User experience - best CPU/MoBo and graphfor VP 10

WayneM wrote on 6/13/2011, 8:48 AM
I am very near to needing to pull the trigger on this. I must build a system for editing HD, moving from SD. My experience is with the Intel family and planning to stay with Intel. The Sandy Bridge seems where I want to go, but I'd like to know who is using it, or has some hands-on experience (beyond the web reviews).

I'm likely to go with the 2600K / 1155 socket version and was looking at the ASUS P8Z68 boards but a number of user issues have been pointed out to me via this forum. (Thank you!)

So I'm looking now at Gigibyte who seems to have a broad range of boards (and PRICES!) for the Z68 support. Many seem to be ultra high end for very serous gamers. I don't need super speed PCI xxx-flavor sockets for a 12 screen system.

Any experience or recommendations on Gigabyte or other brands of Mobos strictly for VP 10 (and beyond) HD editing with (eventually) 2 to 3 displays and maybe a feed to a HD video projector?

I also understand that the super-fancy video cards are not generally necessary, so I'm looking for what I would need (NVidia preferred) to drive two displays. It could be one or two cards. The only other card I will have in this videoedit machine will be, if it si still compatible, the card for my Delta 1010 rackmount audio interface. (Hmmm, is ISA supported anymore?)

Thanks much in advance!

Wayne

Comments

Stereodesign wrote on 6/13/2011, 9:00 AM
2600K, AsusP8 and nVidia Quadra600.

Works fine.
WayneM wrote on 6/13/2011, 9:45 AM
Thanks Stereo8. Which P8? It appears they have 3 models: P8Z68, P8Z68-V, and P8Z68-V Pro !

If one of the ASUS with video, are you using the integrated video on the MoBo?

Thanks.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/13/2011, 10:41 AM
I edit HDV nicely with the rig in my profile: AMD Phenon 9600, 4gb DDR, ATI 3850 duel head, 1xIDE 250 GB, 1x SATA 500GB, 1x USB2 500GB, Asus M3A MB.
Steve Mann wrote on 6/13/2011, 1:35 PM
There's almost 90-entries in the Rendertest database. Look at what others are using:

http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?MessageID=722194&Replies=99
TheHappyFriar wrote on 6/13/2011, 6:01 PM
I'd say that after you say "Wow, I'm going to get THAT rig!" when looking @ the render test thread, you look up posts by that person to see if they're having issues.
im.away wrote on 6/13/2011, 6:19 PM
Hi Wayne,

I have an i7 2700k, ASUS P8P67 EVO V3, 16 GB RAM and GTX460 with 2 GB RAM. I consistently get 128 seconds for the Rendertest 2010, (I was going to post a link to the page, but when I checked it the database has been hijacked yet again, and corrupted,) although I did get 123 seconds after I noticed that the checkbox for including audio in the render was ticked, and removing the tick.

I have mildly overclocked my CPU, running it at 4425MHz. It utilises all 4 cores at 100% with a maximum temperature of 63 degrees celsius. I have run the CPU at 5 GHz but didn't do a rendertest at this speed. I get pretty good preview performance from the timeline, with most things being able to be previewed in real-time.

I don't know anything about problems with the ASUS boards and my research before purchasing didn't turn up anything. The quality of the board is excellent, drivers installed under Win 7 64 bit without issue. Tuning the board when overclocking is dead easy and the monitoring software is excellent. I built my system in a little over an hour.

I use this PC only for editing and Internet access. I have resisted the urge to put Micro$oft or any other kind of bloatware on it (to the point where my fully-loaded and running PC uses just 20 GB of space on my SSD.) I'm very happy with the machine.

Cheers

Russ
LReavis wrote on 6/13/2011, 11:11 PM
"I'd say that after you say "Wow, I'm going to get THAT rig!" when looking @ the render test thread, you look up posts by that person to see if they're having issues."

With the new CPU, I get 107 seconds (1 min. 47 seconds) a 970 running (6-core) just shy of 4.2 gHz. (Kkolbo with a 980x OC'd a bit faster than mine gets 104 seconds.) Rendering quality set for "Best," 1.5 GB preview RAM, with the"include audio" checkbox checked.

If I keep my ambient air temp. at or below 75 F, no core gets above 70 degrees C. (I turn on a through-the-roof fan to cool my computer closet if the closet temps get above that; outdoor air temp here in So. Ca. usually is below 75F, so overheating of the closet generally is not an issue.)

My videos frequently exceed an hour in length and are FX-heavy. Even so, I virtually never encounter quirks if I edit in 8c and render in 9e-64. (I do encounter quirks a-plenty with Vegas 10). My other programs (Sketchup with Twilight Renderer, Poser, etc.) are similarly quirk-free.

@ im.away:
Frankly, I would have expected better performance from a 2700k. How much RAM did you allocate for preview?

WayneM wrote on 6/14/2011, 7:08 AM
Steve, thanks for the heads up. I'm just getting back into this after being away from the Forum for some years. This is a tremendous resource, especially for me at the moment. I DO wish that the MoBo I was looking at wasn't so new that no one has reported the results yet :-) But I do see that the i7 2600 has good ratings. I understand that the 980 offers a performance boost, but at a cost that is beyond my budget. Nothing yet for the newer Z68 chipset.

BTW, the 9 second result is impressive. What kind of hardware (Cray?) is "test firstname" using :-)

When I downloaded the CSV into Excel I immediately made the first row an Auto Filter which gives an automatic dropdown list of all entries and allowed me to select only the chips sets. That even accounts for non-standard entries.

I was told by someone that AMD was the preferred CPU for Vegas, but it looks here like that isn't true. It looks like the best AMDs ar 2.5x longer that the i7 2600, correct?

When I get my new workstation fired up I'll be sure to post results. I also plan to do some tests at various RAM levels, such as 8 GB & 16 GB.

Again, thanks to everyone for creating a fantastic resource!

Wayne
Steve Mann wrote on 6/14/2011, 10:09 AM
When I did a quick summary of the results, the Asus and i7 predominate the fastest render times. The Xeon in the MacPro appears in the top-20, but that's not a BYO option.

Larry has a good suggestion. I'll put that discussion in my to-do list.
John_Cline wrote on 6/14/2011, 1:55 PM
"I was told by someone that AMD was the preferred CPU for Vegas"

AMD has sponsored part of the annual Sony Vegas party at NAB, otherwise their processors are in no way "preferred" for Vegas, at least for any technical reason. Their processors have been considerably slower than Intel CPUs for years now. The only reason to buy an AMD processor is to save a little money if you're willing to put up with much slower performance.

Personally, I'm running a Gigabyte X58-UD5 motherboard with the X58 chipset and an Intel 980x six-core processor under Win7-64bit with 12 GB RAM. Since it is a 980x (the "X" standing for "Extreme"), it is designed to overclock very nicely and is the fastest processor one can currently get.
im.away wrote on 6/15/2011, 7:06 AM
@LReavis

I tested with various preview RAM settings and found that there was no difference in performance above 1.5 GB. My CPU is only mildly overclocked as I have a self-imposed limit of 65 degree core temperature. If I push to 75 degree core temps I can shave off another 9 seconds, giving me 119 seconds total for the rendertest. Frankly, render speed is not my primary concern from a Vegas user poingt of view. I'm more interested in smooth preview from the timeline. Rendertest has helped me test various tuning options for the PC.

I think that it would be helpful for those doing the test to do so without changing any of the custom settings for the render (with the possible exception of unchecking the "include audio" checkbox) so that we are all comparing apples with apples. By playing with some of the options in the custom menus I can achieve faster renders, but I don't think that that is the object of the exercise.

One thing I did do was alter the base clock frequency of the mobo from 103Mhz (that was set up automatically by the ASUS bios) to 100 MHz. Along with this I changed the ASUS selected multiplier of 43x to 45x. The increase, overall in CPU speed was just 75 MHz, with little difference in core temperatures - but this improved the rendertest time by 3 seconds.

Cheers

Russ
LReavis wrote on 6/15/2011, 12:34 PM
@im.away

Thanks, Russ - still seems like a 100% solid system to me - something that would serve most Vegas users well without unnecessarily running up the $$$.

Please keep us posted if you notice quirks in day-to-day experience.
WillemT wrote on 6/15/2011, 3:33 PM
@im.away.

Not to take this of topic but just a quick question.

I just got this ASUS GTX460 DC TOP 1Gb video card. All vertical lines are slightly wavy, only by a few pixels. It is very irritating and I am going to take it back for ASUS to check. Horizontal lines are perfect. I tried different power supply and cables. Old card, ASUS 7600GS, displays perfect - no GPU grunt however.

Do you see anything like that with your GTX460? Do you have clean straight verticals? Most noticeable when you, for example, display Word in a window covering the full vertical screen height.

Thanks
Willem.
John_Cline wrote on 6/15/2011, 4:18 PM
Willem,

What type of monitor are you using and are you running DVI (digital) or VGA (analog) from the card to the monitor?
im.away wrote on 6/15/2011, 5:28 PM
@WillemT

Hi Willem. No, I don't have any of the symptoms that you described.

Cheers

Russ
WillemT wrote on 6/16/2011, 3:12 AM
John. Unfortunately my monitor, ACER F20, has no DVI inputs. I use an adapter, supplied with the GTX460 - it has two DVI and one mini HDMI port, to go from a DVI output to the VGA input of the monitor (both DVI outs give the same result).

I realize it is not the best monitor for the job but it has served me well with quite reasonable display - a lot better than I have seen on many other monitors. If I use the DVI out, with the same adapter, on my old GS7600 card the display is perfect (BCC7 however is not too happy with that card - hence the new one). I have never seen this problem from a mutlitude of graphic cards over the last 20 or more years.

Just by the way, my other monitor (with slightly lower resolution) gives the same result. I did try a different adapter and video cable.

Im.away. Thanks for the heads up. It is a holiday here today, Thursday, so I have arranged to see Technical at ASUS on Friday. I will let you know the outcome.

Willem.