What's so compelling about Win 7 ? XP Pro was fine!

Seriously...

I finally had a chance to actually see what real world benifits win 7 (64 bit) can provide me. I kept asking myself if all the tweaks and migration was worth it. I'm not much interested in the fancy shmancy Aero stuff. My system is:

Win 7 Pro (64 bit)
Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz
8 GB of DDR3-SDRAM (1333 MHz)
Boot drive is a WD VelocityRaptor 300 GB 10K
Data is written to a WD Caviar Black 2TB drive 7200RPM/64 MB cache (new kid)

Iv'e yet to read about a test using a professional Video Editing package. This kind of software really streses the system. Memory, CPU speed, and drives all get stress tested. Drives have to be fast or you drop frames. All the other system components have to be tuned for this task. I used Sony Vegas Pro 9.0c. The 64 bit version which has not had a lot of tweeaks for Win 7 but runs fine under Vista 64.

I used a few High Def video clips down sampled for the project. Rendered at 720x 480 - 29 frames/second bit rate of 30307KBPS Data Rate of 28771 KBPS. Audio bit rate of 1536KBPS 2 channels sterio and audio sample rate of 48 KHz. The project has 5 clips with 5 different transitions between clips.

The rendered .avi file is 276 MB and the clip is a tad over one minute long (00.01:16). Render time was an amazing 1 minute and 2 seconds. On my old machine (Pentium slug) this render would take over 25 minutes and sometimes droped frames. During the render I had Task Manager running to see exactly what those 8 processors were doing via the i7 chip. CPU usgae bounced between 70% and 85%. Memory usage never went over 30%. NOTE: their are a zillon rendering settings in Vegas Pro depending where the final destination of the video is. Some don't stress the system much so since these are the settings I often work with and I have hiostorical data on the old render times I chose these settings.

I would love to hear your own experiences? Their is great value for all of us to learn exactly what kind of performance improvements Win 7 (64 bit) can provide. It's actually my prefered method as opposed to using a set of benchmarks.

 

For me, the most exciting thing is getting Win 7 64bit with an I7-920 CPU. This allows me to crunch eight BOINC or WCG project work units at one time with the hyperthreading, and to take advantage of those projects which have provided for the 64bit O/S.

We can get so much more work done for these incredibly worthy scientific projects.

I have had my new computer for about two weeks. Setup and configuration were a snap. It just gulped down my network. It is an absolute joy.

But, then again, I never had a lick of trouble on my two Vista Core 2 Duo machines.

>>RSM

 

Fast is never fast enough!

Great story richardmitnick

Both high end pro level Video editing programs like Sony Vegas Pro (in my first post and 64 bit)) and a 64 bit image editor like Photoshop or the great free kid named Paint NET crunch numbers like mad.

A friend who works in Photoshop all day and regularly opens 100 MB CMYK images almost cried when he saw how fast he could apply a filter like a Gausian Blur. Natch it's that's dandy i7 processor plus a 64 bit OS and a 64 bit software solution. Wait till the coders start tweaking for Win7 (64 bit) plus the i7. I think it's going to get even faster

I just read that the i7 chip has the "limiter" removed so I assume a few of our more experienced Geeks have performed a "OC" for even more speed? Time to confess to your "sins" and tell us all about the results and how you handle cooling?

 

Arie, thanks for your confession. WOW! Makes sence.