1 beyond 770 (with DVStorm). (Editing Computers).

 
$5,995 
 
1 Beyond Inc. 
61 Medford St. 
Somerville, MA 02143 
(877) 663-2396 
www.1beyond.com 

The 1 Beyond 770 turnkey looks like any other PC in its unassuming beige full-tower case. Under the hood however, lurks a real beast--a real-time beast. Combining real-time hardware effects and transitions, courtesy of a Canopus DVStorm RT card, with the raw number-crunching of dual-AMD Athlon MP 1800+ processors, machines like this make the nightmare of eight-hour renders seem like a distant legend from last century. If you can afford this turnkey, you may never have to wait for a render again.

Dual Hardware

Everything seems to come in pairs on this system. The dual-head Matrox G450 display card drives dual 19-inch ViewSonic monitors that made Adobe Premiere seem downright spacious, especially when we connected a third television monitor for previews via the S-video out port on the back of the DVStorm card. Premiere was not entirely well behaved across two monitors. For example, the capture dialog would not function properly when it was on the second monitor, but it was not difficult to accommodate these few quirks.

The system came stocked with 220GB of video storage space, which came in the form of one 100GB and one 120GB hard disk. Although they were connected to the IDE RAID on the motherboard, they were not configured as a RAID. Of course, the really exciting dual was the pair of AMD Athlon MP 1800+ processors, which dramatically improves system performance in all situations, whether the software is designed to multithread or not. But let's get to the real question: do dual CPUs improve performance for video? And, more specifically, what is the impact of two CPUs in Premiere and for MPEG-2 rendering on this particular computer?

We ran a number of tests (in Premiere) checking timeline render times with both CPUs and then popped one of the CPUs off of the board and ran the tests again. Generally, for transitions, titles and simple overlays such as picture-in-picture, we saw an average increase in performance of only about 20 percent, with a surprising exception being Canopus hardware transitions that rendered almost 40 percent faster in some situations. MPEG-2 rendering was more in line with what you might expect, with renders occurring almost in real time. A 10-minute DV clip took about 11 minutes to render, which was about 91 percent faster than the system with only a single CPU.

DVStorm RT