Windows 10: CPU recommendations for a lot of video conversions

@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

 

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 *Smile
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!