On 05/02/2008, Paul Lemmons <paul.lemmons@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I am soon to purchase a new PC. It will run Fedora and its primary > purpose will be: > > 1) Transcoding my DVD library to xvid-avi's so that they may be watched > on my media player > 2) Editing training videos that I create and burning the finished > product to DVD for distribution > > To transcode I will most likely be using dvd::rip and for editing I will > probably be using cinerella > > Now that that is said and money not a limitless resource I have some > choices to make. One of those choices is CPU configuration. For the > tasks above, which is better: > > 1) A single very fast CPU > 2) Dual core CPU with combined speed greater than or equal to a single > CPU but each core slower than a single CPU > 3) Multi socket CPU with combined speed greater than a single CPU but > each CPU slower than a single CPU > > Bang for buck, option 2 sounds the best to me but I am concerned that > the process of transcodeing is single threaded and would not take > advantage of multiple CPUs. > > Thoughts? Suggestions? > I don't know about the video editing, but transcode (the backend DVDRip uses) can use multiple cores to do the video encoding. On top of that there's always audio encoding as well. That means two cores gives you a ~2x speedup (not quite 2x, as audio isn't parallelised). Comparing the prices of dual core CPUs with ones twice the speed it quickly becomes apparent which the better option for that application is. In addition the faster processor makes more demands on the rest of your hardware: you may need faster memory and a more expensive motherboard for it. -- imalone
