Vegas Workstation- Do 8 cores really make a difference?

[Wesman]

I am looking to build an editing workstation to run Sony Vegas, since it seems like the best solution for editing shorts shot on the RED. I come from ten years experience with Avid. However, Avid is really sucking right now for Red support and Vegas does basically everything one would need for a short that will finish on HD.
I am looking to buy a single 2.66 Ghz quad-core i7 processor and get 12gb of DDR3 ram since it is so cheap. I will be running Vista 64.
My question though is whether or not it is actually worth the extra expense to buy a multi-processor board and run dual i7's? Can Vegas really take advantage of 8 cores for basic editing and color correction? Will 12gb of ram actually do anything?
Thanks

[MikeHedge]

I have the i7 with 12gb here on vista 64.

a dual board? they are out now?

I'm adobe all the way here. seems to help to have the ram

[Roberto Lequeux]

I really hope someone will answer your question with actual facts and figures Wesman.

Aside from that I agree that if you plan to use AE at all the RAM will come in handy.

[Wesman]

I could either go for a server computer with dual xeons, or stick with a single i7.

[donatello b]

ask the question over at sony Vegas forum ...
i don't think they monitor this board ...

from looking at task manager ...
running Vista 64bit , 8gigs ram ..
when rendering out to HD or blu ray ( 32bit float) the 64bit Vegas uses all 4cores at 100% and approx 3.5 gig ram ... the 32bit Vegas (on same 64bit vista) uses 4 cores at 70-90% and approx 2.5 gig ram ...
rendering in 8 bit ( not 32bit float) uses about 15-20% less on the 4 cores ...

when it is using 100% of the cores you really can't do anything else on the computer ...
for past week i've been rendering out 2k cineon clips in After effects (32bit float) and it uses maybe 45-55% of the 4 cores & 3.5gig ram ...
while AE is rendring i have been editing in Vegas ( r3d and 2k QT clips )

[Joe Carney]

Vegas 64bit will take advantage of more than 4 cores. there are no dual i7 mobos, but there are dual Xeon 5500 (nehalem) mobo out there.

Here is an interesting one from SuperMicro

http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...0/X8DAH+-F.cfm

Has enough slots to handle dual video cards, raid, video capture and even a Red Rocket.

[Roberto Lequeux]

I was looking at that one after Jarred pointed it out to me. I am not sure what kind of station he was building with it so please don't extrapolate it into anything. It looks like a work horse.

I am still looking for a dual socket board that will let you overclock though... and it seems it won't happen until the next skulltrail comes out. I am not exited about the idea of buying two $1,500 CPUs.

[Wesman]

Vegas64 may take advantage of more than four cores. However, how efficiently? Just because it uses eight cores doesn't mean that it is twice as fast as four cores. So that is the real issue here. I am unconvinced at the moment that eight cores would significantly improve performance. Though I'll post on the Vegas forum and find out.

[Joe Carney]

I was looking at that one after Jarred pointed it out to me. I am not sure what kind of station he was building with it so please don't extrapolate it into anything. It looks like a work horse.

I am still looking for a dual socket board that will let you overclock though... and it seems it won't happen until the next skulltrail comes out. I am not exited about the idea of buying two $1,500 CPUs.

Intel has stated there will be no knew skull trail mobos, but if a 3rd party ones to develop one, the new chipset for the i7 cpus' supports it.

[James Wright]

Intel has stated there will be no knew skull trail mobos, but if a 3rd party ones to develop one, the new chipset for the i7 cpus' supports it.

They did originally make that statement, but apparently they still have one in the works. See this link. Couple of months maybe?

It should be using DDR3 DIMM's this time as well. High speed memory will be a big win.