Final Touches on First Workstation Build.

[videoeditor246346]

Hey guys,

I am close to setting up my Premiere workstation after a few months of research/planning. I wanted to list my specs/workflow and see if the experts here can chime in to see if I could optimize it any better. Any opinions are well appreciated.

CPU:

AMD Ryzen 1700X

Can probably overclock to 3.8Ghz but tired of random BSOD errors in the middle of working on projects.

RAM:

Corsair Vengeance 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3000

Can overclock to a stable 2666Mhz since latest BIOS update.

GPU:

MSI GeForce GTX 1060 6GB ARMOR OCV1

No need to upgrade to 1080Ti because of negligible performance gains within Premiere Pro specifically. I ran my own tests with a 1080Ti to come to this conclusion.

Motherboard:

ASRock X370 Taichi

Has lots of great features but boot time is slow (~25 seconds).

OS Drive:

Samsung 960 EVO 250GB

Works great, can't say I'm missing out on anything from the 960 PRO.

Media Drives:

Hitachi Deskstar NAS 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM (x3 in RAID0)

Created volume via disk management disk striping. Seems to run okay, but I can't notice any real-life performance gains compared to working from a G-Drive.

Cache Drives:

Samsung 850 EVO 250GB (x2 in RAID0)

Created volume via disk management disk striping. Not sure if there is any value of having two SSDs for cache files.

Backup Drives:

G-Drive 5TB (x2)

G-Drive 2TB

Everything from the 12TB RAID is manually backed up to these external drives. Looking into using a program called Beyond Compare to schedule automatic folder copying. Has anyone else used this program? I set up this configuration instead of a 24TB RAID10 because of the convenience of having portable drives.

Archive Drives:

WD easystore 8TB External Hard Drive

WD Caviar Black 1TB 7200RPM (x2)

WD Elements 2TB

Archive space for wrapped projects. Quickly filling up. Anyone used cloud-based archive storage before? Is it cost effective? I have gigabit internet so it's an option.

Lender Drive:

LaCie Rugged 4TB

This drive goes out to other editors I'm working with.

[Bill_Gehrke]

You might want to consider for your lender drive the Samsung T5 portable USB SSD   It is SATA III speed if you have a USB 3.1 Gen 2 port available.  This will allow direct editing off of it and you do not have hard drive fragility and slow down as it fills up.  I think your other editors would love that.

As you guessed I do not think you will see any advantage to the cache drive for two in RAID 0, besides the cost you have the complexity of setting it up and twice storage which would be an absolute wasted.  I assume you keep the cache cleaned up frequently.

[videoeditor246346]

Hi Bill,

Great to hear from you again.

Thank you for recommending that drive. I will keep it in mind. It also seems like it could be a good idea to have a 250GB T5 handy as a portable media cache drive if I had to work from a laptop on a job outside of the office...

I will put my secondary 850 EVO back in my backup workstation as an OS/programs drive. Unless, maybe you think it is beneficial to have a dedicated SSD for exporting to? As of now, I export to the same RAID0 array containing my source media. I was taught by my mentor to structure my projects as such:

1. Projects

2. Footage > Cameras > Cards

3. Audio > Sound/Music/VO

4. GFX

5. Misc

6. Exports > Cut 1/Cut 2/Cut 3... and so on

Also, I just ran PPBM- the following were the numbers generated in the Output.csv file:

"118","92","24","586", Premiere Version:, 11.1.2.22

Is that a bad benchmark?

[exile1972]

You've obviously done solid research. One added thought, the Ryzen will not allow you to make use of Thunderbolt. Just in case you have a need in the future.

[videoeditor246346]

Hey Exile,

I know Thunderbolt 3 is slowly beiong implemented into some newer Intel chipsets, however it still seems like it's in its infant stages. I read somewhere that they had plans to make it more widespread in 2018.

I wanted to make a custom DIT workstation in a pelican case with a thunderbolt 3 enabled mobo and a 7820x. If I had endless money...

[exile1972]

In case you're interested, Thunderbolt 3 is now available in a number of motherboards. I have the gigabyte x99p-sli because it's compatible with my i7-5820k CPU but there's a variety of other Motherboards with TB3. On the Thunderbolt website there's 20 motherboards now listed.

It's also working well in my setup so I fully recommend TB3 in the windows environment.

[videoeditor246346]

How does it help in your day-to-day operations? What drives are you using?

[exile1972]

I have two OWC Thunderbay 4 drive (12T) raids which are Thunderbolt 2 and so it was essential that I add TB to my setup. TB2 is plenty fast for 4k editing and so when the need arises to replace the Thunderbay I'll then upgrade to a TB3 raid.

[videoeditor246346]

Ooo nice. What kind of speeds do you get on something like that?

[Bill_Gehrke]

My recommendation follows the KISS rule that 6 destination workflow must be challegeing for archiing and backup, but then I am not a production shop.  You are following our dear departed Harm's lots of hard drives rule  With todays SSD's and Super Speed M>2 PCIe x4 Gen 3 SSD's we can start thinking differently.

Your benchmark results ."118","92","24","586", are not great. and specifiacally your 586 seconds CPU only score is lousy,  From other test results on the Ryzen 7 1700 you should be aroung 260 seconds.  You need to tune that beast and get twice the CPU horsepower..  Start by going to Task Manager/Startup and diable almost every program you can.  If any are really needed that will turn themselves back on as required. Have you turned off indexing ion project related drives?

Your GTX 1060 is a good choice and your 24 seconds essentially matches my matches my 24 second score for my GTX 1060 6GB.

Your Disk I/O test of 118 seconds tells me your write rate from Premiere is about 300 MB/sec this is where a 960 EVO could give you  >1300 MB/second.

I have to run

[exile1972]

Bill's benchmark test gives the Premiere write speed at 579mbps with the raid.

[Bill_Gehrke]

exile1972  wrote

Bill's benchmark test gives the Premiere write speed at 579mbps with the raid.

I hope you meant 579 MB/sec (little "b" is bits not bytes)

[exile1972]

yes, sorry, my grammatical mistake. 579 MB/sec is the write speed in Premiere.