Is it worth upgrading to DDR3 machine from my current DDR2 setup

My current setup:

AMD 1055t at stock
Gigabyte ga-ma785gm-us2h
4x1gb ddr2 800mhz ram (cheap hp branded)
1.5tb seagate 7200rpm

I'm planning to upgrade the motherboard to support DDR3 1600 shown here

For the motherboard i'm considering this

My primary use of this machine will be to convert blurays to 4gb 1080p mp4 files with ripbot264 (2-pass/no resize). question is

1) will i see any faster encoding without overclocking
2) how much overclocking can i get out of the 1055t with the motherboard mentioned

If I stick with ddr2 and decide to get this motherboard here will i see any better overclocking.

 

DDR3 AM3 rigs are actually slower than DDR2 AM2+ rigs if the processors, ram capacity, and other things are equal.

 

@KillerBug i'm calling a BS on that...unless u can prove it. would be interesting to see, but for me the ddr3 version of my rig is running faster. then it did with the ddr2. what will also help is to have good tight timings, and the newest mobo versions...for instance the 785 isn't that old of a nb, but the 710 is ancient for the sb and will slow your ram performance to the point that it mightaslee will be ddr2. then for timings on the ram u wanna try for about 7-8-7-20 or lower, i got mine 4gb ddr3 1600 and it runs that np for 90$ here's a link http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820226154
but if you're set on your ram i'd buy it from newegg to save money here's another link http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220436. hmmmm....other then that idk what 2 tell u ^^. do with the advice what u will.

 

It depends which RAM you use. DDR3 AMD systems aren't any faster than DDR2 ones, but they aren't slower.
AMDs rely on memory latency, and DDR3 memory is high latency.

DDR2 800mhz at CAS4: 5ns cycle time
DDR2 1066mhz at CAS5: 4.69ns cycle time -> faster
DDR3 1600mhz at CAS8: 5ns cycle time -> equal
DDR3 1600mhz at CAS9: 5.63ns cycle time -> slower

 

u and travis would get along, i dunno how u got your answers but i'll show how i'm getting mine XD.

btw the formula is from my text book. sad but true.
(equation being time per cycle) * (cas in number of cycles)

ddr2 800mhz at CAS4=2.5ns * 4=10ns
ddr2 1066mhz at CAS5=1.875ns * 5=9.375ns
ddr3 1333mhz at CAS6=1.5ns * 6=9ns
ddr3 1333mhz at CAS9=1.5ns * 9=13.5ns <--worst
ddr3 1600 at cas7=1.25ns * 7=8.75ns <----best
ddr3 1600 at cas9=1.25ns * 9=11.25ns

is that format better?

 

You've taken the actual clock speed of the memory, rather than the double data rate clock speed. I think memory can still function on the double data rate clocks, but don't quote me on it

 

lol those are with that XD assuming i am right when i assume i know what you're talking about.... u mean that they still work on both rise and fall of the clock right? meaning at every voltage change. so u get 2 bits per one cycle. if so then just take a look at what these really are... we call them ddr2 800 but it's really only operating at 400mhz, 800 changes 400mhz...and fck you're right, BUT it should still be the same listing, i'll readd them to make sure same equation but i'm not typing them out again.

ddr2 800mhz at CAS4=5
ddr2 1066mhz at CAS5=4.69
ddr3 1333mhz at CAS6=4.5
ddr3 1333mhz at CAS9=6.75
ddr3 1600 at cas7=4.375
ddr3 1600 at cas9=5.625

all in all if u compare cheap ddr2 ram to cheap ddr3 ram then ddr3 will be better, but if u compare good ddr2 ram (last i checked cas4 was considered godly....granted last i look was back when i had ddr2 so a while ago(so i'm assuming it's good now) to cheap ddr3 then the ddr2 will be faster. and if amd would hurry up and get some triple channel memory we could have some real fun lol, but yeah apples to apples ddr3 is better apples to oranges ddr2 is better. and just to point out yes we are arguing over such a small amount of time that it's not worth arguing over but that comes out to being a good bit by the time u finish with your movies lol.granted in either case odds are you're gonna be bottlenecked by a hdd or something first

 

Yeah the numbers are different, but the order is the same

 

At the end of the day, you can dump a lot of money on good DDR3 to get a hair more performance than you get with cheap DDR2...and if you already have good DDR2, then good DDR3 won't give you any detectable improvement. Yes, DDR3 can be faster; but it needs a CPU and a chipset that can make use of it...and AMD offers nothing fitting that description right now, with the possible exception of the Hex cores.

If you want more performance, there are a lot of other places to spend your money that will give you much larger performance.

 

Agreed, DDR3 only works well with CPUs that can take advantage of the extra speed, that's Intel CPUs not AMDs. Still though, with DDR2 and DDR3 similarly priced in the UK, I don't steer people away from DDR3, especially not since it's possible it could be re-used in another system, whereas with DDR2 that's highly unlikely.

 

@ KillerBug but he does have a hex core, so it will help, and i know that i got noticable performance boost with a quad core amd. (965 phenom II OC'd to 3.9ghz) however it is true that he could get alot better performance boost with other components for what he's wanting. for the video conversion etc you're better off with a good gpu that has built in, such as the ati 5xxx series doesn't take much but allowing the gpu to handle it seems to speed it up imho. then the hdd will play another role in that, i'd suggest posting more detailed stats so we can find the actual bottleneck and help u from there. as for how detailed...u can never have to many details...ok maybe u can...but not with this!

also i do notice that the difference beween the numbers on the 2 best is a matter of .315ns, but that's per cycle, and that .315 does add up. after 10^9 cycles you're dealing with .315 seconds off so lets say you're doing something that takes one hour with the ddr2 ram, that would come out to 7.676x10^10 cycles to do that same number of cycles with the ddr3 ram would take (using the unabbrevaited number for accuracy's sake) would take approx 336 seconds, saving u about half a minute let's say you're hard core and are doing 6 of these at a time (one per core on the hex core) that's 3 minutes of your life, per hour. let's keep going and say you're really hardcore, and u do this alot, or u game or w/e else is the case then your pushing it that much further, i know sometimes the numbers don't seem like alot, but also keep in mind those three minutes/hr times 24 hours times 365.25 days per year, comes out to 210384 seconds a year, or two and a half days of your life.(2.435 same thing) u know what u could do with an extra 2 and a half days? that's right, u can convert more movies! not to mention getting a new mobo preferably one with usb3 and sata 6gb/s will also help future proof your rig, saving u $$ in the future.

 

it looks like ddr3 vs ddr2 will not make much of a difference worth upgrading the mobo/ram. do i need faster hard drive? like raid 0? if cpu is at 100% almost all the time, does it mean hard drive is "not" in the way of performance? its more like the cpu's 100% potential is used up

sorry, i should have posted more details before:
my rig:
amd 1055t as you know
gigabyte ga-ma785gm-us2h
4x1gb ddr2 800mhz (regular hp branded)
win7 x64 ultimate on 320gb (stm3320620as) hard drive
all br rips on 1.5tb (wd15ears) hard drive
gigabyte 4550hd pcix vga
antec ea-500 earthwatts something

ripbot264 created its temp folder on the wd 1.5tb hard drive
also, i highly doubt if video compression makes any use of graphics card. ati 5xxx or gtx460/470 etc. are you sure about this? please let me know if you need more details.

 

99% of ati cards still in existence have avivo on them, for the most part avivo is known as hardware acceleration (video encoder), however it is also a decoder (conversion tool) and using the gpu to do the conversion has proven to save time (i think about 20% off of the normal cpu time to do it) not sure what ripbot uses but i use avivo and it helps me out XD i can rip a video real fast and let u know what my times are so u can compare? though my rig is different (worse cpu better mobo/ram worse hdd better gpu) (amd phenom II 965, ddr3 1600, crosshairIIIformula mobo, and an old WD 500gb (from back when 500gb was the biggest u could get lol)
i'll go rip a movie and then time the conversion times.

 

Not many programs support GPU decoding of video, last I checked, so it comes down to the tool of choice really, as to whether a high-end GPU is worth it.
If you're trying to compare the speed of RAM as a linear performance benefit based on the cycle time, it really doesn't work like that

minghi: When you're decoding video, the hard disk is very rarely the bottleneck, it's the CPU. If your CPU is at 100%, it means the program you're using is multithreaded, which is good, as using all 6 cores is not that common, and it does mean you're getting very good performance out of the CPU.
Just an aside, you refer to your card as the '4550HD PCIX' - PCI-X was a completely separate technology to PCI Express (PCIe) - PCIe is the correct term. It's also HD4550, not 4550HD

Most Radeon cards do not have AVIVO on them these days, and that includes all of the HD5 series. The technology was scrapped around the introduction of the HD series.
AVIVO decoder is a separate system entirely, and is an extremely primitive program built into the ATI software.
It can only transcode, not encode/decode and for that purpose, you're better to either just use the CPU, or find a better program that can use the GPU to decode video.

 

ummm... i have a 5770 and it does have the avivo software and the avivo video converter, and am about to use it to convert Avatar to a couple different formats for timing and comparison reasons XD.

 

The software, but not AVIVO as a technology. Different things.

 

ummm i think you're gonna have to be more specific about what you think the "AVIVO technology" is.

 

AVIVO was originally a successor to VIVO, meaning 'Video In Video Out' but now the idea of bidirectional video appears to have been abolished, with AVIVO simply representing image processing for output.

 

welll....you're right and wrong XD. avivo isn't on newer cards. it's actually yet another upgrade, it's called AVIVO HD.
here's some direct copies so u don't have to take my word for everything.

first the video converter.

ATI Avivo Video Converter

ATI has also released a transcoder software dubbed "ATI Avivo Video Converter," which supports transcoding between H.264, VC-1, WMV9, WMV9 PMC, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX video formats, as well as formats used in iPod and PSP. Earlier versions of this software uses only the CPU for transcoding, but have been locked for exclusive use with the ATI X1000 series of GPUs. Software modifications have made it possible to use version 1.12 of converter on a wider range of graphics adapters [1]. The ATI Avivo Video Converter for Windows Vista was available with the release of Catalyst 7.9 (September 2007 release, version 8.411).

The ATI Avivo Video Converter with GPU transcoding acceleration is now also available for use with HD 4800 and HD 4600 series graphics cards and is included with the Catalyst 8.12 drivers. Support for Vista x64 is available via a separate download starting with Catalyst 9.6 (9-6_vista32-64_xcode). The new software is faster than Badaboom, an encoder that uses NVIDIA's CUDA to accelerate encoding, but has a higher CPU utilization than Badaboom. One review reported visual problems with iPod and WMV playback using Catalyst version 8.12, and although concluding there was no clear winner, if forced to choose would go with the Avivo converter[2].

next avivo and avivo hd

ATI Avivo

During capturing, ATI Avivo amplifies the source, automatically adjust its brightness and contrast. ATI Avivo implements 12-bit transform to reduce data loss during conversion; it also utilizes motion adaptive 3D comb filter, automatic color control, automatic gain control, hardware noise reduction and edge enhancement technologies for better video playback quality.

In decoding, the GPU core supports hardware decoding of H.264, VC-1, WMV9, and MPEG-2 videos to lower CPU utilization (the bitstream processing/entropy decoding still requires CPU processing). ATI Avivo supports vector adaptive de-interlacing and video scaling to reduce jaggies, and spatial/temporal dithering, enabling 10-bit color quality on 8-bit and 6-bit displays during process stage.
[edit] ATI Avivo HD

See also: Unified Video Decoder

The successor of ATI Avivo is the ATI Avivo HD, which consists of several parts: integrated 5.1 surround sound HDMI audio controller, dual integrated HDCP encryption key for each DVI port (to reduce license costs), the Theater 200[dead link] chip for VIVO capabilities, the Xilleon chip for TV overscan and underscan correction, the Theater 200[dead link] chip as well as the originally-presented ATI Avivo Video Converter.

However, most of the important hardware decoding functions of ATI Avivo HD are provided by the accompanied Unified Video Decoder (UVD) and the Advanced Video Processor (AVP) which supports hardware decoding of H.264/AVC and VC-1 videos (and included bitstream processing/entropy decoding which was absent in last generation ATI Avivo). For MPEG-1, MPEG-2, and MPEG-4/DivX videos, motion compensation and iDCT (inverse discrete cosine transform) will be done instead.

The AVP retrieves the video from memory; handles scaling, de-interlacing and colour correction; and writes it back to memory. The AVP also uses 12-bit transform to reduce data loss during conversion, same as previous generation ATI Avivo.

HDMI supports the transfer of video together with 8-channel 96 kHz 24-bit digital audio (and optionally Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio streams for external decoding by AV receivers, since HDMI 1.3). Integration of an audio controller in the GPU core capable of surround sound output eliminates the need for S/PDIF connection from motherboard or sound card to the video card, for synchronous video and audio output via HDMI cable.

The Radeon HD 2900 series lacked the UVD feature, but still was given the ATI Avivo HD label.

here's a list of supported software.

* ArcSoft TotalMedia Theatre
* Corel WinDVD
* Media Player Classic Home Cinema
* MediaPortal
* Microsoft Windows Vista internal MPEG-2 decoder
* Nero (software suite)
* Roxio CinePlayer
* All linux players supporting Xv output (with ATI official drivers 9.1 or newer)

the converter is a little newer but most ppl don't use ati cards older then the 46xx series since well...they kinda suck nowadays xD but newer then that and ppl use them.

sorry for the long post ^^

 

But does this actually refer to video in through the DVIs? As far as I knew, hardware VIVO was dropped after the X series.