best cpu for video editing

Ish · 2 Jan 2010 at 11:19

Hi

What's the best cpu I can buy for AVCHD HD video editing with Adobe Premiere CS4 with a budget of:-

1) up to £150 inc vat
2) up to £200 inc vat

Thanks

Frozennova · 2 Jan 2010 at 17:01

Is that budget just for a CPU? Do you have a motherboard already or will you be building a complete system based on proccessor choice?

Badas · 2 Jan 2010 at 18:13

stretch to £210 and get the I7 920 for video editing and encoding

for £150 it would have to be the I5 750

if i had the money i would go for I7 but whats your current setup?

Ish · 2 Jan 2010 at 18:48

I have everything apart from cpu/mobo/memory.

The budget I mentioned is just for the cpu.

Badas · 2 Jan 2010 at 18:51

what PSU and GPU u got?

Showboat · 2 Jan 2010 at 19:09

i7 for video encoding, plenty of reviews / benchmarks out there.

Ish · 2 Jan 2010 at 22:10

ok, i've managed to extend my budget to get the i7.

PSU is a 600 watt decent one.

GPU is something I forgot about. What do you recommend?

LEUVEN · 3 Jan 2010 at 03:15

Good choice on the i7 as encoding is one area where it really starts to stretch its legs. :cool:

droyden · 3 Jan 2010 at 12:15

Does CS4 offload to the GPU yet? Although its not that much of a concern if you have an i7.

Dangerous · 3 Jan 2010 at 12:25

droyden said:
Does CS4 offload to the GPU yet? Although its not that much of a concern if you have an i7.

Not without addins

CS5 does when its out in April.

So thats why I'm not upgrading until then.

R B Customs · 3 Jan 2010 at 12:55

there are other ways to improve an editing rig, RAID 0 for one. speed helps with encoding or 'rendering' sure, but that's usually the last thing you do and you never watch it rendering!

editing video takes it;s toll on the system in many ways, not just encoding / rendering. what are the specs of the rest of the system ?

Ish · 3 Jan 2010 at 16:11

The spec is:-

i7 920
asus P6T SE mobo
6GB DD3 tri channel crucial ballistix ram
antec 650w psu
samsung sata 2 hd for o/s - 160gb
samsung sata 2 hd for video - 1tb
GT 240 gfx card

o/s to be decided on but probbaly win7 64 bit

'Wes · 3 Jan 2010 at 16:54

Get windows 7 and your done.

Ish · 3 Jan 2010 at 19:55

Thanks for the help everyone. It's ordered!

LEUVEN · 3 Jan 2010 at 20:08

Out of interest what CPU was you using for editing before?

Ish · 3 Jan 2010 at 22:34

It was an Athlon X2 of some sort with 4gb ram. While it dealt with sd video fine it struggles badly with hd avchd video.

Dangerous · 3 Jan 2010 at 22:48

Ish said:
It was an Athlon X2 of some sort with 4gb ram. While it dealt with sd video fine it struggles badly with hd avchd video.

Have a look at Cineform Neo Scene - $129 and it will help with slower PCs

Badas · 4 Jan 2010 at 11:51

what about an after market cooer :S are you not overclocking it? itl be a lot faster if you do and its easy to do apparently on an I7

SMAndy · 5 Jan 2010 at 09:05

The i7 does excel at video editing/encoding. It's all about the Hyperthreading...

Video encoding tries to speed it up as far as i know, by having multiple threads, so the more threads you can process, the faster it'll go. There's also less use of L2/3 Cache for encoding, so it works really well. This works the opposite in gaming, as while there are still lots of threads, they're optimised by game software to be run in serial - as a single core cpu would, and each thread needs a lot of L2/L3 cache. The cpu tries to run all of them at the same time, which is far more cache required than any cpu currently out, so it clogs it up.

Get an i7 for encoding, and an i5 for gaming. If you do a bit of both, the i5 gets you more gaming performance, without losing too much on the encoding side.