Recommended hardware for Expression Encoder

Question

Hi,

We are in the process og purchasing hardware that will be used for Expression Encoder only, and would like to hear if there are any preferred hardware for Expression Encoder performance. E.g. will Opterons and Xeons work equally well? Is there any possibility of hardware acceleration? Are fast discs recommended, or will the limitation be CPU? What about RAM?

Regards
Loke Dupont

Answer 1

GPU is currently used only for editing/preview (no hardware acceleration currently happening encode).

Depending on your sources and type of encoding, having fast HDDs might be helpful.

Since we are still 32-bit bound, having more than 3GB of available RAM wouldn't be very useful.

This may change, but the main bottleneck for performance at the moment is the number of cores and the speed of your CPU. We highly suggest getting "i7" class procs, as they proved to be quite efficient at video encoding with Expression Encoder. I know it might be a little late for your plans, but Intel has announced a 6-core "i7" class chip due in March (3.33GHz for each core). This chip will provide 12 logical cores per chip @ 3.33GHz, which will probably be able to encode high-quality 1080p at faster than real-time speeds. And the 8-cores one-chippers are on their way this year.

Answer 2

Do specs still stand? Any benefit in using a one of the 12 (physical) core AMD Opteron 6100's? If you're running Windows 7 64bit (you ARE running 64bit, aren't you) couldn't you also flip a switch on the encder exe so that it would access 4GB of RAM too. I recall doing this to x86 version of Visual Studio and let me tell you, that extra GB of addressable RAM  made a noticalbe difference.

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Garth H MCITP | BI 2008 MCTS | SQL 2005 & SharePoint 2010 http://bitinkering.spaces.live.com/