I've Just Gone Dual-Core :^)

[anonymez]

That's right, my PC crashed 2 days ago (possibly because of my carelessness and the huge lightning storm outside). the monitor showed nothing but 'no signal' each time i tried to boot it up.

using that as an excuse to upgrade, i re-built me an outrageously awesome PC (at least for a cheap person like me :P )

AMD Athlon64 X2 3800+
2GB PC3200 Dual Channel RAM
ASUS A8V-E SE Motherboard
ATI X800XL 256MB PCI-E Graphics Card
Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM 8Mb Cache
Western Digital 200GB 7200RPM 8Mb Cache
LG GSA-4163B DVD +R/-R
LG DVD ROM
Antec 450W PSU
CMV 19" LCD

dual-core is amazing, shrink bench coming soon, chewy ;)

[UncasMS]

who cares for shrink?
^_~


enjoy your new rig

[anonymez]

thanks uncas, gotta love the new task manager look :D

http://img503.imageshack.us/img503/9964/untitled8bw.png

[Chewy]

"dual-core is amazing, shrink bench coming soon, chewy"

please(and a screenshot/like posted during a heavy duty transcode)
something about settling an discrepancy.

don't pay any attention to that other guy he's just jealous, but I am sure
he'll be after you for a full encoder bench(hehehe)

I am jealous too, wondering how much I could overclock that puppy.

[UncasMS]

i doubt shrink will be able to profit from dualcore anyway

and of course i would trade in my 3000+ venice core (@3500+) for a dual 3800+ but for the time being it is still a bit too pricy in € compared to what some of you guys can get the cpu for in $

[anonymez]

i don't think it will benefit from dual-core either, but we will see for sure once i finish restoring my pc from this clean install (probably some time tomorrow) :)

meanwhile i've found xvid takes advantage of it, at least partially, this is in the second pass. from what i've read, will improve soon

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/3534/untitled0zh.png

i was playing half-life 2 earlier while xvid encoding, ran absolutely perfect ;)

[anonymez]

odd, it seems to utilize more when doing the first pass of any xvid encode:

http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/5627/untitled4so.png

[Chewy]

I really think this belongs in general PC, the problem would be our envy.

[anonymez]

feel free to move it anybody :)

[UncasMS]

done

[Chewy]

"That's right, my PC crashed 2 days ago"
sounds kind of fishy, right before christmas, "hey hon I am off
to fix my computer, the old cpu went out, don't bother about that
tool set, I'll just make do with the old ones"

[anonymez]

LOL i feel a little stupid, i forgot avisynth was involved, and its probably the cause for the higher cpu utilisation ;)



"don't bother about that
tool set, I'll just make do with the old ones"

:D

[blutach]

Good burner, anyway :rotfl: :rotfl: :rotfl:

Have fun anon :)

And I can testify that the hailstorm (and I presume electrical storm) was a freak - it made the news. Move to sunny Melbourne anon! :rotfl: :rotfl:

Regards

[anonymez]

And I can testify that the hailstorm (and I presume electrical storm) was a freak - it made the news. Move to sunny Melbourne anon! :rotfl: :rotfl:

its cheaper to buy a surge protector :P

but from now on, i'll unplug my PC during any lightning storms, unless i want another upgrade, that is :rotfl:

[mill]

Dual Core, nice keep us udated.

[Chewy]

all I wanted was a screenshot in my stocking, no coal tho

[anonymez]

well guys, i am pleasantly surpised :)

i did a backup of 'war of the worlds', re-author, using deep analysis & AEC (default sharp), using the settings below:

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9688/shrinksetup9iu.png


during the analysis stage, both cores were at full load, and i was happy :P

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/2443/shrinkdeepanalysis4do.png


during encoding, both cores were at full load again, most of the time. there were brief slumps in utilisation, but keep in mind that 50% usage is the equivalent of having only one core at full load!

http://img248.imageshack.us/img248/9020/shrinkencoding7qk.png


the entire process took 16 minutes, 22 seconds

deep analysis - rate: hovered around 13,900KB/s, and 370-375fps

encoding: started off at 14,000KB/s, very gradually decreased to around 10,000 KB/s, and was at 11,000 KB/s towards the end

very pleasing results i think :D

[blutach]

Lend me your PC - I need it for DVDRB encoding

Regards

[anonymez]

but i need it too! (though probably less than you, at the rate you are buying dvd's! ;) )

too bad i don't have an estimate of what a single core athlon64 3200+ does, so i can compare the two :sad:

[blutach]

Ha! I am working on a 4yo PC - Athlon 1700. It doesn't even have a USB2 port!!! But my encodes go overnight just fine - I really couldn't give a stuff about the time.

Regards

[Chewy]

HMMMMMMMMMMM, that explains a lot, the faster times for X2/64's,
now we may know what shrink really changed with 3.2. Would anyone happen to know if shrink was using a dual cpu during the last months
of developement? 2 cpus, not dual core.

Ok anony, what was the source, dvd'd files on hard drive or disk in
optical drive?

[anonymez]

encoded from the hard disk, to that same hard disk

@blu: that sound like the talk of somebody who doesn't have a dual-core PC! :rotfl: (just joking mate, i used to get by on a pIII 800MHz, doing all encoding not too long ago ;) )

[Chewy]

and you didn't flash the bios first?

1. clear cmos/install new cpu
2. flash bios
3. spend days tweaking bios
and for some reason or another it's fun if it works

[anonymez]

i don't think if i were to try shrinking again i would get very different results. the main reason why i updated the bios was in the hope it would stop explorer.exe from completely occupying my second core! it was fixed after an update & reboot :)

i had a lot to learn about using the dual-core for games though. certain games run too fast/glitchy, i found that you need to set 'affinity' for that process as to restrict it to one core. (you can pick any process and tell it which core/s to use)

i also learned that 'system idle process.exe' taking up 90+ of both cores is a GOOD thing.

[Chewy]

need new 64bit multithreaded games

task manager is nice, but go into performance in adminstrative tools
and it's like layers of an onion.


you did reload or run xp as a repair disk?

[mill]

i was just checking in on you anonymez to see how your duel core was working , but i was still on the first page, i didnt see page 2, da. Sounds like your pleased with it.

[anonymez]

chewy, i did a format & clean install. i wouldn't have it any other way ;)

@mill: very pleased with it, probably even more so in the future, when more apps are multi-threaded and we can get massive performance gains :)

[Chewy]

"chewy, i did a format & clean install. i wouldn't have it any other way"

yep, safer too, windows xp is getting a little long in the tooth and even repair
disk is not fixing stuff it ought to, I changed a cpu and some other hardware
and xp never worked right, until I repaired, but I am still considering deleting the system partition and clean install.

[anonymez]

i do a clean install every 3 months or so, just maintaining performance...

[Chewy]

i do a clean install every 3 months or so, just maintaining performance...

Now that's what I want like to hear in this subforum, but you must live a little dangerously to do it that often.

[anonymez]

i have a 20GB portable HDD & many DVD-RW's, and back everything up that i wish to keep, i wouldn't format that often if my data was at stake :)

[Chewy]

I sometimes just set up XP on a 10 gig partition and start saving everything to the D partition. Just figured out recently that XP will let you delete the system partition and not touch D(data).


I had to make an exception to get rid of a german bootloader,
but I won't mention any names.

[anonymez]

OK after trying out this CPU for a few days, i can honestly say i am very impressed with AMD. I have done some basic testing on all cpu-intensive apps i normally use, including shrink, vdub, GK, Tmpgenc, Photoshop, ffdshow+MPC, etc.

the performance gains in programs such as dvdshrink, which we all thought wouldn't benefit much from a second core, were excellent, even if not at full potential. Photoshop, though it has little to do with digital video, in particular gives absolutely outstanding performance. Since i have updated the BIOS, my PC has NOT crashed, paused, frozen, lagged, or anything similar. If you know how to keep a 'healthy' system, your pc will never be unresponsive again.

It also allows pretty much 24/7 encoding. i am able to play any game i have while doing an xvid encode, setting the affinity for vdub to a single core. rome:total war, far cry, half-life 2, doom 3, gta san andreas all play perfectly on 4XAA & 4XAF. keep in mind you will need plenty of ram too if you wish to do this.

i would have recommended a dual-core to anybody buying a pc that would be doing digital video editing even before i had one, but now that i have really seen the improvements, it definitely gets 2 thumbs up from me :thumbs_up :thumbs_up

[anonymez]

and for anybody else who gets a dual-core, a little advice (you should do these even if its not a dual core ;) ):

1. update the motherboard's BIOS. it may say nothing in the changelog, but there are usually compatibility issues that are resolved

2. download the cool 'n' quiet driver from amd.com. , enable it in the bios, and set your power management in windows to 'minimal power management' to enable it. this will extend the life of the cpu, especially for digital video editing/gaming

3. check out MS's hotfix if you have any issues (i didn't need it though) http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896256

[Chewy]

"we all " hmmmmmmmm

cool 'n' quiet driver , not for me, fast and furious only, these babes,
amd64's run so cool already, of course my cpu only costs 135$
to replace and my OC won't work with cool and quiet.

[anonymez]

"we all " hmmmmmmmm

what would you have said if you were asked 'on the spot' to give an educated answer on whether shrink is multi-threaded? ;)

[Chewy]

No, but after seeing a bench I quoted, I felt it had to be, considering the
respective core frequencies of the dual and single cpu's. When you weight those with the scores(little time consuming) it's obvious. The pieces of the puzzle are starting to drop into place, shrink 3.2 was so intensive, reencode
follows. My educated guess was contaminated by seeing benchs months ago.
From early reviews I thought the x2 was a waste of money, when the reviewers started adding the right benchs then the x2 64 showed it's true colors.

that's why all i wanted was a screenshot, it was a good birthday present thanks
now I want an x2

[UncasMS]

2. download the cool 'n' quiet driver from amd.com. , enable it in the bios, and set your power management in windows to 'minimal power management' to enable it. this will extend the life of the cpu, especially for digital video editing/gaming

first of all i must say: the cool & quiet function is impressive and i like to use it on my athlon64 most of the time as it cuts down the core frequenzy almost down to half the original when not needed - and i dont need the full power now typing in a forum

in addition to reducing the frequenzy the core voltage also goes down by some ~20-25%

taken together this will make your athlon64 run considerably cooler AND consuming less power

when overclocking, however, this function is NOT to be adviced as c&q might reduce the frequenzy (so far so good) but after heavy load it will not go up to the overclocked frequenzy again but only to the standard frequenzy the cpu normally uses

i use to enable c&q at startup if i dont need the overclocked power and when running conversions i turn c&q off

one more piece of information: there are quite a few c&q drivers from the mainbaords manufacturer which may NOT work - go for the ones provided by AMD!

[anonymez]

that was a pricey birthday gift chewy! :rotfl:

@uncas: if you are refering to asus, i never ever touch their own drivers unless i absolutely have to. i get them straight from realtek, ati, amd & via. ;)

also, the drivers on their site are never the latest, it takes them a while to update...

[Floppy]

that was a pricey birthday gift chewy! :rotfl:

@uncas: if you are refering to asus, i never ever touch their own drivers unless i absolutely have to. i get them straight from realtek, ati, amd & via. ;)

also, the drivers on their site are never the latest, it takes them a while to update...

A while to update is somewhat of an understatement (I feel you)...

With my other A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 the only thing updated was the bios after a year... I was already using that bios actually the beta 002 of that...

Asus dont really develop or demonstrate to be very interested in developing after the product is minimally stable..... once it reaches that stability they move on......

[mill]

and for anybody else who gets a dual-core, a little advice (you should do these even if its not a dual core ;) ):

1. update the motherboard's BIOS. it may say nothing in the changelog, but there are usually compatibility issues that are resolved

2. download the cool 'n' quiet driver from amd.com. , enable it in the bios, and set your power management in windows to 'minimal power management' to enable it. this will extend the life of the cpu, especially for digital video editing/gaming

3. check out MS's hotfix if you have any issues (i didn't need it though) http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896256 Thanks for the info,PS since im getting my built by Monarch do you think there have the latest updates and drivers installed?

[anonymez]

don't know, but you could always check via my computer-->properties-->hardware-->device manager, and check the date of the drivers.

or you could just ask them :)

[mill]

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe nForce4 SLI Audio/GB-LAN/IEEE-1394/USB/PCI-E/SATA3G/DDR/ATX 64 939 , How would i find the newest bios for this mother board?

[anonymez]

go www.asus.com

select your region, click 'download' at the top of the screen. it will have drop-down boxes where you can choose your motherboard. it will then give you a list of updates.

OR you could install asus update, which is on the cd that comes with your mobo, i believe it can download the bios image automatically & apply it too. this way is easier.

[Chewy]

Hey, anony how do you flash?

[anonymez]

i download the image file from asus, close all unneccesary processes/apps, disconnect any network connections, run asus update (i install/uninstall the app as needed from the cd), point it to the file, and its done within a minute :)

asus update also has an auto-update feature, but i'd rather do these things manually...

[Chewy]

from Windoze?
color me oldfashioned

[anonymez]

from windoze

[Chewy]

I do so many different ones, I use my standard above and beyond
any specs one, I developed over the last few years.

[anonymez]

you use dos?

[Chewy]

that's only one line of a full page of safeguards I take

line 25 tin foil hat

[anonymez]

old school chewy :P

[Chewy]

Well I have never paid more than $70 bucks for a mobo and that was
retail, my deluxe ones are usually a year old and refurb, never know
who or what has hosed them. A 200$ mobo after a year passes
and refurb is 50$. It gives time for bios maturity and there are so many noobs trying to build state of the art bleeding edge computers, the supply of refurb mobos is plentiful. Should have picked up 2 of the last 939 one,
it jumped up 20$ in price last month. I paid 35$ ea for my soyo dragon 2 delux socket a's.
I won't touch refurb deluxe vid cards anymore, too delicate, same with cpu's.

[Chewy]

you do have 2 serial drives in that beast?

[mill]

Thanks

[anonymez]

you do have 2 serial drives in that beast?

yup

[Chewy]

yup

wrong answer!

Let the games (benchs) begin!


haven't done any xvid in a year and a half, hope it's progressed since then.
divx4?

[anonymez]

xvid has progressed hugely, there is very little to improve now IMO, they have pretty much reached the limits of what mpeg-4 ASP can do ;)

i've used divx4 once, divx 5 many times (though not for several years), divx 6 just for testing.

[Chewy]

on a lengthy encode I guess its ok to use source and output same drive,
but never on a fastttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt! bench.
cpu has to be the only bottleneck

4 gigs in 6 minutes

[anonymez]

gimme the conditions, i'll bench and we'll see how fast it goes ;)

the only reason why i used the same drive was cause my 80GB was full :P

[Chewy]

let's make it simple and fast
no aec no da
70% compression(which I believe is a major glitch in shrink)
decrypted files from hard drive to hard drive
star wars 3 is fine (at least it's had time to get downunder)

slow boat from hollywood?

reauthor main movie only
2hr 20 min movie time

R4 R1 pal ntsc?

[anonymez]

lol i don't have star wars 3

i'm currently doing a very long xvid encode, so it will have to wait a while, though here are the dvd's i currently have on my hard disk:

man on fire
war of the worlds
training day
the longest yard

could we do one of those?

[Chewy]

none of them are long enough

we wait, no rush, look how long it took threading in shrink
to be analyzed

[mill]

wrong answer!

Let the games (benchs) begin!


haven't done any xvid in a year and a half, hope it's progressed since then.
divx4? Chewy im very new at this, and i guess im being nosey, but i was wandering if you could explain this ,if you find the time :)

[Chewy]

are you loaded for bear? or rabbits!

we were just talking about optimizing the video encoding/transcoding process.

kinda like kids street racing, how fast can you go?

won't be racing for pinks tho, there is a little knowledge to be gained.

to be fast at shrink you need 2 hard drives if you are working off
decrypted files on one. An optical drive slows the process down.

[mill]

'If you use dvdd to rip the movie to your hard drive, then use shrink to
compress/transcode(make it smaller), it's faster and much less error prone
if the source file(s) are on one hard drive and the output file(s) go on anotherhard drive, however ideally these drives do not share a cable.":thanks2: Thanks, this is what you were explaining to me before. It was xvid and divx4, that was throwing me off, thanks again.
<!-- / message -->

[Chewy]

xvid, divx, are clones of mpeg4. dvd's are based on mpeg2

this is time and cpu intensive(the conversion) from mpeg2 to xvid.
anony backs up his movies to this format, smaller with equal quality.

[mill]

interesting, thanks, about how much space does it save, and how much more time are we talking?

[Chewy]

try it and find out

[mill]

Good answer

[Chewy]

Long ago and far away I saw the first lord of the rings compressed to 2.1
gigs and could not tell it from the original dvd on my .22 dotpitch 17"
monitor somewhere around the time the dvd came out.
My computer or expertiese couldn't have done it back then.
Half the time I tried to make an svcd, my computer locked up.

[mill]

Yea i think i better leave that along for awhile i still have alot to learn with what im doing now, but it sounds like a person could save on the price of media.:)

[Chewy]

I don't look forward to an xvid bench, something about anything that takes
longer than 15-20 minutes for a single operation just doesn't seem right.

I really don't like ripping a movie to the hard drive without compressing it.
Straight rips in reauthor can be done in 8-10 minutes with shrink, another
8-9 minutes, a nasa burn on aaa media, mission accomplished.
Add 10 minutes tops for an intensive compression of larger main movie.

New protection has thrown a monkey wrench in this scenario.

With grade AAA SL media down
to 30/35c bulk in USA, cost is irrelevant.

[anonymez]

sounds like a person could save on the price of media.:)

rather on hard disk space. (though if it were several years ago, a person would most definitely save on price of media)

i back up all moveis onto dual layered dvd's. i also encode to xvid, at a bitrate of at least say 1800kbps. the xvid files go on my HTPC, with around 900GB hard disk space. i can fit anywhere between say 700-1000 movies on that one PC, without inserting any disks. as opposed to say ~210 dvd5's, and maybe 100-150 dvd9's. quality loss is minimal as long as you use the correct settings...

xvid is also the best codec (in terms of quality/playback performance) for HDTV encoding, gives excellent results ;)

[Chewy]

"i back up all moveis onto dual layered dvd's"

doesn't that get a little pricey?

maybe you meant(all the movies I burn)

[anonymez]

i only recently started buying dual layered media, so i've only done around 20-25...

i don't buy verbatim (their prices are outrageous!), plus i know the store owner, i get a nice discount ;)

[Chewy]

what brand and what burner/firmware
success rate?

[anonymez]

LG 4163B, latest firmware, TDK media, i think i only had 1 coaster (maybe 2)

[Chewy]

AN16? or 1.05?

ricohjpn?

[anonymez]

105

[Chewy]

after looking at the media codes in both firmwares all I can say,
robbing a line from the "Last Crusade", paraphrasing

YOU CHOSE WISELY

[mill]

Problem with Windows 64-bits - build 1218

"You have to copy the two quartz.dll from build 1069 to build 1218
this must be done in safe mode otherwise you can't delete and past quartz.dll from folder windows/syswow.

For those that don't find files, quartz.dl_ is in AMD64 folder of the WIN64 CD. Just extract it using expand.exe utility. Credit: gvgjazz (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=39602)

I expand (from win64 cd) AMD64\quartz.dl_ to syswow64\quartz.dll and (perhaps not needed) i386\wquartz.dll to system32\quartz.dll (no wquartz.dll file on c: before). Credit: Antidote (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=40086) " :) anonymex , sorry didnt mean to step on any body for cutting in but i was wandering if you had any problems installing shrink or dvdd and getting them to work with that 3800? Im just trying to prepare myself, i hope everthing goes smoothhhhhh
<!-- / message --><!-- edit note -->

[Chewy]

Mill, I don't think anony is using the windows xp 64 bit version.
Are you getting ready to install it?

[mill]

Thanks chewy ,i see now that statment only has to do with running the 64bit ver of windows and not the Athlon 64, i wasnt thunking

[anonymez]

i recommend you stick to 32bit windoows, unless ofcourse you are aboslutely sure every bit of hardware on your PC has 64-bit drivers, and are comfortable . (the only reason why i'm currently not 64bit is because of my tuner card)

[anonymez]

music to my ears: ATI catalyst drivers 5.12 has just been released, with nice performance boosts for dual-core/HT cpu's :D

Catalyst 5.12 improves a variety of CPU-bound performance cases when an ATI product is installed in conjunction with a dual-core or hyperthreading CPU. Performance gains include:

* 3DMark05 gains as much as 5.7%
* 3DMark03 gains as much as 3.3%
* 3DMark2001 SE gains up to 10%
* Aquamark 3 gains up to 16%
* Comanche 4 improves as much as 20%
* Far Cry gains as much as 25% on some product configurations
* Half-Life 2 performance improves as much as 8%
* Splinter Cell improves as much as 8% in certain parts of the game
* Tomb Raider Angel of Darkness runs as much as 10% faster
* Unreal Tournament 2004 framerates improve as much as 10%

[Chewy]

multithreading>>>>> hyperthreading

> = greater than

[anonymez]

HT sucks, and should not be compared to having a second physical core. the responsiveness given by HT is nice, but it is known to decrease performance a little in certain apps. it surely doesn't hurt to have it as a feature that can be enabled/disabled, but i wouldn't be caught dead buying another intel any time soon... (i have a 2.4GHz, runs way too hot for its performance/power consumption)

[anonymez]

just incase anybody else gets a dual-core cpu, uses cool'n'quiet, and experiences any odd problems with certain apps, especially games, which i know you will here's what you do:

make sure you have updated the bios & got latest athlon64 drivers

run the troublesome application, run task manager. right-click the process, click 'set affinity'. set it to only 1 core (your choice). that will usually solve the problem. (if the problem isn't solved, get the xp sp2 dual core hotfix, google it)

but now you have to set it manually each and every time you wish to run the program. this can be solved with the imagecfg affinity mask tool. it will apply the affinity automatically each time the program is started, and will eliminate the problem of some programs blocking the windows shell while running ;)

get it here http://www.robpol86.com/Files/imagecfg.exe

copy it into c:\windows\system32 , as well as c:\windows\system32\dllcache (to see the dllcache folder, go control panel-->folder options-->view-->untick hide protected operating system files)

start command prompt, and type the following, pointing it to the exe file:

imagecfg -a 0x1 c:\path\to\file.exe

where 0x1 = CPU0 (first logical/physical CPU)
0x2 = CPU1 (second CPU)
0x3 = CPU2 (third CPU)

close prompt, run the program :)

[Chewy]

You're no fun! Just disable it in bios, uninstall the software and ramp
up the fsb. By the time you burn it up, the 4200's will be cheap.

:enaughty: :rotfl: :rotfl:

[anonymez]

lol its not cool'n'quiet that actually causes the problem (its a very rare when it IS the cause, hence the very limited availability of the patch-- you have to contact microsoft to get it)

its that certain apps make their workload more or less 'jump' from one core to the next, introducing horrible stuttering (noticed this in several games, worst of which was farcry, which seemed to want to run at twice the regular framerate!)

the downsides of being on (almost) the cutting-edge of technology. *sigh*...

[Chewy]

ever try "bet on soldier", a 64 bit game written for AMD 64?

[anonymez]

nope, but just googled it, looks like they're giving it away with a purchase of an X2 in the US. says its optimized for athlon64, so is farcry ;)

farcry needs a patch, IIRC it provides higher-res textures, better-looking water, better lighting, etc. though its only for x64, and i'd imagine so is bet on soldier :sad:

i'd upgrade to x64, just not willing to buy another hdtv card yet, or even dual-boot

[Chewy]

bet on soldier will not run on 32 bit cpu's, fine with os tho
got my copy free with amd64/3000 venice