sevenstreets Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I'm working on a new build. A year ago most people seemed to be going with a combo like: i7-4930K on Asus P9X79. Main advantages: 6 cores, 4 channel memory Dave Dugdale's lastest build is along these line (he went Sandy Bridge 3930K). Also recommended by Blackmagic. These systems benchmark very high. Now I see video guys and others suggesting the Haswell i7-4770K on Z87. Main advantages: most current chips, Thunderbolt 2. But you lose 2 cores, which shows in benchmarks. Will be running Resolve Lite, Premiere, and maybe Avid Media Composer. Editing GH4 4K footage Any recommendations? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AaronChicago Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I have an i7-4770k with a GTX760, 32gb RAM. It works flawlessly with Premiere and GH4 footage. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pablogrollan Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I can't talk about Resolve performance, but having a system running an i7-4770K and another with one of the "old" i7, I do not see any noticeable difference in Premiere. Premiere is not so CPU intensive, and a GPU like Aaron's GTX760 would do the job just fine. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrgl Posted June 16, 2014 Share Posted June 16, 2014 I can't talk about Resolve performance Resolve needs high-end GPUs. My R9 290X can't do 4K + NR + medium grade at full 30 frames. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunyata Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Haswell has advantages in speed but it's marginal, if you want to save a few hundred bucks and put it into a video card, that will be more of a noticeable investment than an extra .2Ghz, whatever architecture you choose. Setting up a small 1U render farm, I used a mix of Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge (Haswell wasn't out yet) and they are still going strong. Not yet to the point where the render speed difference compared to Haswell is worth upgrading. One thing about Ivy Bridge, it seems to run hotter for some reason, get a good heatsink! For a desktop computer, a Quadro card can cost more than your entire system and since more apps are writing acceleration that uses the cuda cores over the CPU, I'd say focus more on the video card and drives over the processor. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tugela Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Haswell has an approximately 5-8% increase in processing speed over Ivy Bridge IIRC. Certainly it is no where near enough to be worth upgrading to if you had Ivy Bridge (or even Sandy Bridge for that matter), but if you have a much older processor and are building a new system, it is usually a good idea to get the latest generation of processors and support chips. The price difference is minor in the grand scheme of things. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tugela Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Part of the reason Ivy Bridge runs hotter even though it has lower power consumption is due to a less thermally efficient packaging system used with those chips compared to Sandy Bridge. You only really need heavy cooling if you overclock your system (which you would probably be doing if you were building your own performance system). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunyata Posted June 17, 2014 Share Posted June 17, 2014 Other general suggestions, aside from the video card emphasis, would be to think about a pedestal server chassis, an extended board, lots of PCI slots, a really nice power supply and internal backup! Anyway, those are things that I think make a workstation functional, I only notice clock speed when I'm cursing a render that is hanging on a single frame. Shouldn't be an issue with grading and editing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenstreets Posted June 20, 2014 Author Share Posted June 20, 2014 Hey thanks everyone for sharing your thoughts! I decided to go Ivy Bridge rather than Haswell so that I could get the monster 6core i7-4930K. It sits above any Haswell options on PassMark but is still (somewhat) affordable: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html Plus Asus came out with their X79 Deluxe motherboard not that long ago which supports Quad channel RAM and all that good stuff, including SLI if I go that way at some point. Also going with Nvidia GTX 780 3GB. So a good amount of power there. You can check out the build here if you like: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/kqsgQ7 This should be all the power I need for a long time I hope. I have also selected components that I hope will be fairly quiet. I can report back on that once it's in and built. I can't stand a noisy computer! The GTX is the mostly likely candidate for noise, so we'll see... I think the only thing I regret is that it will consume more electricity and create more heat than I wish it did. But working in Avid, After Effects, Premiere and Resolve, it should excel - hopefully. I do this for a living so I hope it's a justified investment. Still hurts though! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sunyata Posted June 21, 2014 Share Posted June 21, 2014 That should scream but beware of AE consuming ALL of your ram when you want to use those cores (especially hyperthreaded). It's a real memory hog now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Fraser Posted June 21, 2014 Share Posted June 21, 2014 From what little I know, I would agree with the previous comment that 32Gb ram would match your six core processor better. More important to get it right with X79 chipset as it uses quad channel ram, so you would populate all four slots with 16Gb then would have to replace it all later upgrading to 4 sticks of 8Gb. With Haswell, it's dual channel ram, so you can just add in two more ram sticks and get to 32Gb more easily and cheaply. Here are two links from a website that I go to for insight that considers all the issues you need to think about. Your choice of "enthusiast" X79 motherboard and chipset, not only lets you use six core cpu, but enthusiast motherboards have higher bandwidth internal buses between main components which is very advantageous for video applications. DIY10 DIY9.5 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leeys Posted June 23, 2014 Share Posted June 23, 2014 Resolve needs high-end GPUs. My R9 290X can't do 4K + NR + medium grade at full 30 frames. Doomed. Isn't Resolve OpenCL enabled? The R9 290X is pretty much a high-end card. andrgl 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrgl Posted June 23, 2014 Share Posted June 23, 2014 Doomed. Isn't Resolve OpenCL enabled? The R9 290X is pretty much a high-end card. Yes about Resolve, and the 290X is sorta? Workstation cards seem to net better results. Plus DualGPU cards and crossfire/sli setups run laps around one card. Anyway, it's not unusable by any stretch. I leave NR on its own node and disable it, until I need to render the clips. Then it's pretty much real time, even with secondaries on. leeys 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leeys Posted June 23, 2014 Share Posted June 23, 2014 Well, thanks for the info. Things to consider when upgrading the computer some time next year. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenstreets Posted June 30, 2014 Author Share Posted June 30, 2014 Thanks for the suggestions. I've upgraded ram to 32GB. Actually downgraded graphics slightly to GTX 760 as I don't know how much use I would really get out of the extra cores on the 780 (other than in Resolve which is not a primary tool for me). config: http://pcpartpicker.com/user/sevenstreets/saved/hCWfrH Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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