P3-800 vs Celeron 1.4 --> video encoding time

Hi,

I'm currently running a P3-800 Slot1 100FSB CPU on a Gigabyte BX2000
motherboard/Win2K with 1GB RAM.

For most of my purposes, the performance is fine, except that average time
to encode a 700MB DivX file takes 5-6 hours (ATI Radeon 7000 32MB video
card).

Does anyone know if I'd gain much performance in terms of video encoding
time by upgrading to a Celeron 1.4GHz CPU (using a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T Rev.2
Slot 1 convertor)?

The article below suggests the Celeron 1.4 should be better than the P3-800,
but I'd like to hear other opinions beforehand.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...omparison_tabl
e


The Celeron 1.4 I'd be getting is also 100FSB with 256KB L2 cache; my P3-800
is Coppermine with 100FSB and 256KB L2 cache.

So to improve video encoding time, the Celeron should be an easy "yes"?

or would I better off upgrading the ATI 7000 32MB video card to an ATI
Radeon AIW 8500DV 64MB?


TIA for any input,

JT

"PS" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm currently running a P3-800 Slot1 100FSB CPU on a Gigabyte BX2000
motherboard/Win2K with 1GB RAM.

For most of my purposes, the performance is fine, except that average time
to encode a 700MB DivX file takes 5-6 hours (ATI Radeon 7000 32MB video
card).

Does anyone know if I'd gain much performance in terms of video encoding
time by upgrading to a Celeron 1.4GHz CPU (using a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T
Rev.2
Slot 1 convertor)?

The article below suggests the Celeron 1.4 should be better than the
P3-800,
but I'd like to hear other opinions beforehand.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...omparison_tabl
e


The Celeron 1.4 I'd be getting is also 100FSB with 256KB L2 cache; my
P3-800
is Coppermine with 100FSB and 256KB L2 cache.

So to improve video encoding time, the Celeron should be an easy "yes"?

or would I better off upgrading the ATI 7000 32MB video card to an ATI
Radeon AIW 8500DV 64MB?

I'd say that the Celeron would be about 50% quicker. Those Tualatin CPUs are
great.

I'm not sure what the effect of the video card swap would be.
--
~misfit~



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"~misfit~" wrote in message
...

"PS" wrote in message
...
Hi,

I'm currently running a P3-800 Slot1 100FSB CPU on a Gigabyte BX2000
motherboard/Win2K with 1GB RAM.

For most of my purposes, the performance is fine, except that average
time
to encode a 700MB DivX file takes 5-6 hours (ATI Radeon 7000 32MB video
card).

Does anyone know if I'd gain much performance in terms of video encoding
time by upgrading to a Celeron 1.4GHz CPU (using a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T
Rev.2
Slot 1 convertor)?

The article below suggests the Celeron 1.4 should be better than the
P3-800,
but I'd like to hear other opinions beforehand.


http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...omparison_tabl
e


The Celeron 1.4 I'd be getting is also 100FSB with 256KB L2 cache; my
P3-800
is Coppermine with 100FSB and 256KB L2 cache.

So to improve video encoding time, the Celeron should be an easy "yes"?

or would I better off upgrading the ATI 7000 32MB video card to an ATI
Radeon AIW 8500DV 64MB?


I'd say that the Celeron would be about 50% quicker. Those Tualatin CPUs
are
great.


Do you mean I could expect encoding times of around 3 hours for a 700MB DivX
file by upgrading to the Cel1.4?

That sounds great, and since I haven't used any systems with Tualatin CPUs,
I appreciate any comments specific to video encoding (and capture).

I recall hearing that the older Celerons were supposed to be "quicker" too
than P3's for short tasks, but didn't compare well to P3's for longer,
computation-intensive work. I assume the encoding process is quite CPU
intensive (mine runs 100% usage while encoding, while 10-20% usage when
doing anything else).

The awful performance (for anything) of my old 66FSB Celeron 500 system with
512MB RAM made me wary of anything bearing the "Celeron" tag.


I'm not sure what the effect of the video card swap would be.
--
~misfit~


I just mentioned this since I plan to do a bit of video capture with the ATI
8500DV card. If the Cel1.4 outperforms the P3-800 in video encoding, it
should be at least equal or better than the P3-800 for video capture (from a
VCR), right?

--
My P3-800 is actually running at 896MHz with a 112FSB speed. Since the
Cel1.3 is about 25% cheaper than the Cel1.4 locally here, I'm thinking of
saving a few $$ and bumping up the FSB with a Cel1.3 Anyone have
comments/experience with this CPU? (my motherboard has fixed FSBs of 100,
112, and 133)


TIA,

JT

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 09:53:44 -0400, "PS" wrote:



Do you mean I could expect encoding times of around 3 hours for a 700MB DivX
file by upgrading to the Cel1.4?

It's pretty hard to nail down a number since part of the time may be
spent reading and writing the source & destination files, and the main
system memory is a constant 100MHz. Providing you have fairly quick
HDDs it should make a noticable difference, but for best performance
you really should swap out the videocard instead, as the upgradeware
adpaters are ridiculously expensive. If you really want to keep the
motherboard, and IF the motherboard supports vCore down to 1.5V, you
might be able to use one of these adapters instead:
http://66.216.68.88/details.htm?productid=3A-1202
Their homepage: www.tigersurplus.com


That sounds great, and since I haven't used any systems with Tualatin CPUs,
I appreciate any comments specific to video encoding (and capture).

There's nothing new to consider, the Tualatin supports same
optimizations, etc, as the Coppermine, is just faster. Just install
the new CPU, make sure the system is stable, and proceed as before.


I recall hearing that the older Celerons were supposed to be "quicker" too
than P3's for short tasks, but didn't compare well to P3's for longer,
computation-intensive work. I assume the encoding process is quite CPU
intensive (mine runs 100% usage while encoding, while 10-20% usage when
doing anything else).

The older Celerons were sometimes quicker when compared to the Katmai
P3 which had separate, larger cache chips that ran slower on a
back-side bus. As soon as the P3 moved to FCPGA socket 370 package it
was again faster at everything. Since the Tualatin Celeron has same
amount of L2 cache as the P3 Coppermine, it could be considered very
similar in performance, with the only thing distinguishing it as a
Celeron being that it still uses the 100MHz FSB, while P3 moved up to
133MHz.

Any CPU will run at 100% while encoding video so long as the hard
drive and busses can feed data fast enough, which they usually can...
it's a linear job, no matter how fast the CPU is, it just gets the job
done sooner.


The awful performance (for anything) of my old 66FSB Celeron 500 system with
512MB RAM made me wary of anything bearing the "Celeron" tag.

There are a lot of factors though. If that system didn't have new
HDD, an inefficient motherboard chipset, and maybe even onboard video,
it's crippled before even considering the CPU. In most instances a
Celeron 500 was about the same performance as a PII-450, but certain
apps that could make good use of the P2 larger L2 cache, (like Seti)
ran much faster on a P2.



I'm not sure what the effect of the video card swap would be.

No benefit... Only a pro-grade card with hardware mpeg compression
would make significant difference for cpu load during capture.



I just mentioned this since I plan to do a bit of video capture with the ATI
8500DV card. If the Cel1.4 outperforms the P3-800 in video encoding, it
should be at least equal or better than the P3-800 for video capture (from a
VCR), right?

"Equal or better" is relative. You set the codec, capture size,
framerate, bitrate, etc, yourself (or are forced to use whatever is
offered per the capture program), and either the CPU can keep up or it
can't. If the CPU can keep up then there is zero benefit to a faster
CPU, but if it can't keep up... So to a certain extent a faster CPU
allows capturing higher-quality video if you aren't able to "max out"
the capture quality with the P3 you have, which I would guess is just
about borderline for... might barely be able to capture to full-res
mpeg but again depends on the rest of the system.


Dave

On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 15:58:29 GMT, kony wrote:

snip

but for best performance
you really should swap out the videocard instead, as the upgradeware
adpaters are ridiculously expensive. If you really want to keep the
motherboard,


Oops, I meant,

.... but for best performance you really should swap out the
MOTHERBOARD instead,

(then buy CPU faster than a Celeron 1.4)



Dave

"kony" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 09:53:44 -0400, "PS" wrote:



Do you mean I could expect encoding times of around 3 hours for a 700MB
DivX
file by upgrading to the Cel1.4?

It's pretty hard to nail down a number since part of the time may be
spent reading and writing the source & destination files, and the main
system memory is a constant 100MHz. Providing you have fairly quick
HDDs it should make a noticable difference, but for best performance
you really should swap out the videocard instead, as the upgradeware
adpaters are ridiculously expensive. If you really want to keep the
motherboard, and IF the motherboard supports vCore down to 1.5V, you
might be able to use one of these adapters instead:
http://66.216.68.88/details.htm?productid=3A-1202
Their homepage: www.tigersurplus.com

Thanks for the link. My motherboard is Slot 1, so that adapter might not be
an option for me. (not sure how stable is a FCPGA-to-FCPGA2 adapter running
on a Slot1-to-FCPGA Slotket?) But they've got some other good deals for
sure.

My OS is running on 2x40GB Maxtor 5400 rpm RAID 1 array, but my
video/data/capture drives are a WD80GB-8MB and a WD120GB-8MB. So with the
fairly decent WD HDs, I hope to see some improvement with the new CPU during
encoding.

I've thought long and hard about getting the Cel1.4+Powerleap for $150 CDN,
versus an AthlonXP 2000+ and an ECS or Asus mainboard for about the same
price. The hassle of physically changing the mainboards (and swapping
in/out all the peripherals), reinstalling the OS/apps/drivers/etc., and
buying new DDR RAM makes the Cel1.4 better than the AthlonXP option for me;
I guess I'm the lazy/cheap consumer that the PowerLeap is exactly targeted
at... ; ) Also, video encoding/capture is just a small
side-hobby/diversion for me. If I was doing video stuff for real work
purposes, I'd definitely take your advice and do a mainboard upgrade (or get
a system designed for this type of work).



That sounds great, and since I haven't used any systems with Tualatin
CPUs,
I appreciate any comments specific to video encoding (and capture).

There's nothing new to consider, the Tualatin supports same
optimizations, etc, as the Coppermine, is just faster. Just install
the new CPU, make sure the system is stable, and proceed as before.

Sounds good. I expect the upgrade to take no more than 30 minutes start to
finish. (vs. 1-2 full days for a mainboard switch and OS/apps reinstall)


I recall hearing that the older Celerons were supposed to be "quicker"
too
than P3's for short tasks, but didn't compare well to P3's for longer,
computation-intensive work. I assume the encoding process is quite CPU
intensive (mine runs 100% usage while encoding, while 10-20% usage when
doing anything else).

The older Celerons were sometimes quicker when compared to the Katmai
P3 which had separate, larger cache chips that ran slower on a
back-side bus. As soon as the P3 moved to FCPGA socket 370 package it
was again faster at everything. Since the Tualatin Celeron has same
amount of L2 cache as the P3 Coppermine, it could be considered very
similar in performance, with the only thing distinguishing it as a
Celeron being that it still uses the 100MHz FSB, while P3 moved up to
133MHz.

Any CPU will run at 100% while encoding video so long as the hard
drive and busses can feed data fast enough, which they usually can...
it's a linear job, no matter how fast the CPU is, it just gets the job
done sooner.

Interesting, I was never 100% clear on the exact differences between the
various Celerons and P3's. I wasn't able to get my system stable at 133FSB,
but that may have been more an issue with the CPU than the mainboard.
Hopefully I can bump up the Celeron beyond 100FSB?




The awful performance (for anything) of my old 66FSB Celeron 500 system
with
512MB RAM made me wary of anything bearing the "Celeron" tag.

There are a lot of factors though. If that system didn't have new
HDD, an inefficient motherboard chipset, and maybe even onboard video,
it's crippled before even considering the CPU. In most instances a
Celeron 500 was about the same performance as a PII-450, but certain
apps that could make good use of the P2 larger L2 cache, (like Seti)
ran much faster on a P2.



I'm not sure what the effect of the video card swap would be.

No benefit... Only a pro-grade card with hardware mpeg compression
would make significant difference for cpu load during capture.

Thanks for the info here. I wasn't sure whether to upgrade the CPU first or
the video card first. The Radeon 8500DV will have to wait for the moment.




I just mentioned this since I plan to do a bit of video capture with the
ATI
8500DV card. If the Cel1.4 outperforms the P3-800 in video encoding, it
should be at least equal or better than the P3-800 for video capture
(from a
VCR), right?

"Equal or better" is relative. You set the codec, capture size,
framerate, bitrate, etc, yourself (or are forced to use whatever is
offered per the capture program), and either the CPU can keep up or it
can't. If the CPU can keep up then there is zero benefit to a faster
CPU, but if it can't keep up... So to a certain extent a faster CPU
allows capturing higher-quality video if you aren't able to "max out"
the capture quality with the P3 you have, which I would guess is just
about borderline for... might barely be able to capture to full-res
mpeg but again depends on the rest of the system.


Dave


thanks again for all comments, it's very helpful to me!

JT

hey, thanks for the upgradeware.com link.

I checked out their Canadian resellers, and there's one just 20 minutes from
my location here in Montreal.

regards,

JT


"Spajky" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 01:08:08 -0400, "PS" wrote:

I'm currently running a P3-800 Slot1 100FSB CPU on a Gigabyte BX2000
motherboard/Win2K with 1GB RAM.

Does anyone know if I'd gain much performance in terms of video encoding
time by upgrading to a Celeron 1.4GHz CPU (using a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T
Rev.2
Slot 1 convertor)?

Get the lowest Tualatin Celeron & Slot-T from upgradeware.com & OC it
till it goes if you have PC133 Ram; is gonna be cheaper & faster !
No need to upgrade your videocard! Hope your MoBo supports Vcore
adjustments. a 300W PSU recommended !

-- Regards, SPAJKY
& visit - http://www.spajky.iscyber.com
Celly-III OC-ed,"Tualatin on BX-Slot1-MoBo!"
E-mail AntiSpam: remove ##

"kony" wrote in message
...
I'm not sure what the effect of the video card swap would be.

No benefit... Only a pro-grade card with hardware mpeg compression
would make significant difference for cpu load during capture.

That's what I thought.
--
~misfit~



---
Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free.
Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com).
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On Sat, 20 Sep 2003 18:50:55 -0400, "PS" wrote:



Thanks for the link. My motherboard is Slot 1, so that adapter might not be
an option for me. (not sure how stable is a FCPGA-to-FCPGA2 adapter running
on a Slot1-to-FCPGA Slotket?) But they've got some other good deals for
sure.

I have in the past used a Tualatin with that adapter and a slotket,
but it wasn't stable as far overclocked as on a Tualatin-supportive
motherboard without any adapter. Whether that was the slotket or the
motherboard I don't know, but the Tualatin was a 1.1GHz which would
barely go past 1.2GHz with both adapters but otherwise overclocked to
1.5Ghz with no adapters. Eevn if you're not overclocking, you're
still facing a similar situation when choosing a 1.4GHz default speed,
though I don't recall what the default voltage is on the 1.4GHz,
perhaps it's no higher that the lower speed Tualatins, which would
keep power usage lower than my overclocking did.

Many boards that old weren't designed to supply the amps for an
upper-speed Tualatin CPU. Some users upgraded their boards anyway and
found they needed to attach small heatsinks to the voltage regulators.
"Usually" the regulators have thermal shutoff protection built-in, so
the system would turn off, but I'm not so sure they have the ability
to shut down *many* times before they're damaged. I'm not trying to
discourage use of a Tualatin, but it's something to consider. In that
regard the slotket adapters with built-on power supply (uses system
power supply lead to get power for CPU) are a better choice, but those
adapters are often near as expensive as a new Tualatin-supportive
motherboard these days, and the motherboard would offer more modern
features, have good lifespan (presumably) compared to a board already
several years old.


My OS is running on 2x40GB Maxtor 5400 rpm RAID 1 array, but my
video/data/capture drives are a WD80GB-8MB and a WD120GB-8MB. So with the
fairly decent WD HDs, I hope to see some improvement with the new CPU during
encoding.

Yes, they should be fast enough to feed the CPU, your primary
bottleneck should be memory and FSB speed then.


I've thought long and hard about getting the Cel1.4+Powerleap for $150 CDN,
versus an AthlonXP 2000+ and an ECS or Asus mainboard for about the same
price. The hassle of physically changing the mainboards (and swapping
in/out all the peripherals), reinstalling the OS/apps/drivers/etc., and
buying new DDR RAM makes the Cel1.4 better than the AthlonXP option for me;
I guess I'm the lazy/cheap consumer that the PowerLeap is exactly targeted
at... ; ) Also, video encoding/capture is just a small
side-hobby/diversion for me. If I was doing video stuff for real work
purposes, I'd definitely take your advice and do a mainboard upgrade (or get
a system designed for this type of work).

It's not a bad upgrade but you'd likely want to upgrade again, sooner.
At least it's pretty easy to have a quiet running system with a
Tualatin CPU, provided you don't end up with one of those high-RPM
fans that gets whiney in a few months time.


Sounds good. I expect the upgrade to take no more than 30 minutes start to
finish. (vs. 1-2 full days for a mainboard switch and OS/apps reinstall)

Not even that long, maybe 2 minutes to make sure the adapter's jumpers
are set right (if there are any, I don't remember).


Interesting, I was never 100% clear on the exact differences between the
various Celerons and P3's. I wasn't able to get my system stable at 133FSB,
but that may have been more an issue with the CPU than the mainboard.
Hopefully I can bump up the Celeron beyond 100FSB?

If that's what you want to do, don't buy the 1.4GHz version, as the
average overclock for a Tualatin is somwhere around ~1550MHz, meaning
the highest performance (especially during video encoding which
benefits greatly from memory speed increase) would be seen from buying
a 1.0 or 1.1GHz and overclocking that to 133MHz FSB & snchronous
memory bus. "Most" 1.1GHz parts I've seen will run stabily at 1.5GHz
(actually 1467MHz) @ 1.65V, so you'd need the ability to raise the
core voltage, IF the slotket adapter allows it. Of course there's
better oddds of hitting 133Mhz FSB with the 1.0GHz default speed CPU,
and IF your motherboard and memory can run stabily even higher,
140-150MHz is the sweet spot. Another poster, "SPAJKY" is the
resident expert on Tualatins, you might visit the 'site he has linked
in his sig.

On the other hand, having 1GB of memory may be working against your
hitting very high memory bus speeds, as is usually the case. I would
be guessing that 133MHz memory bus would be stable, but not certain of
it with multiple large memory modules. Many boards also offer a
124MHz FSB speed, which is the lowest setting that drops the FSB
speed. Come to think of it your board is a BX chipset, which isn't
even spec'd to run at 133MHz FSB, so perhaps the 1.4GHz CPU IS the
best choice, only overclocking as far as the BX chipset will allow may
not hit the CPU's ceiling speed anyway.



Dave

PS wrote:

Hi,

I'm currently running a P3-800 Slot1 100FSB CPU on a Gigabyte BX2000
motherboard/Win2K with 1GB RAM.

For most of my purposes, the performance is fine, except that average time
to encode a 700MB DivX file takes 5-6 hours (ATI Radeon 7000 32MB video
card).

Does anyone know if I'd gain much performance in terms of video encoding
time by upgrading to a Celeron 1.4GHz CPU (using a PowerLeap PL-iP3/T
Rev.2 Slot 1 convertor)?

The article below suggests the Celeron 1.4 should be better than the
P3-800, but I'd like to hear other opinions beforehand.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/200...omparison_tabl
e


The Celeron 1.4 I'd be getting is also 100FSB with 256KB L2 cache; my
P3-800 is Coppermine with 100FSB and 256KB L2 cache.

So to improve video encoding time, the Celeron should be an easy "yes"?

or would I better off upgrading the ATI 7000 32MB video card to an ATI
Radeon AIW 8500DV 64MB?



Any increase in clock speed is going to help. Should be about a 30%
inprovement. First I'd get some PC133 ram and try running the FSB on that
P3 at 133 if the board allows this setting. Faster ram/fsb -and- a faster
chip will do more than just a faster chip will.

The video card has nothing to do with this..

--

Stacey