Dual Core or Dual Xeon

Anyone used the Dual Core CPUs yet for video work?

As the prices of the Dual cores come down I'm interested to see if they could be a bit better then my single CPU for video work.

The benchmarks I have seen so far show that a single processor with HT will process .wmv files as fast as a dual core. But I have also seen that Vegas Video supports dual core and that could make life easier.

The best system still is a dual xeon and we run those in a seperate area for video encoding (www.drmpackager.com) with the digial rapids (www.digital-rapids.com) cards. They run great but they are LOUD and HOT. The movies are loud and hot too of course..

But I just wanted to see if anyone as worked with them yet.

Steven

multicore cpus speed up the process only with software supporting it. usually best smp support is in linux apps.

I use the Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 for all of my editing and rendering. It was the best chip on the market when we purchaced the setup from Dell.

If you do allot of rendering, you may want to check out benchmark tests, to see how well it stacks up with other chips:

tomshardware.com/cpu_2007.html

I have been using a dual2core laptop for almost 2 years now, dual core technology is great for doing multiple things at once. It doesn't necessarily speed up your video rendering, but it does allow you to do rendering at the same time as doing photoshop, outlook, browsing and FTP. Before going dual core, I could never do anything while rendering a video as my system was almost in a hung state during the whole rendering period.

Dual processor machines are better than dual core, its not necessarily the app that needs to be dual processor aware, but the OS. If you run an OS that recognizes dual processors (pretty much any current OS) then you will get full power of two processors, not just two cores.

If you want really fast, look at the new apple 8-core machines: http://www.apple.com/macpro/

oops....just realised how old this thread is