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Best value processor for HD video editing and photo processing?

dubcat

dubcat

dubcat

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Joined
5 Jan 2005
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753
Location
South East, UK
Hi - what is the best value processor for editing hi-def video from my panasonic camcorder and photographs in CS4/Lightroom? Is i7 overkill?

I'll be upgrading my VERY old AMD based PC. I'll need mostly new everything (I'm guessing I will only be able to salvage my case, hard drives, cables and fans to be honest) - i figured i would start by choosing a cpu. I tend to keep my stuff for a long time so don't want to use a CPU that will need upgrading in the near future - but also don't want to pay over the odds for something that is overpriced because it is so new and is perhaps more than what i need.

Hope that makes sense and that you can help -
Dub
 
Deffo going to need a budget to make some recommendations here. i7 is untouchable for any kind of encoding but carries a price tag to boot.

Give us your upper limit and lets see what can be built. :D
 
Thing is I don't really have a specific budget in mind. I'll pay what i need to do get the job done right (and with a certain amount of future proofing built in). However, I also don't want to pay for something that is overpriced due to it being new / novelty factor.

If i7 is really head and shoulders above the nearest competition i'll go for it. However, if i can get something almost as good for a LOT less then i'll choose that instead.

Dub
p.s just had twins so expect to be doing a lot of video editing over the next few years. My 5 year old system is just so far from handling these files it's not even funny.
 
for video editing I'd say get an i7 or wait till the mainstream varient comes out, are you planning to overclock, if no, I'd wait till the mainstream varient of i7 is released
 
Q6600/Q6700/Q8400 on Socket 775 are a very good "cheap option" for encoding. You can put together a good CPU/Mobo/Ram combo for around £250.

i7 920 would offer better perfomance but would cost an extra £150. The i7 will be approximately 20% faster than the socket 775 CPU's but does cost 60% more.
 
+1 for q6600

I assume by mainstream i7 he means i5, which is expected to be marginally quicker than quad cores and marginally slower than i7. As quad cores and i7 are really close in performance anyway, it's not a wildly exciting thing to wait for.
 
Q9550 for £175 sheets is a bargain and perfect for this, should do 3.4ghz on stock volts. There's an X48 gigabyte board going for 100 notes at the moment and 4gb DDR2 is cheap too.
 
Didnt see that until you mentioned it! :)

Really tempted to upgrade my Q6600 now, as it only does 3.2ghz with stupid amount of volts.
 
Lynnfield is to be expected september? I don't think intel like people call it the i5 because the core i7 is called the i7 because its the 7th generation or something? Intel havn't released the proper name yet. Although they might go with i5 cus thats what everyone thinks its called lol.
 
Maybe i'm being dumb here but isn't socket 775 end of life now? Does it make sense to base a new system on 775?
 
dubcat said:
Maybe i'm being dumb here but isn't socket 775 end of life now? Does it make sense to base a new system on 775?
Click to expand...

Depends if you're the sort of person who chops and changes CPU a lot constantly upgrading or if you're the type who buys a machine, maybe swaps in a graphics after a year but otherwise leaves it alone until something significantly better comes along anyway which more often than not is on a new socket by then.

For example, I bought S939 pretty much on release cos S754 was end of life but in the end by the time I even thought about upgrading the CPU AM2 had been out for ages anyway.

Now i'm getting a 775 machine cos ultimately I expect whether I went for 775, 1366 or AM3, by the time I came to upgrade the sockets will have been replaced anyway, even the 'new' ones.
 
kenai - you sound a lot like me in terms of your upgrade habits. I am definitely someone who tends to go for significant upgrades rather than step by step ones. So with this in mind the Q9550 makes sense. The only thing confusing me is that I have read in another thread that the i7 is MUCH faster for video encoding, something I will be doing plenty of when editing those HD video files...
 
dubcat said:
kenai - you sound a lot like me in terms of your upgrade habits. I am definitely someone who tends to go for significant upgrades rather than step by step ones. So with this in mind the Q9550 makes sense. The only thing confusing me is that I have read in another thread that the i7 is MUCH faster for video encoding, something I will be doing plenty of when editing those HD video files...
Click to expand...

I thought about i7 as I do a lot of video encoding too but the price difference is too much and the increase in speed isn't enough to warrant that......but that's because I already had a 775 board.

q9550 + P43 + 4gb PC2-8500 = £305
i7 920 + X58 + 6gb PC3-16000 = £480

I don't think the i7 is £180 faster.
 
hmm that price difference may be better spent on an SSD rather than a slightly faster cpu and more new school mobo...
 
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