Advice for New System for CC

[Robert Young]

I'm looking at upgrading to a new computer.
My current i7 system is 5 years old and will no longer allow upgrade to newest GPUs etc.
Is there any consensus regarding moving on to Win 8, or to stick with Win 7 64 Pro while I can still get it on a new system??
What is the practical difference between an Intel i7 6 core CPU vs. an Intel Xeon 6 core?
Is one "better" than the other as far as the Adobe CC apps are concerned??
Thanks

[Harm Millaard]

Bob,

The difference between an i7 hexa core and a Xeon hexa core boils down to two major things:

1. Xeon has a higher price tag than an i7 with the same stock clock speed.
2. Xeon can not be over-clocked.

It is somewhat similar to the question, what is the difference between a GeForce and a Quadro card.

1. Quadro is way more expensive than a GeForce card,
2. Quadro is not faster than GeForce
3. Quadro supports 10 bit color, GeForce only 8 bit.

IMO any new system warrants the move to Win8.1 instead of Win7, which will be stopped shortly. In April a major update of Win8 is expected and Win9 (Threshold) is expected in April 2015.

Have a look at Tweakers Page - What kind of PC to use? and the main Tweakers Page

[Paul R Johnson]

I've just built a new one, an one thing is for certain - I HATE Windows 8 - It's too 'domestic' and gadget filled.

SSD drive is a welcome addition for the OS, but what a faff getting CC to not install certain programmes on it!

H81M-D2V motherboard
16GB RAM
i7-4770 3.4 GHz

So far, seems quite speedy compared to the previous one - Core 2 Duo E400 3GHz

[Noa Put]

As long as my NLE supports windows 7 I will continue to use it, I don't see any benefits moving to win 8. I have it on my laptop and I find it utterly annoying having 2 graphical layers on top of eachother each trying to decide which to activate next depending on what program opens. Biggest blunder from Microsoft since Vista.

[Robert Young]

I appreciate everyone's advice and comments.
The Tweaker's Page is a great source of info.
As I really begin to examine the nuisance and expense of switching everything over to a new system, I find myself becoming a bit more forgiving of the old one.
It's an i7 Quad, Win 7 Pro, 24 GB RAM, SSD system drive, RAID 0 media drives, Quadro FX3800 GPU.
I actually am having no significant problems editing either native AVCHD, or Cineform.
Mostly I deliver to web and Blu Ray, and that is no problem either.
I might be trying to fix something that's not really broken yet...

[Al Bergstein]

I agree with a lot of these thoughts, but having worked on every version of Windows the first my feeling is that Windows 8 is still a beta product. Radically altered interface. Total change to your use of it, and things are not where they should be. You waste a ton of time on trying to figure out the simplist of tasks. I bought a new desktop for my wife, and I consider myself extremely technical on Windows since before Windows 3. I've often owned three machines at a time. But this was beyond bad. I know why they did it, but Harm is not quite right. Windows 7 is no where near End of Life. XP was just taken to EOL. Windows 7 is familiar, and hardened. We have at least 3 or 4 more years of Windows 7 being supported. If you have experience on Windows XP or later, just stay with 7 until a year or so more goes by. You'll see why the minute you touch an 8 machine. Words to the wise. If you really want to change the way you work with an OS, then go buy a Mac and load Windows 7 on it. 8 is the best reason for moving to Mac I can think of.

[Robert Young]

Well, I actually managed to hang on to Win XP all the way to Win 7.
I managed to skip the entire Vista era.
From what Harm implied, if I can hold on for another 18 months, Win 9 might be getting close.
I really have heard an awful lot of complaints about Win 8.
Most people loved Win 7 when it was released- I know I did, and still do...

[Noa Put]

I have been a Premiere user up until cs3 and already back then it was a very resource hungry NLE and based on what I read the years after it still is, it seems to benefit a lot (or even depend on) from as much as you can feed it being the fastest processor, graphics card, loads of memory and many drives in an array. But if your current set up (which must have been a very high end system 5 years back) does the job then you are probably better of spending the money on something else.

About windows 8, I do see some small improvements over 7 but it's 2 OS's in one, the metro thing is actually designed for touch screens and there I imagine it works well but it does nothing extra whatsoever in regards to user experience on normal desktop pc's or laptops that require a mouse and keyboard. It looks to me Microsoft was trying to jump on the train called Apple to catch up on the massive success they where having with their tablets and instead of creating one OS specifically designed for touchscreen tablets they decided to put one layer on another. Probably and hopefully they will make up their mind when Windows 9 comes and we can all have a laugh about 8, just as we did with Vista. Windows 7 is the best OS they ever made, even Apple saw that when they stopped making these "I"m a pc" and "I"m a mac" funny ads as soon as Windows 7 appeared. :)

[Harm Millaard]

I currently have three non-server systems, an old laptop running Vista, my old desktop running Win7-64 Pro and my new desktop running Win8.1-64 Enterprise. The servers are running Server 2011 or VMWare.

I completely agree that Vista was and is a disaster. I just never got around to upgrading that old laptop, since I hardly use it any more.

When I got the new desktop, I installed Win8 and it was quite a change coming from Win7. The Metro look still does not appeal to me, but with 8.1 things improved a bit, although in some instances it does not make it a lot easier than with Win7. However, once you have gotten used to the interface there is not much difference between Win7 and Win8 during normal work. All the fundamentals are the same, the tweaking is essentially the same, only the boot times are much faster, the loading of programs is faster and the stability improved, at least in my experience.

Here is a screenshot of my Metro look (note I'm still on CS6, luckily) and my normal desktop, at least my left monitor. Not much changed there from Win7.

[Nigel Barker]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

Bob,

The difference between an i7 hexa core and a Xeon hexa core boils down to two major things:

1. Xeon has a higher price tag than an i7 with the same stock clock speed.
2. Xeon can not be over-clocked.

That's an over-simplistic & partial analysis choosing to ignore stuff like multiple processing & ECC memory. You may not need these things in a desktop personal computer that you build yourself but for servers & workstations it's a different matter.

[Harm Millaard]

Originally Posted by Robert Young

What is the practical difference between an Intel i7 6 core CPU vs. an Intel Xeon 6 core?
Is one "better" than the other as far as the Adobe CC apps are concerned??
Thanks

The question was about a single CPU, not the comparison between a single i7 CPU versus dual Xeons. For instance a single i7-4930K is clearly faster than dual E5-2620's.

Sure, in some cases a dual Xeon E5-2687W or better a dual E5-2695 v2 leaves a single i7 hexa core in the dust, but at a serious price... and then ECC memory is not the best option for a workstation, despite the price. But that was not the question.

[Robert Young]

Harm
So, what gives the best performance for video editing?
Higher clock speed?
More cores?
Dual vs. single??
I was looking at both Dell and HP workstations and the CPU choices are huge.
What best serves the demands of native AVCHD editing, rendering out for delivery, and so on...

[Harm Millaard]

Bob,

The simple answer is: It depends...

AVCHD, MXF, XDCAM and other full HD codecs are relatively simple when compared to 4K, 5K or even higher resolutions, because of the sheer amount of pixels to be handled in UHD.

As you know encoding and decoding is handled by the CPU, not the GPU. Luckily for CC, 7.01.141 and later handle nearly all codec formats natively, even if they are wrapped in a .MOV container and threading has improved significantly over earlier versions of PR. If you use CS6 or earlier and the source material is wrapped in a .MOV container, you are confronted with lousy threading and only 4 GB memory space, due to the QT32Server extension.

Things get complicated if you take final delivery into the picture. AVCHD, MXF, XDCAM and other full HD material is often delivered without any scaling, frame rate conversions, color space conversions, so there is no use for a fast GPU, since it does not come into play at all. The CPU does all the encoding/decoding. This is where number of cores, clock speed and size of the L3 cache have a major impact on performance.

However, with 4K+ material, rescaling often happens on final delivery and that is where the GPU comes into play. Dual Xeons not only have more cores, albeit at a lower clock speed than an over clocked i7, more L3 cache, but most importantly they have dual QPI's, which is a distinct advantage when the GPU comes into play, especially with dual video cards as well.

Unfortunately, dual Xeons are extremely pricey, as are the motherboards that support dual processors, not to mention the additional memory required to profit from all those cores and the extra VRAM on the video card for 4K+ material.

Very roughly speaking, a solid i7-4930K on a good motherboard, over-clocked to around 4.3 GHz, 64 GB RAM, and a GTX 780 (Ti) will cost around $ 2000, when we leave out disks, PSU, cooling, raid controller, etc.

The same components, two Xeon E5-2695 v2, mobo, 128 GB RAM and GTX Titan card will require a lot more. Around $ 6850 with only a single video card, around $ 7850 with dual Titans to benefit from the dual QPI's.

The extra cost of such a dual Xeon system can be worth the expenditure when using a lot of 4K+ material but is IMO overkill for full HD.

One could try to skimp a bit on the Xeons, by opting for dual E5-2650 CPU's, saving around $ 2400 on the CPU and $ 600 on the RAM, but still the total cost would be around $ 3850, noticeably more expensive than the i7 configuration and not any faster, despite 2 x 8 cores plus HT, due to the low clock speed.

Hope this explains it a bit.

[Robert Young]

I sort of get the idea from what you say that for video editing, where usually you are sort of doing one thing at a time- previewing/editing, or rendering a finished timeline to a different format, etc., the overall performance may be more determined by the clock speed than by the number of cores or single vs. dual processers.
So, perhaps a Xeon E5-2667 (Six Core, 2.9GHz, 15M, 8.0GT/s, Turbo) with 32 BG RAM might be more effective than Dual Xeon E5-2620 (Six Core, 2.0GHz, 10M, 7.2 GT/s, Turbo) with 32 GB RAM???

Of course. the other wild card is to imagine what you might be doing several years down the road- currently I'm not editing 4K, or 3-D, but 2017- who knows...

[Byron Jones]

Harm, I have been primarily a Mac user since XP 2nd Ed. I never upgraded past that one. However, I have just been limping by recently editing multicam HD video on a Macbook Pro and Thunderbolt External Raid drive. This year I am hoping to invest in a proper editing system. You mentioned two drastically different price options in this thread. I am curious about where the new Mac Pro falls compared to the two options you mentioned. Price wise, it is in-between, but how would it compare performance wise. I am still on CS5.5 if that matters, but I imagine I will eventually cave and go to CC. I fell in love with my mac computers after switching and I cannot imagine going back to a windows based system for my house, but business is business. If a windows system is better/cheaper, than that is the direction my business will go. To me the specs look impressive on the new Mac Pro. Wondering about storage space, though. Can be configured only with one SSD HDD. Thunderbolt 2 looks like the fastest option for an external "source files" drive. Is that going to be fast enough for multicam HD? Suggestions?