I've been thinking of upgrading my video editing pc. At the moment, I can't afford to replace the whole machine. I've recently replaced the original 4 core 2GHz processors with 3GHz ones. That has made a noticeable improvement.
I was wondering if any one experienced in pc upgrades could look at this pc performance report and suggest the next step. At the bottom of the report is a caution about the disk drive - does that mean it could be improved?
I'm not really sure what the warning is about but the two areas you may like to look at are solid state drives (SSDs) or a new graphics card (if you're doing things that need it).
People usually buy an SSD and use the existing drive alongside it for storage. Using one as your primary drive will vastly reduce boot time due to their extremely low response times. It's unlikely to speed up any video encoding though as that's mostly CPU intensive.
The graphics card is reasonably new although it's quite low end. If that was upgraded, you might need to consider whether the power supply is sufficient and has PCI-E power connectors (a lot of mid - high range cards require these). Not sure if video editing utilizes it much anyway so it might be pointless!
8GB of RAM is reasonable for what you're doing but I suspect it's DDR2 which is rather expensive. Might be worth holding off on RAM upgrades although I'd think 16GB would help with video editing. You may also need certain RAM configurations for that machine.
For anything else, you're better off basing it all on a new motherboard and CPU in the long run otherwise you're paying through the nose for slight improvements. The price of newer hardware tends to be quite good (try comparing the price of DDR2 and DDR3 RAM!)
In my opinion, if an SSD doesn't seem like a good move to you, I'd save the money towards the new build!
Just had a bit of a google for SSD's. The ones I've found seem to have a SATA 3 interface -but the built in controller on this thing is sata 2, so I wonder if that would make them just as slow as the whirly metal things I've already got?
Do you have any experience with serial attached SCSI drives? I notice that the XW6400 brochure offered SAS drives as an option, although I would need to buy the appropriate controller card as well.
But maybe you are right, this thing is about six years old now, so maybe just keep using it until that final puff of smoke appears, then take it down to the tip.
I bought the GT620 a year or two ago to help with the one and only game I play on the PC -- EVE Online. Wasted many a happy hour drifting through space.Are you a capsuleer too by any chance?
SATA2 would be holding the drive back in terms of throughput but you'd still see a huge difference. Most of the speed comes from their very low access times, way under 1ms usually whereas their mechanical counterparts are usually in the range of 5-20s ms. With 10,000 files, it all adds up to a huge difference.
SAS I've seen used in industry a lot although I'm not sure how it compares with SATA. I have a sneaky suspicion that unless you plan on something like a RAID array, I don't think it's worth getting a SAS card. Probably best to do a bit of Googling rather than taking my word for it.
I've got friends who play EVE and I've heard a little about it. The steep learning curve puts me off. I'm more one of those "SHOOT IT, SHOOT IT!!" kind of people who doesn't bother with this tactics thing which I hear EVE is full of. Some Rhythm games too.
Id agree with what Ben said, you haven't mentioned what aspect your trying to improve though?
Your Processor and memory are fairly fast and unless your using all 8GB adding more wont help as you wont be using it.
Replacing with lower latency RAM may help if some is available and that's likely to be expensive and not boost the performance all that much.
An SSD will make standard PC usage allot quicker though for reasons Ben already described. RAID is an option on SATA if supported by your controller, but this really depends on what you want to improve the most.
Some graphics cards offer GPU acceleration of video encoding\decoding this may help if your editing software supports it.
Hi Tom,
I was hoping to reduce the time to render the videos. With this machine it now takes approx 25 minutes to render each 5 minute video, which is better than it used to be. With its original 2GHz processors, it used to take 35 minutes. It's all a bit of a trade-off I suppose. Last year I was using a different type of video compression, which rendered more quickly but produced bigger files which took longer to upload! This year I switched to uploading in flash format which the pc takes longer to encode - smaller files to upload, but the bit rate is a bit less which I think makes the end product look slightly worse than last year.
I think the simplest thing to do for starters is see if your using your current processor to it's full potential when encoding. If your not using close to or 100% OF YOUR cpu when encoding, I would suggest changing codec or encoding software for a multi threaded version that way you will be using all four cores.
Also have a look at these two links one for ati\amd and nvidia, both are about gpu supported encoding. I.e. using your graphics card to speed up encoding. Your current nvidia card may already support this and there is a link for a tool to check. Again though, your encoder software will need to support this type of encoding.
