Premiere Pro CS4 Benchmark

[Harm Millaard]

I would like to draw your attention to Bill Gehrke's benchmark program and invite you to actually run the benchmark. The more results, the easier it is to see how your own system holds up or where improvements can be made.

Adobe Forums: PPBM is Back--Benchmarking Premiere Pro...

[David Dwyer]

Thanks I'll run it tonight :)

[Pete Bauer]

This is awesome! I don't see a QX6700 on Bill's chart yet so I'll give it a try.

Harm, if I'm not misunderstanding the chart, it looks like Win7 actually did outperform Vista even at a lower (over)clock, but otherwise identical system?

Of course, with an "ancient" QX6700, I've been aching to build a new system. Anyone have a 55XX dual processor workstation with lots of RAM onboard to test? I was thinking about holding off until I could go crazy with a 6-core Gulftown dual processor workstation next year, but I wonder how performance vs cost will be when you get SO MUCH PPro performance out of an OC i920 for so little money? What are your thoughts, Harm?

[Harm Millaard]

Pete,

Currently the i7-920 overclocked is the most economical solution and the enormous benefit of a X58 mobo, that is significantly more expensive than a P55 mobo for use with an equally priced and equally performing i7-860, is that a simple BIOS update will allow a simple exchange of a Bloomfield (i7) for a hex-core Gulftown.

I currently have a Dell Poweredge T410 with dual E5520's in the hallway for testing VMware, but have not even unpacked it yet. So no results to give yet.

If you look at PassMark Software - PerformanceTest System Benchmarks - Fastest Performing PCs you will see a number of significant results.

Look for instance at BL#46692 (rank 16), which is a dual W5580, or BL#75006 (rank 20) with dual X5570's and compare these with BL#21147 (rank 15) and you will see the economic advantage of i7's versus dual Xeon's.

BTW, I'm still waiting for the Top 20 list to be updated with my latest Win7 results (BL#106949). When that happens, I will have rank #1 with Vista (score 6055), #9 with Win7 (score 4623) at much lower clock speed (3.44 GHz), and the current score of 4300, now at #15, but then dropping down to #16.

And yes, Win7 is around 10% faster than Vista in these tests.

[David Dwyer]

DavidDwyer, Personal or Computer ID
HP Proliant 115GS, Computer Manufacturer
HP, Computer Model
159.4, secs Total Benchmark Time
7.1, secs AVI Encoding Time
94.3, secs MPEG Elapsed Time
58, secs Rendering Time
AMD, CPU Manufacturer
2.1GHZ, CPU Model
2.1, GHz CPU speed
1, Number of CPU chips
4, Total Number of Cores
8, GB RAM
4.1, APP Version PPBM4 DV
Win 7 64bit, OSVersion
SATA, OS Disk Interface
150, GB OS Disk Capacity
10,000, OS Disk Speed
SATA, Project Disk Interface
400x2 R0, GB Project Disk Capacity
7200, Project Disk Speed
Nvida FX3700, Graphics Board
, Comment


Tried to email but bounced back

[Harm Millaard]

David,

I copied your results and have mailed them to Bill. Thanks for your effort.

Your results look very good for an AMD system. Once they have been included, I'll have a second look.

[Pete Bauer]

Ran my system two different ways and emailed the results:

- First was default PPBM which used my D drive (older 10K Raptor) for all files
- Second I changed the location for preview and output files to a 7200 SATA RAID0 750GB x 2 drive

Text files attached. I was a little surprised that even though it is onboard RAID at 7200, it was still a little slower than writing all the files to a single 10K drive.

Ok, Harm, now set up that dual E5520 system and give it a go. Gotta know!

[Harm Millaard]

Pete,

I took the liberty of mailing your results to Bill.

Looking at your data, I tried to look up your mobo, but the 6xx series is no longer available, so I am merely guessing about an explanation for the differences between your results.

The differences are pretty small, but the relatively compute intensive parts of the benchmark, rendering and encoding to MPEG2-DVD seem to suffer the most from using the nVidia chipset and raid capabilities. Maybe the speed advantage of the raid is more than offset by the overhead of the nVidia chipset for the raid, having a relatively high CPU load. Also, the Raptor is by nature very quick and depending on your 750 G disks (16 or 32 G cache) may have a significant advantage for the relatively small files used in the benchmark.

From the looks of it, some further tuning of your system (services turned to manual, processes turned off) may give you some more responsiveness.

[Pete Bauer]

Naw, what I need is the latest Monster Computer.
;-)

Don't forget to benchmark that E5520 -- I was so sure you'd immediately unbox it, set it up, and run the PPBM before taking a bathroom break that I could hardly sleep last night. I was so very deeply disappointed, perhaps clinically depressed, to wake up this morning and not see the results posted.
:-)~

Well, maybe it isn't THAT urgent, but am interested in seeing what it'll do. If the dual processor machines don't give all that much improvement for the large increase in cost, I may break down and build an i920.

[Harm Millaard]

Pete,

Up to late last night my son and I were up to discuss the installation of the disks in that system (whether to install 1, 1.5 or 2.0 TB disks, how to install more than the default 6 disks, how to preserve cooling charateristics, etc.), contemplating photos of the interior, arguing about the benefits of passive CPU cooling versus active cooling, the lack of fans in the default system, the way Dell had done the SAS connectors and the like. When I finally called it quits, my son was still busy on installing the system. I will ask him to run the PassMark test but since it is his system, I don't think I can get him as far as to install PR and run Bill's benchmark. (Much of our discussion went over our VPN connection). BTW, Bill has received your results and will try to get them posted by tonight.

Another side remark, PassMark informed me that they do not accept results in the Top-20 list from the same machine, even if running different OS'es, so they will not publish my results (4623) while running at 3441 MHz clock speed, because my machine already holds the top position (6055) while running at 4195 MHz. I argued that it might be interesting to bend the rules a bit, since my system was the only one of all the single CPU systems running at far below 4000+ MHZ in the Top-20. Although they conceded that it was interesting, it would give them serious headaches to bend the rules for me. So no publication of the results. You have to do with the image in my previous post.

Bill Gehrke's results, as well as Averdahl's will give you an inkling of the performance of dual Xeon's versus a single i7, as do the PassMark results. If you really want top-notch performance, wait a little bit for SuperMicro to come out with dual Xeon hex-cores somewhere next year. However, if you want to be at the forefront of the technology curve, be prepared to pay for it. The other drawback is the limited functionality of the installed BIOS, which makes overclocking rather difficult.

I'll keep you informed on our progress with the T410 system.

[Steve Kalle]

Harm: I noticed that you have the 1680ix in your pc. I just added one to my pc that also has a 3ware 9650 in it and I also setup a Matrox Mini around the same time. But now my system has a serious lag when clicking on folders and opening apps. I am using a 1 month old Vista x64 installed on an Intel X-25 80GB SSD, ASUS P6T & i7 920. I have 7 x64 Ultimate and am about to install it but I would like your feedback on any problems you have had with your 1680ix in Vista and 7.

I uninstalled all Matrox software & drivers after 2 days of use so I am hoping something got screwed up from the Matrox drivers. (I didn't like the lag in Premiere while using the Mini)

One other quick question about your ASUS WS board: I didn't get it because I had read many people were having problems with Raid cards. Have you had any issues related to your board? I ask because I realized that I need more pci express slots and am considering that board.

Thanks

[David Dwyer]

Originally Posted by Steve Kalle

Harm: I noticed that you have the 1680ix in your pc. I just added one to my pc that also has a 3ware 9650 in it and I also setup a Matrox Mini around the same time. But now my system has a serious lag when clicking on folders and opening apps. I am using a 1 month old Vista x64 installed on an Intel X-25 80GB SSD, ASUS P6T & i7 920. I have 7 x64 Ultimate and am about to install it but I would like your feedback on any problems you have had with your 1680ix in Vista and 7.

I uninstalled all Matrox software & drivers after 2 days of use so I am hoping something got screwed up from the Matrox drivers. (I didn't like the lag in Premiere while using the Mini)

One other quick question about your ASUS WS board: I didn't get it because I had read many people were having problems with Raid cards. Have you had any issues related to your board? I ask because I realized that I need more pci express slots and am considering that board.

Thanks

Steve can you tell me about these Matrox cards? What card do you have and how much does it speed up your video editing? Is it worth the money?

[Pete Bauer]

...and while we're picking brains, a question I've been meaning to ask the seasoned overclockers around here: do the processor and most/all of the motherboards allow the QPI on the i920 to be overclocked as well, or does that stay at 4.8 despite increasing the clock speed of the processor?

Not sure how much it matters, but I was wondering about that in terms of possible impact to AE OpenGL or other software using the graphics card to speed tasks; perhaps the slower QPI could get saturated?

[Harm Millaard]

Steve,

I have not experienced any problems with the Areca controller. In fact I am quite happy with it, since it gives me a sustained read transfer rate of over 850 MB/s and a sustained write transfer of around 600 MB/s, regardless of fill rate, and 10 TB of net space (12 TB gross in raid30). I have not experienced any delays under Vista 64, nor under Win7 64. Just today I installed the official Win7 drivers for the 1680iX, no hiccups, and a slight performance improvement over the Vista drivers, around +7%.

[Harm Millaard]

Pete,

On my system, which is somewhat overclocked to 3.6 GHz for the CPU and memory to 1440 MHz, I use a QPI link of 3240 MHz, which should be multiplied by 2 to get the effective QPI rate, so 6.3 GHz. Most mobo's give you endless possibilities to fine-tune your overclocking and voltages, but I have a simple rule: Keep voltages as low as possible and adjust the rest (BCLK, multiplier, turbo mode, etc.) to give maximum stability and longevity. Then edit along. Gamers would probably cry out loud at my simplistic approach, but it works for me. While trying out different settings, I keep a close watch on voltages and temperatures and check stability with things like Prime95 to ensure the system remains stable under heavy load. I don't want to have a system stall halfway during a long render...