Hey all, Looking to build a post-production media PC. this will primarily be used for 1080p and 4k video editing, Photoshop, After Effects, and Lightroom... along with the odd game here and there. I currently have a 4tb RAID 1 NAS which is also acting as our company's FTP server, and two 2tb HDD's in my current system that can be re-apportioned. For monitors I have 2 ASUS 25" IPS monitors and for sound, a Klipsch 2.1 sound system. This is what I was thinking for a build, i would have preferred to go with a dual Xeon E3 1151 build but the motherboards don't look like they have been released for that yet. Any advice or thoughts/comments?
Not a 6-core 5280? Around the same price of a 6700K (or it was..), although MBs are more expensive but you're buying 4 DIMMs anyway. You can drop in a 2011-3 Xeon into X99 board afaik but you can't drop in an 1151 Xeon into Z170, only C-series MB. What's the GPU for - CUDA/OpenCL? Does it need that much? What about a cheaper 950/960 4GB? (or is it a secret gaming rig ) You already have 2xTB, really need the extra? Sell them both, go for 1x6TB? Faster M.2 drive instead of the 950 Pro - large files will certainly benefit. More IO. Fewer cables in the case. Really need a disk drive? Windows comes on USB stick now. If you 'occasionally' do - buy a USB 3 one. Then you can pack it away or use it with several PCs. 760W is overkill. My X99 system + GTX 960 runs on a Fanless Seasonic 520W. It has plenty of capacity and Platinum efficiency.
Damn Bindi.... i forgot how long I have been gone from certain sections of this forum. Last time I think I saw you you were still an admin. To answer your questions: I looked at the 5820K, but the performance versus the new system didn't add up to me. This PC is going to have to last a while so I am trying to stick to the newer skylake architecture. Nvidia for the CUDA support. AMD has been too flaky with me recently even with new drivers, and Adobe seems to have a hard on for CUDA processing versus OpenCL. I was aiming for the 970 since it has a good amount of CUDA cores and render output processors which should hold me over until 8k With video files i am filling up hard drives faster than you can imagine. Our company currently processes and stores around 15k photos per year and now with the video demand going through the roof we are anticipating gaining close to 1tb of video footage per year. for the SSD is the added advantage of m.2 worth the extra $100 or so? Disk drive is for when I have to take stuff from work home. I'm attached to a aircraft squadron and edit our squadron videos in my limited free time. The only way to get them is via DVD/CD after Snowden. Think 620W would cover then? I was keeping it slightly larger to handle potential expansions. Thanks for the advice and help!
If you're transcoding video, then extra cores would REALLY help over the single-threaded performance of the 6700k. Going for a 2011-3 Xeon would also leave room to upgrade to one of the more beastly Xeons in the future if required (e.g. an 18-core E5-2699v3). It;s one of the few embarrassingly parallel workloads that scales excellently with more cores, but does not take well to GPU acceleration (which at the moment is either Fixed Function Block-based and terrible quality, or can only accelerate a small subset of operations and gets bandwidth bottlenecked).
I have been looking at this sort of stuff recently, and I have found that Adobe Premier Pro CC converts 4K video files on my I5 4440 in around 1.5 hours, where as Sony Vegas Pro 13 was taking between 3.5 hours to 5 hours dependent on what the bit rate etc is. I have not tried it on my main pc yet, but I will later today and see how long it takes on my main pc. When I converted on my I5 machine the GPU was used around 10% the cpu was used to 100%. I will post back once I have tried it on my main pc and let you know how long it takes and what my GPU usage was. I do believe though that you would be better with a X99 setup as you will be able to drop in a Broadwell E cpu which will help, the machine to last longer and with the rumours of a 10c/20t cpu then, that will help later as I believe based off videos I have seen that Adobe and Sony Vegas will use the, 1st cpu to around 100% and then the 2nd cpu to around 50% and offered around a 20% time reduction roughly, over a single cpu machine. If I can as well I will drop Adobe Premier Pro CC on my dads pc which has the 3930K in it, at 4.0Ghz and see what the time difference is between that and my 4790k. ***Edit*** Well I am running the same video conversion on my main pc, and the render time has dropped from around 1.5 hours to around 45 minutes but again it's used a maximum of 10% of the GPU. It appears that Maxwell is not yet supported after looking on the Adobe site, but also it could be because I have not done any editing but just straight pure video conversion. So a 16 minute 4K 50MB bit rate video is taking around 45 mins to convert on the 4790k alone.
It's been ~5 years since I worked here Really go for the 5820K. You can add frequency via OCing, but you can't add cores. The H60 should do still. I don't think you'll need more than a GTX 960, but up to you. My Galax 960 still works fine with my PA328 4K monitor over DP and it's very low power/quiet. If your SSD is the splash drive - yes, the 950 Pro M.2 is 4x the performance in large file transfer. 620W is plenty. 5820K - $330 GA-X99-UD3P - $170 GSkill 32GB - $140 Corsair H60 - $60 Samsung M.2 950 Pro 512GB - $320 Corsair CX600M $70 ZOTAC GeForce GTX 960 ZT-90301-10M 2GB $179, or if you really want 4GB: ASUS GeForce GTX 960 STRIX-GTX960-DC2OC-4GD5 $230 Fractal Arc $80 Win 10 $120 ---- 1530/1580 I dropped the optical, but that's $20, and the CX/80Plus Bronze isn't as 'nice' as your AX/Platinum one, but it's certainly capable enough and still modular. The cost offset for SSD is graphics card and I would strongly say you're more SSD limited than GPU.
+1 for going the x99 route, for that kind of work more cores = better. As for longevity/future-proofing, you do have the upgrade path of the higher-up i7s and/or Xeons if you need it, also the Broadwell-E stuff, which last time I checked should be socket 2011-3 too. Going the S1151/Z170 route at best all you'll get in the way of new stuff is a clock speed bump [and you could probably get that and some through overclocking] as Intel are unlikely to go above 4C/8T on the 'regular' desktop stuff any time soon imo. For SSD, if you're going for a M2 one the SM951 might be worth considering, yes the 950 is the better SSD overall, but the 951 is no slouch and is ~£50 cheaper [though a quick blip at newegg tells me the price different isn't as great that side of the pond].
Ok, after doing some more reading I'm going to go with what Bindi recommended. Thanks for all the advice!
4K post production editing in windows is hard. What is your workflow like? Presumably you copy media to the local machine and work on it there? What file formats are you working with?
Me personally I am working with the files from Shadowplay, them bringing them in to Sony Vegas Pro 13. I then convert them to either 1080p or 4K using the Mainconcept profile iirc at 50Mbp/s. I did try Adobe Premier Pro but when exporting 1080p or 4K using the default profiles I get sync issues on the the rendered file and uploaded. Converting 45 minutes of 4K footage took 4 hours in Sony Vegas Pro 13, probably would have took around 2 hours in Adobe if it was sync'd up once rendered.
