> I am surprised that anybody is still screwing around with > overclocking considering the the price and power of modern > processors. I have enough trouble getting a perfect encoding without > adding in the added risk that comes from overclocking.
I encode raw HD transport streams to H.264 on my quad core. I was able to take the 2.4GHz chip to 3.2GHz (and this was on a B3 stepping) without problem. How confident am I? Very. I validate all overclocks with several days worth of Prime95 with roundoff checking. This machine (an overclocked machine running Vista, no less) has had uptimes approaching 40 days (and I rebooted to swap out RAM sticks). It's solid. The difference in encode times between 4 cores 2.4GHz and 4 cores at 3.2GHz is dramatic--overclocking is still very much alive and very much worthwhile. So I spent $290 and pushed it beyond the performance of Intel's $1100 EE chip. > > One thing that really isn't considered is the growth of quad core > supported apps. My guess is that next year lots of new apps are going > to support Quad core and the years after that even more. That means > your Quad core processor is actually going to get faster over time, > which will not be the case for dual core. Sure it will. Keep in mind that most applications have a -single- worker thread, meaning that pervasive multithreading will benefit dual, tri, and quad-cores. Luckily, my quad-core killer app (x264) scales very well with processor cores already. Greg
