Ram to bus or not to bus !?

[dizzynoodle]

I very simple question, actually directly relates to the effective performance improvment one gets out of a P4 system over a P3 souped up system....

i.e. I need to put together a new editing station for work mainly from mini DV footage in After Effetcs and a bit of Premiere... I am facing a descion of either going for the fastest P3 machine with 1 Gig of Pc133 RAM [which is dirt cheap now!!!] or a P4 station with about 128/256 Rdram [which is supposed to be faster]

Realistically.... do i get much improvment in performace... i know i will be advised by many to go the T-BIrd way... but that is another story.... Also i realize that there are many instructions [on P4]that software is not making use of yet.... But i am buying now not after 12-18 months when After Effects 6 is out with special instructions lfor the P4 or the next chip.... so what is it gonna be ?

[[GDI]Raptor]

No P4, RAMBUS memory stinks! EXPENSIVE, slow....

I realy advice you to by an 1400Mhz Athlon processor, 256Mb DDR RAM, and a ASUS A7V266, a very good combo.

P4 with SDROM on i845 chipset is NOT prforming well!

If you abselutly wants Intel, hold on for the Tualin core (0,13micron PIII) It will go up to 1200Mhz, and a ASUS motherboard based on i815b

[Greebe]

Moved thread due to it being NLE related. Many in GH/S don't consider the most important and or critical nature that NLE computers require / must have over a high performance gaming system over there.

[Wombat]

I would ask Maggi. He does the most DV around here that I know of. And Rambus does have the sustained bandwidth crown for the moment.

[Marshmallowman]

I would go for a athlon or even Dual 760MP.

BUT....

If you absolultely want to Buy a P4, I would suggest waiting a bit for the socket 478 (shrunken die p4's). the older/current P4's are now about to become obsolete and are going to be cleared from most vendors stock.
(could be a bargain soon, but will have very limited upgrade options ~2G max).

I personally would not like throw money at a p4 at this point in time.

[wkulecz]

If you need to get real work done, I'd stay away from the bleeding edge -- thus no P4, no Dual (MP) Athelons.

There are plenty of recommendations in the archives, no point me trying to repeat them all here.

P4 is more RISC like than P3 or Athelon -- faster clocks but less work per clock -- so to really take advantage of it, programs need to be recompiled.

If you can wait, I'd wait for some P4 and DDR dust to settle, RAMBUS appears to be in trouble right now. Nothing "real world" seems to show performance gains anywhere hear the cost increment.

Stability and low latency is IMHO more important that speed for NLE. DV's 3.6 MB/s is not very impressive on benchmarks but you need it in/out with no interrruptions.

A fast Athelon or PIII and a good motherboard would be the safe bet right now.

Heed the advice about current P4's being like the Pentium 60/66 to 90/100 transition -- buy now and count on junking your motherboard soon.

--wally.

[iparout]

As someone pointed out, wait for the new PIII Tualatin (that;s the correct name) to come out. The 1,13 GHz version can be O/C to 1,478 GHz and that can beat many P4 processors in performance (see www.tomshardware.com). The mobo chipsets for Tualatin will support DDR-SDRAM or SDRAM, so it's up to you what to choose. If you have the money, go for the DDR solution. Forget about RDRAM.. Too expensive and not that good for the money you give...

Good luck.

[dizzynoodle]

IN that case is Tbird 1.4 faster ?

So will a T-Bird 1.4 with 256/512 DDR Ram be much faster than and as stable as a PIII [fastest chip available now 1GHZ i guess] ? again to run After Effets + Premiere

[Flying dutchman]

DDR Ram on a P3 is thrown away money; the P3 bus protocol
can't handle DDR. It will be just as slow as SDRAM. An Athlon, on the other hand, can transfer data both on the rising and falling slope of a clock pulse. Here DDR ram makes sense.

Have you considered the third option; a dual P3 system?

BTW, I personally wouldn't install more than 512 KB of memory if there's a remote chance that you need to dual-boot Win98 or WinME. They don't work reliably with more than 512 k installed (or so I've heard).


Whatever system you buy, make sure you thoroughly burn-in test your RAM modules. There's a lot of cheap trash for sale.
I bought three 128-mb SDRAM modules last month and tested them just in case (free test program "DocMemory Ram Diagnostic" at http://www.simmtester.com ).
Guess what? One of the modules was faulty! One single bit got stuck occasionally! Docmemory saved my day!

[Marshmallowman]

I agree about p3's not really being a good match for DDR, but it might possibly help in dual p3's situation.
BUT..there a new dual mothernoard from tyan, who know how to make good stable dual boards and it still only uses sdram(and a via chipset) and it supports tulatins.
see toms adware http://www.tomshardware.com/

But I vote for a fast athlon and a asus or perhaps epox ddr motherboard.