Camtasia Video Rendering On Intel Core i7-875K

This is what a one hour video being rendered to Web MP4 video looks like on our new Core i7-875K based system:

In the above screenshot the Camtasia process is running at 64% across all cores four cores plus HyperThreading.

The above CPU usage shows that Camtasia is quite capable of utilizing all of the cores and threads the Core i7-875K has to offer to run its rendering process.

Note that Intel TurboBoost shows that currently the CPU is running at 3.2GHz to try and keep up with everything.

Meanwhile, the system is still quite usable.

Start time for the process was 16:15Hrs (4:15PM) and is about half done. So, it looks as though the entire 1 hour video that was captured at about 1400x900 will take about 30 minutes to render.

Here we are a while later with the finished product being rendered at about 16:42Hrs.

The original Camtasia capture was just shy of 1 GB in size and resides on our storage server. So, the above rendering was being done by processing the original on the network with the finished product being dropped into a local temp folder on this machine.

If we have time, we may run the render again with the project source files on the local machine to see how much of a difference there is. The storage subsystem is using the on board Intel software RAID controller to run a RAID 0 stripe across to 80 GB X25-M Intel SSDs.

For folks that make a living where CPU intensive tasks are part of the process, the Core i7-875K may make a great compromise instead of an Intel Core i7 Extreme series CPU setup especially for those just starting out.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists
Co-Author: SBS 2008 Blueprint Book

*Our original iMac was stolen (previous blog post). We now have a new MacBook Pro courtesy of Vlad Mazek, owner of OWN.

Windows Live Writer