AMD 64 - Sorting out the truths and advantages (1 Viewer)

[Chris]

Ron, I would say something about DVD_X_Copy, but it would probably violate forum rules. Let me say, the program is (in general) both not very good at what it does and a real CPU hog. Other programs do a very good (better) job and offer the same (and more) features, and some are free.

I will say this:

Visit DVDRHELP.COM.

Now, as to the other thing, RAM is not going to help you nearly as much as you'd think. As long as you are doing defrags w/your DVD space and so on, then you're fine.

For video, the biggest things that will impact you (if you have 512MB and up) will be:

(1) Have a nice fast HD. This generally means something with an 8MB Buffer if possible and/or S-ATA. Most SATA drives are much faster then PATA (Parallel IDE) if you have a drive that isn't 7,200RPM + 8MB Cache, you're losing a good deal of performance. Even better is the WD 10,000RPM SATA drives

(2) One thing you have as a problem you can't readily rectify.. you're using an Intel I850 Chipset motherboard. How can I tell? Because you're using RAMBUS on an Intel Board from Dell Now, here's the crap part of that.. you won't have an SATA connector on the board, and more then that, the south bridge will be the older configuration, which is considerably slower at drive transfers then the newer controller (ICH4 vs. ICH5) This is something you can't easily fix. If possible, you might consider a SATA Controller card and drive. But check out websites like http://www.storagereview.com/ for thoughts.

(3) If you're having trouble with how long it takes to rip a disc, realize even super fast machines with the wrong DVD-RW drive rip slow; and there are places to get firmware to fix that.. by default, as an example, the Pioneer DVD-106 will rip at 2X.. after a firmware upgrade, it rips at 8X Big difference.

(4) If you're using Photoshop, the 1GB will come in handy Adjust your scrap file accordingly within photoshop if older then Photoshop 6.

(5) You'll hate this solution, but for handling DVD images, it's a gigantic speed increase: TURN OFF SYSTEM RESTORE! Right click my computer, properties, system restore and disable on the drive you are capturing images to (or all drives) because system restore is trying to get "change" snapshots while it's at it.. bah! Doesn't work so good with 4GB images, but if you're system restore is more then that, it will give it a go..

Try at your whim, of course

 

[Chris]

BTW, as to Opteron or Athlon64, the biggest advantage is coming around the corner. SP2 for WindowsXP enables features very unique to the Athlon64 and provide some really nice functions..

 

[SethH]

Yes. I would say that in most any case SATA would be better than IDE. Just make sure your motherboard has SATA connectors. If not I'm sure you could find a pci card, but I'm not sure how this would affect performance. Now if you are using SCSI or Firewire then SATA would provide little or no benefit.

 

[Rob Gillespie]

Agreed. Also, get rid of GOBACK as it will be more of a hog than Windows' own System Restore.

 

[Ronald Epstein]

I turned off SYSTEM RESTORE yesterday, thanks to
the linked site that recommended such -- thank you.

I can't turn off GO BACK. That program saved my
ass so many times. I would install or tweak something
that totally screwed up my system. GOBACK restored it
perfectly every time.

I would imagine all these memory hogs will work
much better with the additional 512 ram.

Thanks for all your help, guys. This has been
great reading.

 

[Chris]

While you'll still take the hit of GoBack, it's a good thing to turn of Restore if you have go-back, they are both replicating each others work and hten you really take a performance penalty

 

[Ronald Epstein]

Update



Just got the 512 Ram from Dell this morning.

Installed it, and I must say that my system
is chugging along noticeably faster than it was.

Bootup is quite a few seconds faster than it was.
The startup programs instantaneously appear on the
screen rather than take seconds to load.

I also noticed a decreased amount of loading time
with Photoshop 8.

Best of all, I check my system resources and found
I have more than twice the amount available than I
did before.

Life is good.

 

[Todd Hochard]

A little late, but Samsung is fine memory. Most of it sold here is made in Austin, TX, if you want the "Made is USA" connection.

Also late, but very true. Let me put it this way- I do most of what you do on a PIII-667, overclocked to 750MHz, with 512MB RAM. Yes, two-pass WMV9 encoding is BRUTALLY slow, but I don't have any resource issues, per se.

Oh, and I should mention regarding SATA- some of the folks over at dvdrhelp.com are having issues with noise (a la TV interference) being put into the picture during capture, when using a SATA drive in their system. They switch over to an ATA/100 drive, and BAM, no more noise. Perhaps the early batches of SATA controllers aren't quite up to snuff re: RF interference.

Todd

 

[Max Leung]

If the length it takes to boot the computer is annoying you, you can avoid that entirely by taking advantage of Hibernation mode.

When you want to turn off your computer, instead of just doing the normal "Shutdown Computer" procedure, you can put the computer in hibernation mode, which simply saves the computer's state, including everything in RAM and all the programs that are running, onto the hard drive. If you have 1 gig of RAM, it will use up 1 gig of hard drive space to save this state. You will no longer have to suffer from long boot up times now because it simply reloads everything exactly as you left the computer before.

To put the computer into hibernation, simply go to the Start Menu->Shutdown, hold down the shift key, and click on the Hibernate button. Your computer will save its state onto the hard drive and shut off.

Turn on the computer again and within 30 seconds your computer will be in the exact state you left it.

CAVEAT: This assumes you have USB and other devices with well-written drivers that can handle entering and leaving the hibernation state gracefully. On my laptop, I had an issue with a very poorly written driver for my USB-to-RS232 adapter that would instantly bluescreen when it wakes from hibernation. A new driver fixed it.

 

[dan fritzen]

Ron run msconfig in the run field and tell up what is in your startup tab, most of that stuff does not need to be there, I love programs like winamp, but why does it need to be on the taskbar to soke up RAM? TSR's are supposed to maek your pc faster but they slow down your pc.

 

[Chris]

BTW, finally got around to setting up a WindowsXP 64bit rig running an Athlon64.. VERY NICE. I tri-boot to WinXP 32bit/Linux64 bit... I'm damned impressed at this point, I moved over from a P4 3.0G (C, 800Mhz FSB) which will become the wife's PC.. for the $ it cost, I don't think I could have done any better

 

[Mike Fassler]

heres something else for you to ponder Ron, "you Dont have to buy your ram from Dell" you can use any compatible ram and it will save you a ton of dough doing so, buying it from dell increases your spending by a ton. and yes adding more memory will give you more headroom for programs that you are using
at startup etc.