CPU recommendations for a lot of video conversions

pparks1 said:

If he wants to significantly improve his performance, it won't happen on a sub $800 laptop. I was making a suggestion based on improving his performance dramatically.

not even remotely true as i said i was doing what he's doing on a core2duo e8400 system, so yes on a "SUB" 800 i7 system he can greatly increase his performance.

xXWhackerXx said:

not even remotely true as i said i was doing what he's doing on a core2duo e8400 system, so yes on a "SUB" 800 i7 system he can greatly increase his performance.

He is on a core i5 already and its taking much longer than he wants. Clearly, you can process on lower end cpus, or older e8400s like you have, but if he wants it to run dramatically faster, he needs a good size jump. Since he was considering a dual xeon mobo, he's looking for a significant processing improvement.

First and foremost, getting off a mobile cpu and mobo will provide more processing performance. I would always use a desktop over a laptop for this type of task if i could.

pparks1 said:

Well considering his i5 was in a laptop, I think you can pretty much ascertain that it's not going to upgrade to an I7.

@pparks1

Thanks - yes a laptop isn't the best tool for that job but that was the fastest processor I had at that moment.

I decided to upgrade one of my Micro proliant HP Gen 8 servers to XEON - it's quite easy to to change the CPU on one of these - the XEON is compatible with the mobo --does the job perfectly -- flies along with conversions

Got Intel Xeon E3 V2 Family - E3-1220LV2. Really good and does Hyper threading too. Can also run a whole slew more VM's on it concurrently compared with the original celeron I had in when I bought the server and fortunately my PSU in the original box was big enough (100 W) as I foresaw the possible need to replace the processor. I didn't need a dual XEON capable Mobo -- single XEON was fast enough and the cheapest option as it could be installed in my existing gear. ( About 30 Mins work and I didn't even need an OS update --using CENTOS 7.2 on that box as Host OS).

Love the small footprint of those servers - Micro cube size - there isn't a lot of upgrading you can do but the small footprint makes them ideal for NAS boxes / Lab servers / test rigs etc.

Now converts 3X 4 GB m2ts HD video (1920 X 1080) concurrently to MP4/MKV in around 5 mins instead 0f 4 hours on the laptop where I could only do 1 at a time !!!! .

I'm using the paid version of wondershare Ultimate AVS converter for the conversion running on a W10 Virtual machine. -- Handbrake would work on the native Linux box but it's slower and a bit more convoluted to use. The graphics card is a Matrox one rather than the native fairly limited VGA one on the mobo. The Matrox one has proper HDMI out and optical sound.

Cheers
jimbo

jimbo45 said:

Hi there
anybody got any ideas on what's a good CPU to use for a whole slew of Video conversions --essentially converting losslessly from m2ts to mp4 / mkv or with slight loss to HEVC H265.

Poor old laptop with i5 cpu running jobs overnight isn't the right tool for this job --my NAS server also doesn't have a very powerful CPU (not needed for things like file share / media streaming).

I was thinking of looking at an older dual XEON Mobo (if I can find one) as I think the multi-threading is proibably better than just the number of cores - but I'm open to suggestion here. Bog standard i7 probably won't be significantly be better than the i5 for this job unless it has a load more cores as well as hyper threading.

Thanks guys - in advance.

I'm quite OK at building kit --it's the CPU I'm basically interested in here -- the graphics card per se doesn't have to be special as it's not going to be a gaming rig.

Cheers
jimbo

what about your HD? many times the ultimate problem is the cpu waiting for data (a faster cpu can help but probably not as much as fast stream of data)
The best solution would be working with two different drives, one for the os an one for the data to be processed,
much better if they are SSD.
Also GPU acceleration if supported by your tools (or parallel processing in general be it CPU or GPU based).

roy111 said:

what about your HD? many times the ultimate problem is the cpu waiting for data (a faster cpu can help but probably not as much as fast stream of data)
The best solution would be working with two different drives, one for the os an one for the data to be processed,
much better if they are SSD.
Also GPU acceleration if supported by your tools (or parallel processing in general be it CPU or GPU based).

Hi there

@roy111

On server got decent 8TB HDD in RAID 0 array (2 X 4TB HDD's) no bottleneck there. The process is more CPU bound than I/O bound so an SSD wouldn't speed anything up dramatically.

SSD's are brilliant but they are only useful for heavily I/O bound processes such as say Photoshop scratch areas, paging, OS kernel, Indexes for Data bases etc. For CPU bound stuff it really doesn't matter. The OS itself is usually highly I/O bound and putting the OS on an SSD will always pay dividends.

For simply converting the multi-media - it's not "re-rendering it" in the classic sense - it's simply doing a re-encode so the GPU is irrelevant here -- in fact you could decode / convert video from one format to another one without needing a graphics card at all --- you'd need graphics of course to display or edit the video but otherwise it's just a software algorithm like say decrypting code etc.

Cheers
jimbo

well it seems you have more than the "average laptop" so my suggestion is almost irrelevant :)
not sure that a GPU with CUDA wont help in general but given that your work flow has become 5 min (vs 4 h)
it may also be irrelevant.

All the best!