Recommended PC Upgrades for Vegas?

P

pootify

Member
Right now I'm running an AthlonXP 2000+ with a gig of PC2100 and an ATI 9600xt.

As it is, I'm wondering if I had a ~500 budget, what would I get to help out my rendering times and preview performance. I was debating whether or not getting one of the new Athlon X2's (~380 with a mobo), and also what cheapish PCI-E video card ($100-$200) I could get? Anyone here with dual-core find it worth the price worth the return? Thanks!
 
I think a 'puter would be more worthwhile. I "only" have 512K and don't come close to using it all in Vegas, so your gig of memory is probably enough.

If you get a new system, you can use your existing system as a headless rendering station.

I'm also looking into getting a new system, but haven't decided on a processor yet.
 
To help increase render times, and preview, put your money into a separate FAST hard drive to run you OS off of, if you're not already.
 
Get a WD Raptor SATA drive for your OS... It is a SCSI drive in a SATA box.(10,000 rpm & a 5 Year warranty) You will be amazed as to how fast it is. Keep your Video on a seperate Regular SATA drive and render to a 3rd Sata drive for ultimate render times. Also you could get a new AMD dual core 4200 or higher Dual motherboard. (this would be equal to 4 processors)If you have the Jack.... This is what I plan to build as soon as the 4800 chips hit $600 a piece instead of $900 each.. IMHO
 
I doubt you'll see much diff in rendering times by just HDD upgrade alone.
If you're doing stills/rendering stills, you want as much RAM as affordable (up to 2 gig until Win64)
Fatter FSB is the big gain in Vegas.
SATA RAID system, not faster single drive, will make a lot of render time and playback diff.
As mentioned, the vid card won't do anything one way or another w/Vegas. Vegas performs about the same with a junker S3 card as it does with a top end Appian.
Also, keeping the system cool is more important than most folks think. My uncompressed HD system has 9 fans in it, two of them are 6" behemoths that move slowly so they're not noisy.
I['m currently a big fan of what AMD is doing, I just bought X2 systems for our training rooms, and also bought a dual, dual core 275 system that simply screams. Expensive, but well worth it, IMO.
 
Does Vegas take advantage of the dual cores at all?
Click to expand...

It should because Vegas supports multiple processors (SMP aware app). Dual-core chips are essentially - in its most basic definition - two independent processors on the same die.
 
Does Vegas take advantage of the dual cores at all?[/QUOTE]

Absolutely. You can see in the system performance meters, exactly what Vegas is using. On MPEG renders it's pretty impressive. On uncompressed, still pretty impressive. On DV renders...it just is barely above average.
 
By impressive, do you mean that it's using a lot of the cpu, or that the performance is a lot better. I'm unsure of what you meant that DV renders are "above average". Also, with your dual cores, how much does it take to bog it down out of realtime? (I'm assuming everything short of 3D compositing and 3+ layers won't slow it down a hitch).

I really appreciate the help, I'm debating if the 350ish I have saved should go more towards the Post or Photography ;D.
 
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