System Hardware & OS Upgrade Question. Beneficial for Vegas to run ?

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plainman007

Well-known member
My Existing Simple Rig :
Processor - Intel Core i3 - 2100 @ 3.1 Ghz. Socket - LGA1155.
Motherboard - Asus P8H77-M. Socket - LGA1155.
Graphics Card - NVidia GT210.
OS - Win XP Pro 32bit. SP3.
RAM - 4 GB (2x2gb Sticks).
OS HDD - 250 GB 7200rpm. Only 20gb occupied by the OS. Balance is always maintained empty.
Footage Drive - 500 GB 7200rpm.
Renders Drive - 500 GB 7200rpm.
Backup Drive - 1 TB 7200rpm. To back up the above 3 drives.
Running - Vegas Pro 10, 3ds Max 7, Photoshop CS, Macromedia Flash 8 & some misc video convertors. Nothing else installed on the system. Exclusively used for some HD editing of Canon T2i clips and some graphics and web work.

I am considering an upgrade of my OS HDD to an SSD so id like to know if Vegas would open faster and general operations during editing will be a little faster ?

I'm just running some tests on my system to see if there really is a RAM bottle neck and i observed some things. I opened 4 sessions of 3ds max. Hit 2 simultaneous 3d renders then fired up Vegas and loaded it completely with 40 HD clips. Hit render. In the background i was running a system resources monitoring program and in no way was i able to max out the memory. Its a modest 4 GB of ram and system shows 3.5 GB as recognized by the OS as usual. All these apps together running simultaneously never maxed out the ram and there was always 30% at least left. The processor on the other hand was running at 98-100%. I wonder if a RAM upgrade would do me good even if i put in 16 GB (and upgrade to WIN7 64bit to fully utilize that ram), i mean after i changed out everything and then it still used only 3 GB of that RAM. Of course WIN7 64bit might hog more ram but then what if my programs didn't see any improvement and they were stubborn on using just another 1 to 2 GB over the OS and even if given more didn't want to improve performance or speed. I never install/play video games that would maybe utilize the full 16gb ram either. I should there were a few times Vegas crashed during the testing. Is there some setting to increase the amount of Ram Vegas uses. I know there's a dynamic ram preview setting in the preferences panel, but isn't that only for SHIFT+M temp ram previewing ?

The monitoring software did however show peak usage of HDD's during app loads, etc. So the bottom line being Processor was being fully utilized and maxed out first with OS HDD coming in second. The RAM well, isn't actually being used totally at all. I was hoping it would bottle neck during the test actually, but it didn't. Given this scenario what should i upgrade that will help me see increased performance/speed. Of-course an SSD will help because i did see the OS HDD maxing out at times and the general consensus is that an SSD OS drive will show marked improvement, so changing to a SSD OS Drive is a safe bet i guess.

But by upgrading to WIN 7 64bit and hiking my RAM to 16GB DDR3 1600mhz CORSAIR VENGEANCE will the new 64 bit OS actually utilize the balance RAM towards any practical benefit or should i rather be investing in a faster processor since that's what seemed to be maxing out ?
 
SSD will definitely make everything open faster. Think about upgrading whole system, it's looks a little bit ancient.
 
Using XP, with relatively little RAM, you're probably getting quite a lot of paging to virtual RAM (ie, the hard drive) which is most likely why you get the impression that your RAM is currently under-utilised.

As alohype says - your system seems rather old (and there are very many reasons to ditch XP too). A complete system upgrade would be your best option and I expect you would be very pleasantly surprised by the difference it would make.
 
Can i use the same motherboard and go for this processor (Intel Core i5-3340 3.10 GHz Quad Core LGA1155 Socket Processor (Blue) ), since the motherboard im having has SATA 3 6gb/sec ports and also 4 dimm slots with upto 32gb 1600mhz ram capability. I went thru onine and find that nowadays the midrange boards dont have 4 dimm slots, 2 dimms seem to be the norm now and only the more pro boards are coming out with 4 dimms and they are expensive as i use this system only once in month for personal travel edits and some live event footage edits. Not professionally.
 
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About the RAM. Even if i upgrade to WIN 7 (64 bit) i don't think Vegas will ever use the RAM. Even on my current system (i know its 32bit win xp) it doesnt use even half of the ram that's available and free. Wont it be a bummer if i upgraded to 16gb and it did the same even though i upgraded to WIN 7 64bit, Vegas 64bit and 16 gb ram ?
 
Judging from the responsiveness, this must be a really stupid/petty thread that i started, so i guess ill tune out. DVX forum isn't what it used to be like a few years ago.
 
plainman007 said:
Can i use the same motherboard and go for this processor (Intel Core i5-3340 3.10 GHz Quad Core LGA1155 Socket Processor (Blue) )
Click to expand...

If it's the same socket, yes.


But by upgrading to WIN 7 64bit and hiking my RAM to 16GB DDR3 1600mhz CORSAIR VENGEANCE will the new 64 bit OS actually utilize the balance RAM towards any practical benefit or should i rather be investing in a faster processor since that's what seemed to be maxing out ?
Click to expand...

ALL of this is so. It's not an either/or.
 
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