Date: Fri, 8 Jul 2005 10:17:45 +0100 From: Steve Roome <steve@pepcross.com> To: Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog@FreeBSD.org> Cc: multimedia@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Best processor for multimedia? Message-ID: <20050708091745.GA2544@bibipentium.lonres.com> In-Reply-To: <20050708053845.GL19707@wantadilla.lemis.com> References: <20050708053845.GL19707@wantadilla.lemis.com>
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On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 03:08:45PM +0930, Greg 'groggy' Lehey wrote: > Intel Celeron D 335 - 2.8GHz CPCELD335 $134.00 > AMD Sempron 3100+ Box Soc754 CPAS3100 $157.00 > AMD Athlon XP 3000+ BOX BARTON CPAXPB3000 $184.00 > Intel P4 3.40GHz PRESCOTT 1MB CPP43.40HT-PS $409.00 > Intel P4-660 (3.6GHz)LGA775pin CPP4-660 $841.00 My attempts to solve slow choppy movies (and in my case games) went like this: (I hope this is helpful in some way.) Last week I had an Athlon 2600+, 512MB (DDR 400 running at 333) with a radeon 9600. Movies were occasionaly slow, I had no 3D support and not much in the way of hardware 2d acceleration by the feel of it. I figured that a 400MHz FSB Athlon 3200+ would be the best bet partly by looking at this image: http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20041221/images/cpu_table_amd_big.gif and partly because if you have a socket A that will take it then it's the obvious choice. Perhaps the better change would be to get a newer graphics card, the 6600GT cards are amazingly good value now, costing about UK =A3100 (about Aus$235 ?) and for me this has made all the difference as sadly the CPU I ordered turned out to be a Barton core but with the FSB now locked down to 333. If you can still find a 400MHz one that might help a bit if you have RAM and motherboard to match. (I'm sending this CPU back and holding out for the one I actually ordered!) However, as others said, something like nice(1) might be a better option! On the whole though, I've found that the -vo settings for mplayer have been more important than any other changes. Also, I'm occasionaly hacking together a program that spends most of it's time in a CPU intensive loop or blitting xshmimages to screen, I've found huge 2D speed improvements with the new graphics card (100fps -> 180fps). This is on a process that uses 100% CPU if it can - so clearly the 2D speed has improved dramatically here. I can now play mpegs without chopiness and even silly games: as surprisinly I appear to have a box running -current that now plays unreal tournament 2004 well enough to stop me having to reboot to windows for a lunchtime fragfest! I'm still using the XP2600+ though so I guess that wasn't my problem after all. Steve Roome > That's a pretty big price range. What's important for multimedia? My > understanding is that software MPEG processing needs a lot of CPU, and > the processors here are roughly comparable (OK, the P4s may be > somewhat faster). But what about the other differences? How > important is cache? If I take the AMD offerings, am I better off with > the (cheaper) Sempron with a slightly faster clock, or with the Athlon > XP with more cache? How does the Celeron compare with either? Also, > is it worth paying the significantly higher prices for the P4? >=20 > Greg > -- > The virus contained in this message was detected by LEMIS anti-virus. > For further details see http://www.lemis.com/grog/lemis-virus.html >=20 > Finger grog@FreeBSD.org for PGP public key. > See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
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