i5 6600K System Can Edit 4K60?

[Crazy321]

Friends,

I have looked high and low and all over the web with no good answer to this question. I am having slow (stutters) in playback/editing of 1080p60, 4K30, and 4K60 (these are shot on Galaxy S8/Phantom 4 Pro). CPU is @ 100% during playback, Memory 50%, GPU 1-5%, SSD 3-5%.This is very frustrating as I am sure many have experienced, it makes it unbearable to work. My goal in making this post is to find out if an i5 6600K can edit smoothly 4K60 footage. If possible what would need to be changed to my current system. I am sure upgrading my current 8GB of RAM would be a start, but if someone has some experience/knowledge to knowing that 64GB of RAM in the system still would not suffice for 4K30/60 editing, then I would rather save the time of trial and error and just go ahead and upgrade to the new Intel i7 8700K and purchase 16-64GB RAM together, and future-proof a bit.

This build was made originally for gaming.

Later this evening, I will post a video showing exactly the circumstances. It will be linked to this forum. Current specs are below.

System:

Intel i5 6600K

8GB 2133 DDR4 Memory

EVGA 1070 Founder's Editon

Samsung EVO 850 256GB

PS: I do not want to edit using proxies, as I am a very spastic editor and do not have a consistent style workflow, lol.

Thanks a bunch!

[Moderator note: moved to best forum]

[Crazy321]

Oh, and Merry Christmas, all!

[RjL190365 · Accepted solution]

There are two additional problems outside of the obvious lack of sufficient system RAM:

1) No quad-core, non-hyperthreadable i5 CPU can come anywhere close to handling 4k video material smoothly.

2) That CPU is also limiting the benefits of your current GPU. Even in renders of timelines with a ton of GPU-accelerated effects applied, your CPU would be pegged to near 100% while the GPU usage would average well below 50% and be erratic. This is a sign that the GPU is overkill for your CPU (or more specific, the CPU cannot match the performance of the GPU in GPGPU processing tasks).

And forget about upgrading to an i7-8700K on your current motherboard. You will need an entirely new motherboard with an Intel Z370 chipset. The new Coffee Lake CPUs, despite continuing to use the same physical LGA 1151 socket as your current CPU, has different electrical pin assignments from the Skylake and Kaby Lake predecessors. Therefore, the 100- and 200-series motherboards will not work with the Coffee Lake CPUs, nor will the new Z370 motherboards work with the older Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs. If you mismatch the motherboards and CPUs, the system will simply fail to function properly.

[Crazy321]

Thanks, RjL190365.

Great information. I understand now, so in your opinion I would need to upgrade to Z370 motherboard and 8700K along with how much RAM for 4K60 editing?

[RjL190365]

32GB. RAM prices right now are outrageously high, and might not come down for another year or so.

[Crazy321]

32GB would be enough for 4K60 though correct? A few hundred more dollars to go to 64GB would not be an issue.

[RjL190365]

Yes, but getting 64GB right now would cost you well over $800 USD - more than both the CPU and motherboard combined - by itself without any other component upgrades. And you will need 4x16GB sticks, not 8x8GB sticks (which won't work with your planned platform because the LGA 1151 platform has only four DIMM slots at most), for the Z370 platform.

[Crazy321]

What speed RAM would you suggest. I see the Coffee Lake processors are calling for higher than 2133mhz.

[RjL190365]

Those outrageous prices that I mentioned above were two years ago. Nowadays, RAM pricing is much more sane. 64 GB, via four 16 GB sticks, now costs around $200 USD. Thus, if your system can handle that much RAM, such a purchase is now a no-brainer.

[Janainamajorri]

Se o povo ganhasse pelo menos mais algum deles 4k 60 talvez seria mais fácil pra comprar as coisas esses dinheiro tá pouco de maís