Phenom II 955 to Intel i5 750 for video encoding?

[Ulti]

Well lately I've been encoding quite a lot of videos to put on my phone to watch. I find that with a Phenom II 955 at 3.8ghz, it still takes a little while to encode videos. I might even be able to say that it is slower than when I had a E8200 but I'm not too sure about that.

Now the program I use is the freeware program, SUPER by eRighsoft. I convert mainly asian dramas from rmvb to avi to watch on my Samsung Jet.

I can confirm that the program does definitely make use of 4 cores though as when I look in Task Manager I see there is around 40% load across the 4 cores with around 80% load on the fourth core (not sure why the fourth core is working harder haha)

Will I see a big enough decrease in video encoding times or will it not be worth the upgrade? I'm thinking of the i5 750 because if I sell my Phenom II 955 and my board I could potentially only spend a couple of tenners or so and get an i5.

Hopefully someone could show me some benchmarks or tell me from their personal experience.

EDIT: Hmm, it seems here http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...65,2389-6.html that they are almost equal. So I guess there's no point upgrading then? I'd like to see at least 33% faster encoding with i5 750 but it hardly seems the case in those tests.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I can confirm that the program does definitely make use of 4 cores though as when I look in Task Manager I see there is around 40% load across the 4 cores with around 80% load on the fourth core (not sure why the fourth core is working harder haha)

If the program you are using is barely using all 4 cores then there is no point in upgrading TBH!!

The Phenom II X6 will also be released in the next few months too.

[Ulti]

So the only way for faster encoding is more cores and it's nothing to do with the Intel vs AMD architect?

[Fishpan]

Hi Ulti,

Use Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso - If you have an ATi graphics card thats quite recent - you can use ATi Stream to transcode at much faster rates.
Similarly, if you have a recent NVidia card, then you can use the same program or Badaboom to take advantage of the card's CUDA ability.

In both cases, you should see a reduction of times from 1 hour (using cpu encoding) to under 15 minutes (again depending on your hardware) for the same video file. Try them out and see - I personally found Badaboom excellent. One episode of the wire using Super's CPU encoding on my QX6850 - 20-30 minutes. The same video file on Badaboom (using 8800gt encoding) took under 4 minutes.

Cheers,

Viroshan

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

So the only way for faster encoding is more cores and it's nothing to do with the Intel vs AMD architect?

Faster cores help also but TBH if the program is only using 40% of three of your cores then it seems no point for you to upgrade. If your Phenom II was running at something like 90% over ALL four cores with the program you are using then it would make some sense in upgrading.

I would batch the videos you want to encode and run them overnight if possible as this costs you nothing in new hardware.

You have a decent system with no obvious bottlenecks from what I can see as you have an SSD and a relatively fast hard disk too. I would check RAM usage though to make sure that the amount of RAM is enough.

Getting a P55 motherboard which can do symmetrical Crossfire is also going to cost you well over £100 on top of the cost of the processor too.

Edit!!

I would also look at ATI Stream too like the previous poster mentioned.

[Englander]

I must agree with what's been said about Badaboom.

GPU encoding is certainly the future!

Not sure about switching the processors though.

[Terbinator]

Potentially a sidewise upgrade, Sony Vegas eats up all 8 threads when I've used it for encoding though so if you could afford an i7 that may be a route worth exploring.

[arthurleung]

I must agree with what's been said about Badaboom.

GPU encoding is certainly the future!

Not sure about switching the processors though.

If you are just transcoding to be used on mobile devices it is fine.
Nothing come close to x264 for video compression quality / efficiency.

To better utilize CPU cores, run multiple encodings at the same time. Do 3-4 episodes at the same time instead of 1!

[Jasp]

http://handbrake.fr/

Why not give handbrake a go see if thats any faster.

[Ulti]

Hi Ulti,

Use Cyberlink MediaShow Espresso - If you have an ATi graphics card thats quite recent - you can use ATi Stream to transcode at much faster rates.
Similarly, if you have a recent NVidia card, then you can use the same program or Badaboom to take advantage of the card's CUDA ability.

In both cases, you should see a reduction of times from 1 hour (using cpu encoding) to under 15 minutes (again depending on your hardware) for the same video file. Try them out and see - I personally found Badaboom excellent. One episode of the wire using Super's CPU encoding on my QX6850 - 20-30 minutes. The same video file on Badaboom (using 8800gt encoding) took under 4 minutes.

Cheers,

Viroshan

Well I can't test Badaboom so I'll have to skip it out, will test out the CyberLink MediaShow Espresso program and see how ATi Stream goes.

Faster cores help also but TBH if the program is only using 40% of three of your cores then it seems no point for you to upgrade. If your Phenom II was running at something like 90% over ALL four cores with the program you are using then it would make some sense in upgrading.

I would batch the videos you want to encode and run them overnight if possible as this costs you nothing in new hardware.

You have a decent system with no obvious bottlenecks from what I can see as you have an SSD and a relatively fast hard disk too. I would check RAM usage though to make sure that the amount of RAM is enough.

Getting a P55 motherboard which can do symmetrical Crossfire is also going to cost you well over £100 on top of the cost of the processor too.

Edit!!

I would also look at ATI Stream too like the previous poster mentioned.

Well I guess even if I get a i5 750 at 4ghz, it still won't be much faster than Phenom 955 at 3.8ghz. Yeah, the problem with a good P55 motherboard is that they are expensive, however crossfire can come later - I will be ordering a 24" monitor soon so I will have to see how my single 5770 copes, I imagine it should be ok but if not then a 5850 or another 5770 will be bought I guess.

I must agree with what's been said about Badaboom.

GPU encoding is certainly the future!

Not sure about switching the processors though.

Unfortunately I don't have a Nvidia card so I can't test out Badaboom as I said previously

Potentially a sidewise upgrade, Sony Vegas eats up all 8 threads when I've used it for encoding though so if you could afford an i7 that may be a route worth exploring.

Well i7 is a too expensive as I'd have to buy new RAM and everything I guess so I'll have to skip that route.

If you are just transcoding to be used on mobile devices it is fine.
Nothing come close to x264 for video compression quality / efficiency.

To better utilize CPU cores, run multiple encodings at the same time. Do 3-4 episodes at the same time instead of 1!

Ahha! This is the best idea so far, running multiple encodings - Why did I never think of this?!

http://handbrake.fr/

Why not give handbrake a go see if thats any faster.

Not too fond of it as I there aren't as many options to convert too and I'm not too fond of the UI.

[Terbinator]

You could always drop the voltage on your RAM to save pennies for an i7 rig.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The thing is that the Phenom II X6 would probably be a drop in upgrade for a 790X motherboard.

Anyway the fact is that the CPU is not being fully utilised anyway and the OP is just going to start wasting money on incremental upgrades.

[Cuffz]

The thing is that the Phenom II X6 would probably be a drop in upgrade for a 790X motherboard.

Anyway the fact is that the CPU is not being fully utilised anyway and the OP is just going to start wasting money on incremental upgrades.

6 cores at an affordable price eh? I wonder when Intel will do the same... AFAIK the mega expensive Gulftown part is the only one they are doing for ages, right? Seems like a big win for AMD there, for a change.

[Terbinator]

The 12 threads let it bash anything AMD has out though.

[circuitmonkey]

have you tried AMD/ATI's Avivo Video Converter?
it's available from the drivers download page:
http://game.amd.com/us-en/drivers_ca...indows-7-64bit

I think you'll need to play with getting the right codecs installed to make full use of it.

When I was trying out MediaCoder's CUDA support last week I was seeing 2x speed improvements with my half working 9800GX2 (so on par with 9800GT). I was getting encoding throughput of 150MBs encoding to x264

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

The 12 threads let it bash anything AMD has out though.

At what price though??

You should realise that price is the important factor here and it is most likely the Phenom II X6 will be pitched against the quad core Core i7 processors.

Also buying a new X58 or X68 motherboard and some RAM(if the RAM the OP currently had does not undervolt well) is additional expense on top of the loss they are going to make on selling their existing components.