Old PC died, need new one $3,000 budget.. What is ideal for faster renders?

[tommyj90070646]

Old PC

64gb ddr3

4930k six core

780ti

I work on red epic raw 8k footage and I'll tell you using neat video or sharpening will make the footage go from 10 minute render time with no effects to 56 minute render time if I apply those effects.

What assists in faster render times the cpu, gpu or ram? I didn't notice a huge jump when I upgraded from 32 to 64.

Would it better to buy something like 4 top of the line AMD cards? Or 1 gtx 1080? Im seeing workstations just aren't viable and way too expensive for me to be worth it.

I was thinking new build would be

128gb ram ddr4

gtx 1080

6900k 8 core processor 4ghz overclocked

Will I see a massive increase in render times? Or just marginal?

Would it be better if it was 32 gb ddr4 ram four amd r9's?

Also I want to do a little bit of 3d simulations, so I'm guessing that's gpu intensive more so than cpu and ram... I'm unsure what to get... Any help is appreciate thanks guys.

[RoninEdits]

recent generations of intel cpu's have been about 2-5% faster per generation, so most of the performance gains over your 6 core would actually be from the 2 extra cores in a new 8 core cpu. the new 8 core might be around 30%+ faster of a cpu over the old 6 core you have.

faster render times are usually determined by the cpu, but if you are using any gpu fx or plugins, like neat video, faster gpu(s) can help speed up that part of the render processes. i believe neat video can use multiple video cards, but i'm not sure how many max.

current top of the line amd r9 video cards appear to be limited to 4gb of vram, so that won't be good. the alternative would be dual gtx 1070 8gb cards, or 1080's if budget allows. amd and nvidia will be releasing new cards soon, perhaps in a few weeks, so they might have better options or might help lower some prices of existing cards. if you are going with multiple video cards, now or in the future, you may want to consider the pcie slot spacing/layout on the motherboard you choose. having some spacing between video cards will help them get more air.

if you can salvage enough storage (ssd's/hdd's) from the old computer to carry into a new build you could get an i7-6900k, 64gb ram, dual gtx 1070's and everything else to build a new computer for right around $3k. you might be able to re-use the old computer case, cpu heatsink, and perhaps windows license to save money too. if the power supply is around 5+ years old, i would get a new one. intel also has the 10 core i7-6950X at around $1600 if you wanted to focus on cpu performance, but it may be out of budget.

[tommyj90070646]

Do you think the new risen amd processor would beat the 6950x in render performance? It'd save me a lot of money on the motherboard and CPU.

[chrisw44157881]

the 1700x is faster than the 6900k in multicore benchmark tests. as to if that correlates perfectly to premiere export numbers, I'd wait until march 3rd. but since its half price, its a no brainer from a budget perspective. and would amd instruction sets crash adobe? we won't know till next week.

[tommyj90070646]

Should I wait for the 1080ti too do you think? Also how long until intel prices usually drop after competition shows up with this ind of deal?

[chrisw44157881]

this may give an indication for graphics cards in premiere and octane.The GTX 1080 is about 4% faster than the GTX 980Ti and about 6.5% faster than the Titan X. Again, we won't know exactly until next week, but probably 4-6% faster exports if you had to guestimate, similar to two 1070's.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/GTX-1070-and-GTX-1080-Premiere-Pro-Performance-810/#Concl...

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Titan-X-Performance-PCI-E-3-0-x8-vs-x16-851/#Conclusion

intel won't drop for probably 6 months, until word gets out to general consumers en masse and amd chips get installed into laptops in large batches.

[RoninEdits]

the new gtx 1080 ti might be a slightly cut-down pascal titan x, so it may have about 40% more cuda cores than the gtx 1080. the first puget article chris links to on puget is for the old maxwell titan x. the newer pascal titan x is much more powerful than a gtx 1080. here is a puget article with the pascal titan x, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-2015-3-Pascal-GPU-Performance-840/.  you can see some tests it performs slightly better, in others the same as the gtx 1080 and 1070. those results are due to the cpu being the bottleneck as premiere is mostly a cpu based program. a more gpu intensive timeline would see bigger performance gains from the pascal titan x. if you are looking to get a single video card, the 1080ti might be the best option to handle the red media and neat video plugin. then again, amd's new video cards may offer more budget friendly options when they come out.

the amd am4 ryzen platform is like the intel z170/270 platform, so intel might not change its x99 pricing unless they are forced to by sales. amd ryzen should perform well for many software, but until its tested with premiere we don't know how good it will perform with premiere. there is still a chance the amd 8 core amd will perform like an intel 6 core in premiere, and if that happens amd won't be recommended on these forums. the am4 platform will also have lower max memory and only dual channel vs x99's quad channel. am4 will also be limited for expansion, basically only 2 video cards vs x99 with 4-5. from the second puget article chris linked about x16 vs x8 for gpu, you can see in some scenarios x8/x8 (which the am4 platform will have to use for dual gpu) can impact performance depending on the software. the x99 platform can run dual gpu at x16/x16 and not suffer any performance hit.

[tommyj90070646]

Do you think 5 1060's would be better than 2 1080s? I work with red 8k alot so I'm wondering if this will help previews and export times.

[RoninEdits]

while raw performance numbers might end up slightly better with 5x 1060's vs 2x 1080's, there are some problems with that...

first, not all software can scale 100% with additional gpu's. bill (the main hardware guru in the forums) has done some testing with 2x 1060's and found they outperformed 1 gtx 1080 in premiere. that is basically 100% scaling of performance for dual gpu's to be able to do that. if premiere only gained 50% boost from the second gpu, then in that situation dual 1060's would have been much slower. i don't know how well neat video denoise can scale with multiple gpu's, but if it doesn't scale 100% it won't be worth the 5x 1060's. you can try looking thru the neat video forums to see what they might suggest. i looked at the neat video forums bit and from what i could see multiple gpu scaling wasn't so good, but they were mostly older posts and neat video has been improving the plugin.

second, gtx 1060's only have 6gb of vram max. i would really recommend staying at or above 8gb. the gtx 1080 ti has several rumors from 10-12gb of memory.

third, 5 gpu's can only be done on a single x99 motherboard if some or all of the video cards are single slot, like some quadro's or radeon pro's. so for multiple high end gtx video cards with an x99 motherboard, its more reasonable to have 4 dual slot video cards. while 4 gtx 1060's could save around $200 vs 2 1080's, it wouldn't be worth the savings to have less vram and no room for expansion.

the gpu can help premiere with red media debayering and any gpu accelerated fx and plugins, including lumetri color and neat video. the more those gpu accelerated functions/plugins are used, the more benefit faster and multiple video cards will have to speed up preview renders and exports. however the cpu will still have a big part to play with rendering and exports, so it can be a limiting factor too. neat video has the option to use gpu only, which might help free up the workload some on the cpu. using windows task manager and gpu-z  can let you see what the cpu and gpu(s) are doing, to see how the computer is handling your premiere projects and what might be holding performance back. so if you start with a single video card, you can monitor the computer to see if the gpu is a possible bottleneck and then decide about adding another.

[RjL190365]

In addition to what RoninEdits stated, do realize that the LGA 2011-v3 CPUs have only 40 total PCI-e lanes. So for five GPUs to have even fit that platform, none of the GPUs will run at anywhere near their rated x16 bandwidth. Instead, what happens there would be that at best you get four of the GPUs running at only x8 bandwidth while the fifth will only run at x4. As such, the performance with five GPUs will be barely more than double the performance of that with only a single GPU. Not worth anywhere near the price that you'd be paying for all five of them.

[RoninEdits]

there are a few motherboards that send/assign all 40 lanes to the pcie slots, so they could run all 5 video cards at x8. for the gtx 1060, running at x8 should have little to no performance impact. its the gtx 1080 and titan's that i would start to hesitate running at x8.

[tommyj90070646]

With these new amd boards people are saying everything will be throttled like ram and the 1080... Should I steer clear of amd for this new build?

Also I saw on corridor digital they had 4 1080's and using octane rendered a super complex scene in mere seconds with octane, I wonder how well that'd translate to premiere or after fx.

[RoninEdits]

amd am4 is going to be somewhat risky until others test it and see what its capable of. we may not see any good premiere testing for a few weeks, possibly longer. if it turns out to be good, then a $400-500 amd cpu may compete against a $1000 intel, saving you $500-600. you need to decide if you can wait for it to be released, or longer for it to be tested, and what you might do with the computer if it turns out poorly... 

i think octane is 100% gpu renderer, so it doesn't get held back by the cpu. premiere and after effects are primarily cpu bound programs and won't work like octane does.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Of course I do not know anything about AMD yet but since Premiere and After Effects both are very CPU intensive I will give you some results that I have gotten with my PPBM testing

With my 8-core i7-5960X that I have the best CPU intensive test that PPBM gets with mine at 4.5 GHz and 64 GB of RAM and Premiere 11 (CC 2017) I get 250 seconds.  I just recently have a PPBM submission with the new 10-core i7-5960X at 4.2 GHz on that same CPU intensive Premiere Pro timeline took only 205 seconds.  A very significant improvement.