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RjL190365
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March 30, 2017
Answered

My 2017 hardware refresh or upgrade question

  • March 30, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 995 views

With my recent purchase of a GeForce GTX 1060, I am beginning to feel that my main rig is due for a refresh. My original plan is to move the GTX 1060 from my i5-6500 mini-ITX breadbox to my main i7-4790K tower, and then getting a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for the breadbox. This will retire the Maxwell GPUs in both systems in favor of the Pascal successors. Shall I go along with this original plan?

Or shall I do a major platform upgrade/update for my main tower? This will cost me so much more money that I may have to hold off on or even forego a GPU upgrade/update for one of my PCs. (Remember, my funds are limited even after receiving an income tax refund for 2016.) If I do so, shall I choose one of the 6-core Intel CPUs or an AMD Ryzen CPU? (Remember, even $2,000 would leave me with very little room given my relatively high cost for life's basic necessities.)

Please feel free to choose and/or offer suggestions.

Randall

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Correct answer RjL190365

It looks like the decision has already been made for me today: A simple CPU upgrade in my mini ITX bread box PC – this time, to an i7-7700 (non-K). I did give the GPU downgrade and switcheroo a serious thought – but then I realized that I would have gotten more bang for the buck by simply upgrading the CPU. And with my current budget, going with a new CPU platform for my main tower PC is out of consideration because it would have involved a complete teardown and reassembly of my main PC, and then reinstalling Windows 10 and all of the drivers and apps from scratch. That's not worth the money or trouble. Therefore, my main tower PC will remain as is. My next component upgrade for the bread box will be an m.2 NVMe SSD.

I will be installing the new CPU into that PC later this evening, and will give it a test. Also, I may be switching Blu-ray rewriters and secondary SSDs between the two systems.

Here are the results for the PPBM test with the i7-7700:

Compare those MPE Off and the H.264 results of 504 seconds and 95 seconds, respectively, with the 794 seconds and 142 seconds that I attained from the i5-6500. In fact, this non-overclocked (but default Turbo'd to 4.0 GHz with all four cores in use) i7-7700 compares favorably with my main i7-4790K tower PC which had been overclocked to 4.5 GHz.

Real world exports from Cineform MOV to H.264 Blu-ray were about 25 minutes with this CPU versus 40 minutes with the previous i5-6500 CPU.

So there you have it. Even for a cheapo editing box, the i7 is the way to go for Intel.

2 replies

R
RjL190365Author
Legend
June 25, 2017

After a week of moving to a new residence to accommodate a job relocation, my i7 Kaby Lake mini-ITX system is now in storage. I am posting this from my tower PC with older components (a Haswell Refresh CPU, a GTX 970, DDR3 RAM, etc.). At stock (default Turbo'd) clock speeds I was unable to achieve consistent results in the PPBM MPEG-2 DVD test with MPE on (sometimes 26 seconds, sometimes nearly 50 seconds). In addition, my tower system's H.264 Blu-ray results vary slightly, by as much as several seconds.

Does this mean that the GTX 970 is a mismatch for that system at default CPU speeds? I do not intend to keep the CPU permanently overclocked.

R
RjL190365AuthorCorrect answer
Legend
April 2, 2017

It looks like the decision has already been made for me today: A simple CPU upgrade in my mini ITX bread box PC – this time, to an i7-7700 (non-K). I did give the GPU downgrade and switcheroo a serious thought – but then I realized that I would have gotten more bang for the buck by simply upgrading the CPU. And with my current budget, going with a new CPU platform for my main tower PC is out of consideration because it would have involved a complete teardown and reassembly of my main PC, and then reinstalling Windows 10 and all of the drivers and apps from scratch. That's not worth the money or trouble. Therefore, my main tower PC will remain as is. My next component upgrade for the bread box will be an m.2 NVMe SSD.

I will be installing the new CPU into that PC later this evening, and will give it a test. Also, I may be switching Blu-ray rewriters and secondary SSDs between the two systems.

Here are the results for the PPBM test with the i7-7700:

Compare those MPE Off and the H.264 results of 504 seconds and 95 seconds, respectively, with the 794 seconds and 142 seconds that I attained from the i5-6500. In fact, this non-overclocked (but default Turbo'd to 4.0 GHz with all four cores in use) i7-7700 compares favorably with my main i7-4790K tower PC which had been overclocked to 4.5 GHz.

Real world exports from Cineform MOV to H.264 Blu-ray were about 25 minutes with this CPU versus 40 minutes with the previous i5-6500 CPU.

So there you have it. Even for a cheapo editing box, the i7 is the way to go for Intel.

    R
    RjL190365Author
    Legend
    April 18, 2017

    One final update before I go editing, packing up and relocating to a new place:

    When I first built this mini-ITX breadbox-shaped PC nearly a year ago, it had the following components:

    - Intel i3-6100 CPU with stock cooler

    - 16GB (2x8) DDR4-2400 RAM (running at DDR4-2133 speed due to CPU limitations)

    - Gigabyte GA-H170N WIFI motherboard

    - eVGA GeForce GTX 960 FTW with 2GB VRAM

    - 2 x 500GB Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III SSD

    - Fractal Design Core 500 Mini-ITX case

    - Corsair CX450M power supply

    - Samsung DVD+/-RW drive

    Since then, I first upgraded the CPU to an i5-6500 CPU (with the i3 being donated to a friend/relative's PC), then the GPU to a GTX 1060, then the CPU again to an i7-7700, then the CPU cooler to a Corsair H80i v2 liquid cooler. That was when I discovered that the system went into a repeated power on/off cycle in which the system failed to POST and the fans cycled on and off repeatedly. Perhaps that CX450M cannot handle a high startup current draw or falls just shy of being a true 450W PSU? In any case, the CX450M PSU has been shutting itself down to save itself and the components that were connected to it.

    As a result, yesterday I picked up a Corsair RM550x PSU. I installed the new PSU later that evening, and lo and behold, the system posted and booted into Windows 10. This just goes to show you that one should not be cheaping out on a major-brand PSU for a video editing system.

    Thus, my final mini-ITX PC configuration is this:

    - Intel i7-7700 CPU with Corsair H80i v2 AIO liquid cooler

    - 16GB (2x8) DDR4-2400 RAM (now running at DDR4-2400 thanks to Kaby Lake's official support of DDR4-2400 RAM)

    - Gigabyte GA-H170N WIFI motherboard

    - eVGA GeForce GTX 1060 ACX 2.0 with 6GB VRAM

    - 2 x 500GB Samsung 850 EVO 2.5" SATA III SSD

    - Fractal Design Core 500 Mini-ITX case

    - Corsair RM550x power supply

    - LG BD-RW drive

    This will last me a few years or until new video formats force another major upgrade.

    Randall

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