Upgrading for encoding purposes

[smoove7]

I am looking to upgrade my pc I built about 2 years ago, currently the pc has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GHz.

I do mainly adobe premiere video encoding and was looking to stay with AMD and get the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition Deneb 3.2GHz

BUT while doing research the Intel i5 and i7 have caught my eye. So basically I wanted to know:

1. Should I stay with AMD and get the Phenom II x4 or should I change it up and go Intel?

2. If I go with intel, should I get the i7 over the i5 because of the HT?

3. Lastly how much will these CPU choices crush the x2 6400+ I have right now?

BTW I know if I go intel I will need to get a new MB, plus I am going to go up to 6 gig of mem from 4 and get a new vid card. Right now I have an EVGA 9600gt, but would probably move up to a Geforce 9800 GTX 512 mb.

And I have no loyalties to AMD or Intel and I am in no way a fanboy. I just want the best bang for whatever I am doing.

 

[o1die]

It's your call; the Intel setup will cost more due to the change to ddr3. If you're using 4 gigs or more of ddr2, then the am2+am3 boards will save you from buying new ram now. Frys has the core i5 750 with gigabyte board for $209 after rebate until Thursday. Newegg had some corsair 2x2gb of 1333 ddr3 for $79.99 shipped, which was the best price recently. So you're looking at $300 or more for an i5.

 

[someguy7]

Check what cpus your current board can run. If it can run any Phenom II quad cores that is 100 percent the direction I would go if I was you.

 

[smoove7]

Here is a link to my current mb:





http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131234&cm_re=asus_m3a-_-13-131-234-_-Product

So I dont think this MB supports a Phenom II X4



I was thinking of getting the i7-920 and the EVGA 141-BL-E757-TR LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX X58 SLI LE Intel Motherboard

 

[smoove7]

bump for thoughts

 

[darkgamer]

CPU
AMD® Socket AM2+ Phenom™ FX / Phenom X4 / Phenom X2 / Athlon™ X2 / Sempron™
AMD Socket AM2 Athlon 64 X2 / Athlon 64 FX / Athlon 64 / Sempron
AMD Cool'n'Quiet™ Technology

 

[Pro Llama]

I looked up your board on asus site and it doesn’t support the PII chips. http://usa.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=P48rppKk4jrc9pNd

What chip you get really depends on how much money you have to spend on it. You are going to get what you paid for. The i7 cost a lot but it is very fast so if you have money to burn do it. The i5 deal that o1die was talking about sounds really cheap which would be good as long as the motherboard is good.

 

[smoove7]

Yeah I figured I would need to spend 800 bucks on a MB, CPU, ram and vid card. This route is alot cheaper than building another pc from scratch including buying the tower and everything that goes in it. If I were to build one from scratch with all the goodies, it would be about 1700 bucks.

Of course I made sure my current PS could handle the new hardware and I have a Zalman 9700CNPS which is compatible with an i5 or i7.

But for encoding purposes, the i7 looks to be 20-30% faster than the phenom II x4 which is amazing when it can take hours to render a project.

Then I see the EVGA 896-P3-1170-AR GeForce GTX 275 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI and the price continues to rise, funny how computer can do that huh?

 

[someguy7]

Your most cost effective upgrade would be to uprade to a am2+ board and a PII and keep your same ram. It will be a huge improvement over you current system and will not cost alot. CPU+board can be had for under 300 bucks.

Sure the i7 system will be faster at encoding but is it worth the extra money to you? That is up to you. You could spend less then 300 bucks and get a huge imrpovement from what you currently have. Or spend even more for more performance.












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[BadTrip]

800? With a 275? Hmm.... What do you think about 664 with a HD4890?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117225
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157172
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231277
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814150438

Excellent choice with the xeon.

 

[smoove7]

Thank you so much for all the great replies and I am going to look into these options. Maybe I could spend a few hundred dollars for now, and save up more money for that dream system I want. Of course my dream system would involve a server MB and 4 quad core processors, 100+ gig of memory and ok now I am dreaming and being unrealistic.

Thanks alot everyone, I am glad a friend told me about this site. If anyone has other ideas let me know, leftover grant money is coming and daddy needs an upgrade after 2 years.