i7 vs. i5; 1366 vs 1156?

questions about practical use of Neat Video, examples of use
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brightness09
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Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2009 3:35 pm

i7 vs. i5; 1366 vs 1156?

Post by brightness09 »

Just bought NeatVideo Pro plug-in over the weekend. Love love love it! Now I need a processor upgrade from my C2Q6600. Has anyone benchmarked the latest processors?

I'm currently doing most of my video work in 1440x1080 (HDV), and will be moving to 1920x1080 soon. Is rendering with NV processor limited or memory bandwidth limited? I was spending 3-4:1 rendering time before NV, after NV the ratio is 12-15:1 (and getting much much cleaner video, of course) with all setting at default (except the sampling box as user configuration). Is that indicative of the process being processor limited? On the other hand, the quad core processor is loaded at only 60-70% on each of the four cores according to the Windows Taskmanager.

My question is two fold:

(1) does hyperthreading in i7 help rendering a single project (wmv h.264 output) pulling from 2-3 m2t or avi (the latter is pre-rendered intermediates)? The 60-70% processor load in rendering real projects has me scratching my head. Should I render two projects simultaneously as a time saver overall?

(2) does triple channel memory in 1366pin i7's make a difference vs. the 1156pin dual-channel i7's?

Any advice is much appreciated. Thank you in advance.
NVTeam
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Joined: Thu Sep 01, 2005 4:12 pm
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Post by NVTeam »

I haven't directly tested i7 and different memory speed combinations, so I can only provide a general advice. I hope other forum members who run i7-based machines can help with specific figures.

Generally, Neat Video is both CPU- and memory-bandwidth intensive. With larger number of available cores, memory bandwidth gradually becomes the limiting factor, so I guess those 60-70% are caused either by memory speed limit or additonally by singe-threadness of some other components involved into the rendering process such as codecs or plug-in hosts itself (there may be some functional components in the host application that do not parallelize well).

If you have a choice, select a faster RAM, a CPU with larger cache, with more cores, with higher frequency.

For specific measurements in different configurations, I am asking other forum members to assist. If you run i5 or i7 machines, please post your render speeds. Please specify the hardware parameters, host application, version of Neat Video plug-in, clip's frame size in pixels, rendering speed in FPS. That should be sufficient to compare the efficiency of different hardware configurations.

For some results please also see this thread.

Thank you,
Vlad
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