just started video editing...

[Maezr]

... and good god, my system is slow.

512 megs ram, 1700+ athlon XP. the hard drives are fine (8mb cache WD's). I'm pretty low on cash, but assuming I was about to buy a new cpu, how much would say, going from a 1700+ to a 2600+ change things? would it be really drastic? would I be better off just unlocking my current cpu? how hard is it? is it easy to screw up?

thanks

 

[hoihtah]

first thing, what software are you using?
and i assume you're working with digital (dv) source, and not analog.

i've done dv editing with pII/400 machine, and that was painful.
but it's doable... if you are patient enough.

as for speed, 1700 to 2600 is going to give you a noticeable difference,
(though not significant)
but i'd try to o/c your cpu before going out and getting a 2600+ chip.

what seems to take the most time with your configuration?
capturing? editing? compiling?

 

[apoppin]

Originally posted by: Maezr
... but assuming I was about to buy a new cpu, how much would say, going from a 1700+ to a 2600+ change things? would it be really drastic? would I be better off just unlocking my current cpu? how hard is it? is it easy to screw up?

thanks

It'd be an improvement . . . I'd try O/C'ing first. It's prettry easy and generally safe if you are not too aggressive.

Head over to CPU/OC'ing Forum and learn the details step-by-step from the masters there (do a "search" - it's all there in the archived threads).

 

[Ionizer86]

Editing...you're referring to the step from AVI-->MPG right? That's really processor dependant; my proc usage is like 93% to 100% during this stage (XP1600+), and I'm also looking at upgrading the CPU

If you're mentioning that your system is not very usable when it's encoding, well go to the task manager and lower the priority of the prog (TMPGenc in my case) a bit. On realtime priority, even my mouse refuses to respond fluidly.

 

[Kremus]

Just looking today and a Athon XP 2600+ will run you about 100 dollars.

 

[ptw]

If the ecoding itself is slow, get a faster processor.

If the editing process is slow, it may be the files you are using are too big and you're getting hard drive swapping. Get more RAM.

 

[chocoruacal]

Yes, of course, with a faster CPU its possible to see significant gains in encoding speed. It would help if you listed the software you use, and what sort of encoding you're doing. Probably won't mean much to you, but here's a little look at the three systems I use:

p4 1.5
P4B
512mb pc133

XP2200
8RDA+
512mb pc2700

XP2600
AT7
512/1024mb pc2700 (I'm at 1024mb right now, but going there from 512mb resulted in no noticable speed increase.)

*Virtual Dub
*AviSynth 2.5

Using the exact same filter chain, the 2600 can be anywhere from 15-30% faster. The p4 really blows these days....its over 2x as slow as the 2600 So yeah, you'll see a pretty big difference going from XP1700-XP2500+. The extra 10-15 fps really helps when you've got several hours worth of video to encode