System upgrades

[fionnm61793799]

Hi there, Just about to commit to a new computer for editing on Premiere. Using a laptop at the moment, with plenty of go but a woeful graphics card. This is how the spec looks at the moment (apologies for the format issues with pasting!) I am on a fairly tight budget, but would be willing to spend an extra £100 or so if there were any obvious areas where a modest upgrade would improve performance.

Sorry. I'm a journalist rather than a pro editor, so delving into computer specs scares the pants off me.... especially when it means forking out my own money!

Processor (CPU)

Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-6800K (3.4GHz) 15MB Cache

Motherboard

ASUS® X99-A II: ATX, USB 3.1, SATA 6 GB/s, RGB Ready

Memory (RAM)

16GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 8GB)

Graphics Card

6GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1060 - DVI, HDMI, 3 x DP - GeForce GTX VR Ready!

FREE Rocket League with select GTX 10 Series GPUs!

1st Hard Disk

5TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 128MB CACHE

2nd Hard Disk

5TB SATA-III 3.5" HDD, 6GB/s, 7200RPM, 128MB CACHE

RAID

RAID 1 (MIRRORED VOLUME - 2 x same size & model HDD / SSD)

[Moderator note: moved to best forum]

[RoninEdits]

if money is tight, or just looking for best value, you might want to consider the amd ryzen cpu's. their 6 core and 8 core cpu's are around half the price of intel's. if you want intel, you might want to wait for their next release coming soon.

as far the hardware list you have above goes:

the ram should at least be ddr4-2400, but anything closer to ddr4-3000 would be better. the next gen intel cpu's should be ddr4-2666 default.

it looks like you have two hdd's listed, it would be nice to have at least one ssd for os/apps and some cache.

you also have raid 1 listed, if you are planning on using it for an automatic backup i would recommend against. backups need to be isolated from the source.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Dump the antique hard disk drives and get SSD's.  If you are careful a $100 128 GB SATA III disk drive can be used for the boot drive with the OS and Applications.   Dump the RAID 1 it is of no real value.  You can use hard disk drives for backup and archiving.

If it were my buy and the timing allowed, i would wait for the new X series processors available shortly and for instance the new 6-core i7-7800X is rumored to cost about $400.  This will be a longer lifetime product.  Estimated ETA is "summer".

[RoninEdits]

Bill Gehrke  wrote:

If it were my buy and the timing allowed, i would wait for the new X series processors available shortly and for instance the new 6-core i7-7800X is rumored to cost about $400.  This will be a longer lifetime product.  Estimated ETA is "summer".

is there any particular reason or feature of the intel that you would personally spend nearly 2x as much for maybe 15% more performance? and what do you mean by longer lifetime product? is intel extending x299 to more than the usual two cpu generations?

[Bill_Gehrke]

Is $400 2x as much?

If you go with X299 versus x99 which is going to give you more future upgradability for a longer lifetime?

[RoninEdits]

$220 is amd's entry level 6 core, so $220 vs $400 is the nearly 2x i stated. the amd 8 core is 300-400 as well, so its possible to get an 8 core for the same price as intel 6 core. with more affordable motherboards as well, amd has value locked up. so i'll ask again, why would you spend nearly 2x as much for an intel cpu?

x299 will be a nice upgrade and i would suggest people wait for it over x99, but for most builds here i don't see the future upgradability for a longer lifetime claim being valid. x99 was already capable for most builds here, and x299 + skylake-x might still not be enough for those needing more. its speculation as to if one would keep the x299 longer than x99, which gets into their needs and used part prices vs new parts with new features like ddr5 and pcie 4.0 that will make x299 obsolete. is there something specific in x299 that makes you think its more future-proof for the average forum build?

[Bill_Gehrke]

Thanks for the update!

My major tech reason I do not like Ryzen yet is the limited PCIe lanes.

[RoninEdits]

amd's x399 will be a direct competitor to x99 and x299 for folks that need more pcie lanes and memory, unless they only want a 6-8 core for some reason. amd's x399 is rumored to have 64 pcie lanes, vs 44/28 on skylake-x. for folks needing pcie lanes, it may be amd all the way if 64 lanes turns out to be true. amd's x399 may be even more of a problem for intel to compete against on prices as workloads needing 10-16 cpu cores are going to limit intel's ipc advantage and expose intel's high prices even more. intel's one-step-better response to amd's x399 16 core is the intel i9 18 core. but all the intel cpu's could continue to cost 2x as much as the amd counterpart. so again for value, it will be very hard to justify intel.

considering how content intel was/is to screw over consumers with high prices until they had to compete with amd, i think its better for consumers to reward competition by buying amd. even right now intel should be dropping prices on x99, but they haven't. they will make up some marketing spin about how they were able to lower production costs or something on x299 to justify the massive discounts, but the truth will be they had to drop prices or they won't sell anything vs amd.

[fionnm61793799]

Hey, thanks guys!

Lots of food for though there. Really appreciate you taking the time. I did wonder about going for 1 SSD, and if RAID is of no real value then that makes perfect sense.

Everything seems a little clearer this morning! (it is currently morning in Scotland)