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R
RjL190365
Legend
October 26, 2020
Question

Last major CPU Platform Update/Upgrade (re: "Day of Reckoning for my now-disused secondary PC...")

  • October 26, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 217 views

Remember my mini-ITX PC? Well, it turned out that I will be keeping the box and some of its components. The CPU definitely needed upgrading, especially since it was nearing four years old (with the H170 chipset dating back five years now). It has had only beta BIOSes issued for it since the Spectre/Meltdown scare.

 

As a result of all that, I pulled the trigger on the CPU platform update/upgrade.

 

Parts that I purchased new:

  • AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core/16-Thread CPU with stock Wraith Prism RGB Cooler
  • Gigabyte B550I Aorus Pro AX mini-ITX Motherboard

 

Parts being carried over from its existing innards (at least until I can afford a major GPU upgrade):

  • Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1650 Super GPU
  • 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3200 CL16 RAM
  • Two 500 GB Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSDs
  • Fractal Design Core 500 mini-ITX SFF Case
  • Corsair RM550x PSU

 

The reason why I did this is because I am now considering a downsizing of my main PC for video editing and photo editing. This is why I dedcided to install the mini-ITX box's existing GPU and disks as placeholders. If I decide to replace my big rig with the downsized rig (due to future living space constraints), then I will likely carry over my GeForce RTX 2060 Super and my two m.2 NVMe SSDs from my big rig to the downsized rig. Then, I will be planning to upgrade the PSU to a high-quality 650W unit (more than likely from Seasonic).

 

All in all, I made the wise decision to wait and keep my mini box. And if I decide to use both PCs (as in using my mini box to perform the actual editing job while the big rig keeps rendering away), then I will definitely do the above (move the critical GPU and m.2 SSDs from my big rig to my mini box while upgrading the GPU and SSDs in the big rig.

 

Please feel free to discuss whether or not I made the right decision.

 

Randall

    This topic has been closed for replies.

    2 replies

    R
    RjL190365Author
    Legend
    November 7, 2020

    So far, I am glad to have chosen AMD this round. And I will be expected to remain with AMD for the next desktop round, especially since Intel's forthcoming 11th-Gen desktop CPUs will be expected to add PCIe 4.0 support and better-performing integrated graphics at the expense of raw CPU power. Unlike the 10th-Gen (Comet Lake) CPUs, the 11th-Gen (Rocket Lake) CPUs will revert to an 8-core maximum. And this is all because the Rocket Lake architecture will remain on 14nm because Intel's 10nm process still has teething problems that prevent it from being more than a group of lower-power mobile parts.

     

    And with Intel effectively disabling QuickSync at driver level when a discrete GPU is used, I am willing to bet that even the top-level Rocket Lake i9 CPU will perform worse than an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X in Premiere Pro.

    R
    RjL190365Author
    Legend
    October 27, 2020

    I have run the PugetBench for Premiere Pro on this rebuilt mini-IYX system, and its score (in Premiere Pro 14.5) shot up from 421 (when it had the 7th-Gen Intel i7-7700 quad-core CPU) to 661 (with the 3700X). This improvement is quite impressive, given the weaker GPU that limited the system's export scores somewhat.

     

    All in all, a nice improvement in performance indeed. And that's considering that I had originally planned to upgrade this PC to yet another Intel CPU-based platform (in this case, a 10th-Gen Intel i5 or i7 CPU with a Z490 motherboard). But the salespeople talked me out of another Intel platform, given the CPUs' tendency to run very hot at even stock speeds, and even at idle.

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