First Intel build advice

[Hulkster316]

Whilst i have built several AMD based PCs my Dad has asked me to build him one based on an intel cpu for purly photo , video work.
As i am completly new to intels current cpu s last one i owned was a pentuim 3 and was wondering if the following would make a good cpu m/b base

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=228972

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=291719

Cheers for any advice and or better suggestions.

[TheAnimus]

image and video work is one of the few tasks which 'true' 64bit CPUs can actually help on, dare i ask why not an AMD x2?

At the risk of starting a rage of people who've bought 64bit CPUs without understanding enough about them they don't really help with games performance because most games use a mix of 16bit and as-many-bits-as-the-multimedia-extensions-have.

But image effects can greatly benefit, the basic filter concept can be made faster, as can video encoding.

Because its video work, I'd consider a nice RAID of 15k rpm scsi's if the budget isn't that high, a couple of raptors, and some nice big seagates for storage, i will say i hate WD at present, i have one working WD drive, its become easyer to write "GOOD" in permant marker because i realised i would have to write bad on 6

[Hulkster316]

Sorry forgot to mention the £800 total budget

Thanks though.

[kalniel]

image and video work is one of the few tasks which 'true' 64bit CPUs can actually help on, dare i ask why not an AMD x2?

Why is the AMD X2 more 64 bit than an intel chip? All pentium D and 600 series chips are 64bit, though just like the AMD chips, you need a 64 bit operating system to take advantage of it.

I'm not sure how much image and video work really benefits from dual core - my recommendation would be to buy a fast 600 series pentium. They are blazingly fast for video work, and hyperthreading gives some of the advantages of dual core, but the price is much lower.

That motherboard is a good choice.

[TheAnimus]

Because the Intel offerings aren't really as good, its much more of a rushed effort, more like a retrofitted p4 than a new CPU, they put all their time into the itanium... oops! as such performance isn't great in 64bit any test or bench mark will show you this.

AMD's memory controller lends itself much more to shifting large bits of data about, this is good with video work.

Its worth noting Hyperthreading does make a system feal more responsive, but dosen't provide a significant boost in performance of multi-threaded apps, a current project i'm doing is a connect 4 AI, now this actually runs faster on my xeon box with hyperthreading switched off, only using the two xeons, rather than the 4 virtuals.

[sawyen]

same here, my Xeons works much faster with HT turned off.. running 4 logical threads only shed lousy badnwidth distribution between two already thirsty CPUs..

Benching a 49 fraction (55-90MB/frac) TOF-MS/MS with a NR database of 37GB + 100GB swap.. It took 4 days and 16 hrs to finish with HT on, and 3 days and 22 hrs with HT off..

The results speaks for themselves...