Seeking Opinions on New CPU and GPU

IAM4UK wrote on 5/13/2014, 7:38 PM

I am about to upgrade my computer on which I use VP13 and the "Suite" software. I have read many threads here about previous versions of VP and the various CPU and GPU benchmarks.

Would you choose:
Core i7-4930K with its 6 cores and greater expense both for CPU and mobo...
or
Core i7-4770K with 4 cores and overall significantly lesser expense?

Would you concern yourself with a particular GPU, having such a CPU? If so, which GPU would you integrate with such a system?

Would you use 16GB RAM, or insist on 32GB (given: Windows 7 x64)?

Comments

videoITguy wrote on 5/13/2014, 8:01 PM

The systems specs published in your profile are sufficiently strong - so the question becomes "what are you chasing here with CPU /GPU combo on what motherboard and why so much memory?"

Generally you might be creating a system to attempt to do several things and do them well, given subsystems that will work in that direction. What I am saying is your chase in the abstract of just a CPU/GPU changeout is not very meaningful.

Here is an example of a subsystem goal in a build that I might be thinking about...I want a drive storage system that will support mutliple streams of uncompressed 10bit 4.2.2 video. The answer would be to this- get and build a Raid drive storage.

xberk wrote on 5/13/2014, 8:47 PM

>>Core i7-4930K with its 6 cores and greater expense both for CPU and mobo...

Yes. That would be my choice. Go for the six core. I'm running a i7-3930K .. love it.
Read up on the latest recommended GPU's on this forum. But most important is the CPU.

IAM4UK wrote on 5/13/2014, 9:46 PM

videoITguy:

I want to get closer to real-time renders of complex high definition Vegas projects with FX such as those included in the VP13Suite.
I would also like this upgraded machine to be the server for my media to other client devices, transcoding blu-ray quality streams down to specified bitrates (such as 8Mbps) as quickly as possible.

IAM4UK wrote on 5/13/2014, 9:50 PM

xberk:

With your i7-3930K, do you find that a discrete GPU really helps much with rendering or timeline playback?
If yes, am I correct in my interpretation of the other threads on GPUs that a Radeon 5xxx, 6xxx or nVidia GTX 5(60+) might be the appropriate match to the task in such a system?

GeeBax wrote on 5/14/2014, 1:46 AM

In my case, the two applications that are important to me are Vegas 13 and Resolve10. Resolve will not even say hello to you unless you have a suitable GPU, whereas Vegas is happy with a decent multi-core processor.

So I have the i7-3930K, 32GB of 1866 RAM and a GTX-570. That combination works very well with the two programs.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/14/2014, 6:06 AM

> "So I have the i7-3930K, 32GB of 1866 RAM and a GTX-570. That combination works very well with the two programs."

It's important to note that Geoff is using the older GTX-570 instead of the newer cards and here's why:

I spent about $2,000 building my now 2-year old Intel Core i7-3930K 3.2Ghz 6-core with 16GB memory and NVIDIA Quadro 4000. It performs pretty well. I recently bought a used 2008 Mac Pro with 8-Core Xeon 2.8Ghz, 16GB Memory, and ATI Radeon HD 5870 for $740 on eBay, and installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit on it, and it plays back and renders the Sony GPU sample project (a.k.a. the "red car" project) FASTER than my new 6-core!!! How can that be?

After much benchmarking it was obvious to me that the choice of video card made a huge difference. With GPU turned off, the newer Sandy Bridge 3.2Ghz 6-core was faster than the older Harpertown 2.8Ghz 8-core as you would expect, but with GPU turned on, the NVIDIA Quadro 4000 was slower than the ATI Radeon HD 5870 making the whole experience faster on the Mac Pro with the Radeon!

So given the two processors you are asking about, I would recommend the 6 core with an older ATI Radeon HD 5870/6970 GPU. The newer GPU's don't work as well with Sony's Render GPU acceleration but I'm told they do help the timeline playback so it's a 50/50 good/bad thing. You read that right... people with older GPU's are getting faster acceleration than people with newer GPU's. This has to do with Vegas not taking full advantage of the newer architectures. Also, since Sony is using OpenCL and NVIDIA has terrible OpenCL support, I would stay away from NVIDIA if Vegas Pro is your primary reason for buying a GPU. If you use Adobe Suite you will need NVIDIA for CUDA support so this is an individual decision because on the software you use the most.

BTW, If you are building a new workstation and have any plans to move to 4K during the lifetime of that workstation, you should be aware that Sony recommends an 8-Core, 16GB Memory, and RAID for working with 4K. So your 6-core is not going to be enough and a 4-core is out of the question.

You also have to ask yourself how many cores is enough? When playing back the timeline and it's stuttering and Vegas Pro is only using maybe 25% of your CPU's you have to ask yourself, why isn't Vegas using the cores I already have and what difference will it make if I have more cores that Vegas doesn't use? I'm thinking of moving to a 12-core Mac Pro but I'm afraid it's not going to be much faster that my 8-core with Vegas Pro. :(

~jr

IAM4UK wrote on 5/14/2014, 7:44 AM

JohnnyRoy,

Thanks. I had read your excellent thread with such information about GPU sweet-spot. Difficult to understand why the GPU results are as they are, but I trust actual observations rather than what I think "should" be.

For more than 6 cores, I suppose that means Xeon?

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/14/2014, 7:59 AM

> "Difficult to understand why the GPU results are as they are, but I trust actual observations rather than what I think "should" be."

And by "actual" you really mean "relevant". If I were to use a benchmark like Geekbench against my 3.2Ghz 6-core and 2.8Ghz 8-core you'll find that 8-core has a score of around 10,000 while the newer 6-core has a score of around 15,000. You would think that my new computer would be 1/3 faster... but... unless Vegas Pro is running the same instructions as the benchmark, the benchmark is "irrelevant" because your Vegas Pro workload will be different. Likewise if you run Cinebench against my Quadro 4000 and Radeon HD 5870 the Quadro scores 61 fps while the Radeon HD 5870 only scores 41 fps. Again you would think that the Quadro was 1/3 faster and if you were doing 3D work in Cinema 4D it would be, but for video work in Vegas Pro, the Radeon was faster. So observations that are "relevant" is what is key. You must observe the same workload that you plan to use.

I don't know why the GPU results are what they are. Someone explained it as the new architecture actually uses dual GPU's or makes the card look like it has dual GPU's and Vegas only see's one of them and therefore only uses 1/2 of the cards power. I don't know how true that is but it makes sense.

> "For more than 6 cores, I suppose that means Xeon?"

Yes, the 8 and 12 cores are currently Xeons and the dual CPU motherboards are currently Xeon. There is talk of Core i7 having this many cores later this year if you don't mind waiting. I'm currently watching eBay for a good deal on a 2010 Mac Pro 12-core. They are selling for about $2,600 - $3,200 depending on how much memory and are quite a deal and come with Radeon HD 5870 as standard. The 12-core Xeons are about $2,700 just for the CPU alone so getting a used Mac Pro for the same price makes sense to me although they are not Ivy Bridge they have plenty of power.

~jr