OK, we just put together a computer based on the
Pentium II-400 CPU and compared its rendering speed
with our K6-233 based computer when rendering a
2.25 second DV-AVI clip (with "color balance" and
"brightness and contrast" filters applied to all,
and a "cross dissolve" transition applied to about
2/3 the time) in Premiere (all settings the same).
MUCH to my surprise, the K6-233 computer took
87 seconds, and the P-II 400 computer took 71
seconds to render the same Premier file (we did
it twice with both computers, once with "preview",
then once with "make movie" [dumping the temporary
files first], with the same results). We expected
roughly a doubling in the speed of rendering in
Premiere 4.2, but got only about 20% improvement
in speed. (Running Wintune 98, we got the expected
roughly doubled speed...) The question is,
"Wuh hap-pin?" ;-) (We were about to build a
Celeron A 300 [overclocked to 450...] based mini-DV
editing computer, but this makes us think it isn't
worth it, if the rendering speed improvement is
on the order of only 20-25% instead of 100%...)
Have we missed something?

The computers:
- Intel P-II 400
- Asus P2B MB
- 64 megs PC-100 SD-RAM
- Matrox Millennium G200 AGP 8-meg VC
- Win 98
- IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA HD

- AMD K6-233 CPU
- Abit AX5 MB
- 96 megs EDO RAM (64 megs cacheable with the
Intel 430 TX MB chipset)
- PCI ATI Xpert 98 8-meg VC
- Win 98
- IBM Deskstar 8 UDMA HD (plus a 2940 UW SCSI
card and two 9-gig IBM SCSI HD's, which were
not used for the test...

Thanks for any advice!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^


On Wed, 09 Dec 1998 17:35:38 GMT, d_ruether@hotmail.com (Neuman-Ruether) wrote:

>OK, we just put together a computer based on the
>Pentium II-400 CPU and compared its rendering speed
>with our K6-233 based computer when rendering a
>2.25 second DV-AVI clip (with "color balance" and
>"brightness and contrast" filters applied to all,
>and a "cross dissolve" transition applied to about
>2/3 the time) in Premiere (all settings the same).
>MUCH to my surprise, the K6-233 computer took
>87 seconds, and the P-II 400 computer took 71
>seconds to render the same Premier file (we did
>it twice with both computers, once with "preview",
>then once with "make movie" [dumping the temporary
>files first], with the same results). We expected
>roughly a doubling in the speed of rendering in
>Premiere 4.2, but got only about 20% improvement
>in speed. [.....]

Ooooops! We just figured it out...
We had the new DV-Soft codec (in DPS Spark ver.2
software) on the K6-233 computer, the old version
of the codec on the P-II 400. When the codec was
updated, the new P-II 400 rendering time was 43
seconds, giving us the 100% improvement in
rendering speed. Guess we will order that 300A
Celeron (to overclock) after all.....;-)