels or master/slave relationships to worry about)

I have an IDE boot drive and an SATA capture drive for video. As I add more drives, they will be SATA. My DVD burner is on a separate IDE channel from my IDE hard drive.

~jr

Absolutely right on the money. And ultimately anyone doing video work, especially hd, needs to invest in a RAID setup. Two 250GB SATA drives (even better 2 10,000RPM SATA drives) raided together will greatly reduce the drive throughput bottleneck that dogs NLE work, effectively doubling the access speed of your drives.

Then you can move on to noticing your system's other limitations and remember why computers are such a money pit! ;)

[David Jimerson]

Sorry; just don't buy it. It's worth it if you're doing HD, but there's nothing about DV editing which necessitates a RAID unless you're paranoid about losing data and want redundancy (in which case you gain no speed). If all you're editing is DV, all a RAID does for you is double your chances of a catastrophic data loss through drive failure.

[vovka]

RAID is not just about data redundancy, RAID 0 is striping that split data between hard drives and increase data transfer preformace, in this case you actialy increasing your chance loosing data, due to failer of one drive will lead to unusible data cross all drives in RAID. But it will speed up write/read from HD a lot.

[David Jimerson]

RAID is not just about data redundancy, RAID 0 is striping that split data between hard drives and increase data transfer preformace, in this case you actialy increasing your chance loosing data, due to failer of one drive will lead to unusible data cross all drives in RAID. But it will speed up write/read from HD a lot.

I know, vovka -- that's what I was getting at. Unless you're editing Hi-Def, there's no reason for using a striped RAID. The speed and throughput of single drives is more than sufficient. No need for the increased risk of data loss.

[Zoomforce]

yes.. even raid with SATA wont work with HD, so its kinda useless and a risk, I have lost entire arrays before.

[kmcgrath]

What about operating system? *Any advantage to using XP pro vs. XP home edition? This is strictly for a non-networked application.

[David Jimerson]

After Service Pack 2, there's no Home or Pro. Just XP.

But it makes no difference, anyway.

[vovka]

Main different between Pro and Home edution in supporting multi processors. Home edition will support only single CPU.
Pro - dual, if you have more than 2 CPUs you need to purchase adv server.
Other differences is not effecting editing.

[kmcgrath]

That's interesting! I am thinking of upgrading my Dell to a new Dell and they are recommending "Windows XP Professional" for an extra 80 bucks or so. So I should go with xp home edition, and do the service pack 2...and save myself a few dollars.