It's been a while since I posted here, but it looks like I may need an upgrade. My current setup is as follows:
CPU: Q6600 @ 3200MHz
RAM: 8GB Corsair Dominator @ 1066MHz
MOB: Gigabyte EP45 UD3P
GPU: Gigabyte GTX 580 1536MB
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB
HDD: Western Digital 640GB 7200RPM
PSU: PC Power & Cooling Quad 750
What kills me is using the following software when rendering:
Premiere Pro CS6
After Effects CS6
Sony Vegas 12
Davinci Resolve 9.3
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Major Plugins:
Magic Bullet Suite
Neat Video
Twixtor
I predominantly use Vegas as it is quicker and less little annoying bugs than Premiere (specifically green frames for AVCHD content).
Looking at what is out now and what is in store for the future, it seems that Haswell will be the mainstream CPU until Skylake in 2015. Enthusiast side seems like Ivy-E (September) should be ok until 8 core+ CPU becomes mid-level (probably also Skylake).
Looking at the AMD side, their best offering now is FX 8350 and I am unsure if Steamroller will make it to desktop parts. If it does make it and it does improve as AMD says it will (approx 20%) this should be enough to make it similar at well threaded applications to a 4770K (at least from seeing what the 8350 does in benchmarks).
Right now I get render times of something around 4 hours for a 75 minute Blu Ray with mixed source of DNxHD/AVCHD/H264_MOV. I can't say what effects I use, because every project is different. CPU seems like the bottleneck as it is going at 100% while rendering.
Would any of the current tech give me significant boost in performance? Current intels should be about 50% faster at the same clock meaning a 3930k @ 4.5GHz should be approx 6x faster than my Q6600 @ 3.2GHz.
Does anyone who does any video editing/rendering have any thoughts on performance of current systems?
Would now be a good time to upgrade, or should I wait out and see what is coming ahead?
Ram usage varies. I think it may be format specific. Like it seems encoding dvd eats more ram, but usually around 6gb... I'll look into that a bit more on monday. I would estimate 1.5gb is free. I have seen vram usage at near 100% but load is less than 10%.
I tried rendertest for Vegas and complete it in 57 seconds if that helps.
A little update. It looks like my OC was not stable after all. A ton of dust accumulated inside the HSF basically blocked airflow completely. I noticed that the PC was an excellent space heater raising room temps some 10 degrees!!! Prime95 jumped to 70+ instantly and errored on core2 just as fast...
I did thorough cleaning over the past 2 days and reinstalled everything (what a pain with a non-modular PSU). Temps have stabilized (about 60 - 62 under load) and I will retest things this week. Perhaps the CPU was overheating while rendering and killed render times a bit? Not sure if that is how it would work, but I can test a bit this week.
1. you need a much larger hard drive and not one but three let me explain why.
To speed up video editing and rendering on your machine you can do a lot of great things installing three hard drives 1-1tb hard drive for your o.s 1-1tb hard drive to store your files on and 1-2tb hard drive for a scratch drive will help your video editing needs as well as rendering needs.
Why a scratch drive???
a scratch drive is designed to be a dummy drive of which as you edit your files and renders you can have it use the drive as a giant storage dump to speed up rendering and editing times for videos and graphics the larger the drive the more you can push your software.
by using the three system you can get better performance from the computer and a nice performance boost as well.
Originally posted by ddp: megadunderhead, don't need 1tb for your os as can use a 64gb or higher ssd\mechanical drive for that.
true but because of video editing the fact that windows updates and security updates take lots of hard drive space its better to be safe then sorry a great example of this.
windows vista with all security updates and driver updates and service packs jumps from 15 gig's of hard drive space this is pre service pack 1 disks to 50 gig's after all updates this doesn't include extras.
windows 7 however is a lot more nicer with hard drive space the max i have seen with all updates has been 30 gigs
windows 8 unknown at this time people are specualting in fall windows 8.1 will be 2.5 gig's to even 6 gigs of hard drive space along with the 15 gigs free and security updates could be 30 to 35 gigs
40GB is generally a bit on the tight side for an OS these days, but you don't tend to see SSDs that small any more. 64GB is the minimum, a typical windows 8 64-bit install with IE, Firefox, Chrome, Skype, FilezillaFTP, Dropbox, MS Office 2013, Winrar, Media player classic, and a fairly substantial pile of other applications (for me it's AusLogics defrag, Imgburn, Teamviewer, some RMM tool control centers, RealVNC and Speedfan) is going to run you about 40GB with all the updates in place, with the page file still on C: but hibernation disabled. I have about 10GB of data in my user profile, so I have around 5GB free on a 60GB SSD - it's not a lot, but I'm not going to be using any more space than that any time soon so it's fine. In practice, a 128GB SSD is certainly going to be ample, and will offer a vast performance increase over having a 1TB mechanical for your OS.
As for the methodology of graphics editing etc. anybody that knows what they're doing probably has their own preferred method.
In general, other than x264 video, you will want an Intel CPU for doing heavy work. They're much faster and much more energy efficient, although you will often have to pay more. I wouldn't worry too much about Skylake, it's a long time coming yet as Haswell has only recently been released, and the performance advantage with it will still be fairly slight, as it has been the last few iterations.
