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RjL190365
Legend
February 19, 2020
Question

I have just made my last hardware upgrade (at least for the next three years)!

  • February 19, 2020
  • 13 replies
  • 2707 views

Two-and-a-half months ago, I upgraded the guts of my longtime main PC from a 4th-Generation Intel i7-4790K quad-core CPU to an AMD Ryzen R7 3800X CPU. I have since added a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus m.2 NVMe SSD to that PC, but remained saddled with a GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB card that I have had for almost three years.

 

Today, I have just upgraded that - to a GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GB card. Before I installed it, I moved the GTX 1060 to my spare miniITX PC that still has a 7th-Generation Intel i7-7700 CPU. I then ran the "Standard" preset of the Puget Systems' Premiere Pro benchmark on that PC with both a GTX 1050 Ti I had in there before and the GTX 1060. The GTX 1060 made only a slight improvement in the overall score over the GTX 1050 Ti with that quad-core CPU, with overall scores of between 340 and 352 with either of those GPUs.

 

When I ran the Puget tests on my recently upgraded main PC (still with the GTX 1060), it scored a rather poor 518 using the "Standard" preset. And the primary reason for such a poor score compared to what the CPU is capable of is that the GTX 1060 itself is a weakling these days. The overall playback score with 4k/59.94p heavy GPU effects was less than half that of the overall playback score of the R7 3800X with 4k/59.94p heavy CPU effects. But after removing the GTX 1060 and installing the RTX 2060 SUPER, the overall "Standard" preset score jumped from 518 all the way to 600. The GPU's overall playback score with heavy GPU effects, although somewhat higher overall than my system's CPU playback score with heavy CPU effects, is now much more in line with what I had expected from my system - and it also showed just how important the CPU/GPU performance balance really is.

 

So there you have it. For Premiere Pro it is best to spend roughly equal amounts of money on both the CPU and the GPU {in the case of the R7-3700X or 3800X, the ideal GPU would be an RTX 2060, with or without the "SUPER" designation, or even eVGA's new $300-ish RTX 2060 KO (which is actually a cut-down version of the RTX 2070/2080 rather than a from-the-ground-up midrange GPU)} or a newer GPU whose performance is the equivalent to the comparable GPUs in existence at the time the CPUs were new.

 

Randall

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    RjL190365Author
    Legend
    March 14, 2020

    There is one more piece of advice that I will be giving in this discussion:

     

    I do not recommend buying a high(er)-end system just for the sake of "future-proofing." That concept does not exist any more. You see, by the time that new software requires all the power of that (very) expensive CPU, it will also require hardware capabilities that are not present at all whatsoever in current hardware. So instead, I will recommend that one purchases a PC build that is sufficient for today's needs, and worry about the future later.

     

    EDIT: I re-ran the benchmark with the 0.9b version of the PugetBench set on my system running the 14.0.4 version of Premiere Pro, with the RAM set to both DDR4-3200 and DDR4-2133. While my result with the memory set to DDR4-3200 is as expected (the Extended overall score of 637 and the Standard overall score of 611), the result with the RAM speed set to only DDR4-2133 showed a drop - all the way down to 596 for the Extended and 570 for the Standard. Since that time I saw another Ryzen 7 3800X system pop up with the ostensibly superior-performing RTX 2080 SUPER GPU but with that system's 64 GB of RAM running at only DDR4-2133 speed. That system scored better than mine did at that same RAM speed, but still underperformed my same system with the memory set at DDR4-3200. Why would one shoot himself in the foot by going with a nearly top-of-the-line GPU for a moderately high performance AMD Zen2-based Ryzen platform only to bottleneck that entire system with slow system RAM?

     

    Randall

      R
      RjL190365Author
      Legend
      March 10, 2020

      Thank you for the encouragement, Kevin. Just to prove the opposite, I could run my i7-7700 with the RTX 2060 SUPER, but why would I would want to? The Puget Systems' benchmark result from that combo would not have been sufficiently higher than with the GTX 1060 to justify the added cost because the CPU would then have significantly bottlenecked the GPU. The "Standard" preset score with that combo would have been closer to 360 to 370, rather than the 352 with the GTX 1060. That makes the RTX 2060 SUPER too expensive to be worth using with a 4-core/8-thread CPU. A better match for that CPU would be anywhere between a GTX 1650 SUPER and a GTX 1660 SUPER (among current Turing GPUs).

      Kevin-Monahan
      Community Manager
      Kevin-MonahanCommunity Manager
      Community Manager
      March 9, 2020

      Thanks for sharing your findings with your hardware updates, Randall. I believe what you suspected is going wrong with a lot of other systems out there was proven to be the case with your system, as well. You need a nicely matched CPU and GPU for optimal performace. Glad you've got that sweet, sweet GPU power now.

       

      Regards,
      Kevin

      Kevin Monahan - Sr. Community & Engagement Strategist – Pro Video and Audio
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