Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
DCP Directory
MillimeterEdit Expertise: Test Drive: HP xw4600
Dec 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Single-socket, quad-core workstation is a general-purpose workhorse.
Table 2. Rendering performance for Adobe CS3 Production Premium.
Click here for a larger image
Video editing
For editing and authoring, I looked at two components of Adobe CS3 Production Premium and Sony Vegas. In my Adobe test, I produced two projects, with the first being my standard 3.5-minute HDV test project with color correction, backlight correction, speed changes, chroma key, still-image pan and zoom, logo overlay, and audio mixing. I rendered this to a Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 file on all three computers using the same Premiere Pro output preset. The second project involved producing a 2-minute Blu-ray Disc image from HDV source material in Adobe Encore. Table 2 shows the Adobe results.
In producing the Blu-ray-compatible MPEG-2 file, Premiere Pro proved wonderfully efficient at using four processor cores, coming close to the theoretical target of a 2.72X performance bump over the notebook. On the other hand, performance on the eight-core system was unimpressive. A look at the Performance tab of Windows Task Manager in both systems shows why.
Table 3. Rendering performance for Sony Vegas.
Click here for a larger image
When rendering on the dual- and quad-core systems, Premiere Pro was red-lined at 100 percent for the bulk of the encoding cycle. However, with the eight-core system, processor efficiency hovered around 60 percent to 70 percent.
I ran four CS3 rendering tests on all three systems (essentially the same tests using DV and HDV sources). In all four, Premiere Pro rendered at least twice as fast on the xw4600 than the 8710p — persuasive evidence that jumping from two processors to four should boost rendering performance. In three of four tests, the xw4600 was actually 20 percent faster in DV-rendering tests than the xw8400. This would seem to indicate that a quad-core system is a much better investment for Adobe editors than an eight-core system.
The Sony Vegas story, shown in Table 3, was similar — only more pronounced. In Blu-ray and MPEG-4 rendering trials, Vegas either nearly achieved or blew away the expected 2.72X speed boost, but the xw4600 system was at least 25 percent faster than the xw8400 eight-core system in both tests.
