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My 2019 holiday hardware update/upgrade plan

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
December 3, 2019
9 replies
775 views

With me working again now after my heart transplant earlier this year, I am getting back into the upgrade game. I am well set on my current GPUs, but now I want to update/upgrade my CPU platform on my main PC (which still has the i7-4790K from five years ago) by this Christmas.

The reason for the update is that my main PC has been hiccuping when running programs, especially Premiere Pro. The 2020 (14.0) version has occasionally locked up on me with this current PC because some of its components do not meet Adobe's minimum requirements.

I am thinking about either an AMD Ryzen 3000-series or an Intel i7 or i9-9xxx series. And I will be planning to purchase a new motherboard, new RAM and one new m.2 PCIe SSD with this upgrade.

When that's done, I will move my GTX 1060 to this refreshed main PC and move the 1050 Ti to my mini-PC.

My alternative plan is to simply mothball my current PC and reactivate my mini PC (which already has a 7th-Generation 4-core/8-thread Intel i7-7700 CPU from 2017), but upgrade its RAM from 16 GB to 32 GB, and possibly add another SSD to it.

Both systems will be running a fully updated version of Windows 10. And I will be working with mostly 1080p video content but might occasionally do 4k.

Which would be the better choice, given my $500-ish total upgrade budget (although I might go higher if necessary)? A new platform update/upgrade, or simply upgrading an existing 2017 build? Or something else?

Oh, boy... The cycle never ends!

Randall

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Correct answer RjL190365

I ended up getting an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X, an Asus X570-P motherboard and 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. I decided to skip the extra SSD for now since I have a 256 GB and a 512 GB SSD - both SATA - in my main PC, and I have an additional spare 512 GB SSD that I may use.

I will also be ditching the four-and-a-half-year-old H110i GT cooler and just use the stock boxed Wraith Prism air cooler.

I will be installing and reassembling my main PC tomorrow.

Randall

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RjL190365Author

Legend

I decided to reinstall Windows 10 on my recently hardware-refreshed main PC because some programs started to crash. What's more, Premiere Pro crashed during certain renders.

In addition, I finally took the time to upgrade my main PC's version of Windows from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Pro. (My other two working PCs will remain on Windows 10 Home for the foreseeable future.) The reason for this is that my main PC now has a much newer and more powerful CPU than either of my other two PCs, and I felt that Pro is a better fit than Home is for a CPU that has more than four CPU cores and eight processing threads.

John T Smith

Community Expert

At one time picking an Intel CPU was the better choice, due to micro-code in the CPU that PPro used, and which was not in an AMD CPU

It would seem that is no longer the case with an AMD CPU (or is an AMD simply faster, and that makes up for not having the same micro-code in the CPU?)

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RjL190365Author

Legend

Now I know why I picked a Ryzen 7 3800X over an Intel i7-9700K for that same price:

The 8-core/8-thread i7-9700K would not have been more than a mere sideways-grade from the older 6-core/12-thread i7-8700K in Premiere Pro. That makes both Intel CPUs significantly more expensive than the AMD Ryzen 7 CPUs for any given level of performance.

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RjL190365Author

Legend

Finally, the day after Christmas I added a 500 GB Samsung 970 EVO Plus m.2 NvME SSD. I don't live close enough to the nearest store that sells computer parts to justify the 2-hour-plus commute in each direction, so I settled for my nearest Best Buy. That SSD costs as much money as a slower 1 TB QLC m.2 or SATA SSD, but I gain some additional reliability thanks to its 3D TLC nand.

I had to get it because I like to separate the cache SSD from the projects SSD. And I work on no more than about three 40-minute video clips at a time. However, a 1 TB or larger M.2 SSD may be in my future within the next 12 months.

Randall

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RjL190365Author

Legend

Just got the new parts installed tonight. Tomorrow is testing time.

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RjL190365Author

Legend

Just tested my newly refreshed build, and all of the CPU-only times more than halved (or more specifically, my CPU-only performance more than doubled) those of my old i7-4790K system.

For example, in Bill's old PPBM software-only MPEG-2 DVD test, the Ryzen 7 3800X completed the export in just 210 seconds, whereas it took my old i7-4790K an average of around 512 seconds to complete that same export. Both CPUs were at their default ("stock") clocks.

However, my disk I/O score did drop slightly with my 3800X - 78 seconds, versus 73 seconds from my old i7-4790K - if only because I was forced to use the Microsoft default AHCI disk driver whereas my old i7-4790K used Intel's driver.

My real-world testing will be coming in the near future.

Stay tuned,

Randall

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RjL190365Author

Legend

So far using Handbrake to convert a 40-minute 1080p VFR H.264 to 29.97 fps CFR H.264 using x264 was almost three times faster with my AMD Ryzen 7 3800X than it was with my old Intel i7-4790K: 13 minutes versus 37 minutes.

My testing in Premiere Pro, H.264 to ProRes 422 transcoding and then reencoding back to H.264 using Adobe's MainConcept software encoder, will be reported on shortly.

Randall

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RjL190365AuthorCorrect answer

Legend

I ended up getting an AMD Ryzen 7 3800X, an Asus X570-P motherboard and 32 GB of DDR4-3200 RAM. I decided to skip the extra SSD for now since I have a 256 GB and a 512 GB SSD - both SATA - in my main PC, and I have an additional spare 512 GB SSD that I may use.

I will also be ditching the four-and-a-half-year-old H110i GT cooler and just use the stock boxed Wraith Prism air cooler.

I will be installing and reassembling my main PC tomorrow.

Randall

John T Smith

Community Expert

My current July 2014 build has an i7-4930k 6 core CPU in an ASUS X79 socket LGA-2011 motherboard, with 32Gig ram and an MSI 2Gig GTX760 and 4 SSD drives for 1-Win10+programs and 2-video input and 3-video output and 4-project and temp files

It works well for my home video work using a Canon SX510 camera set to record 1280x720 30fps video... which I feed to Encore to make a DVD to share with family... I don't have a Blu-Ray writer, since a DVD has 'good enough' video quality for my hobbyist work

If I ever decide to replace what I have (right now, I'll say not very likely) I will start with a socket LGA 1151 motherboard and CPU... such as has already been mentioned

John T Smith

Community Expert

>heart transplant earlier this year

Sounds like you've also had a CPU switch of your own... glad to hear you are healthy again

A

Anonymous

If you're looking to do QuickSync encoding, which is not recommended for quality reasons, get the 9th generation as it has the highest quality.

i7-9700K $339

Gigabyte B365M $60

G.Skill Aegis 32 GB $95

Intel 660p Series 1.02 TB $83

I hope you've got a capible CPU cooler because that puts us a bit over budget at $577. You could also get a i5-9600K which is a GREAT deal at $200. You can also add more RAM to this in the future.

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RjL190365Author

Legend

Thanks for the suggestion. I already have a Corsair H110i liquid cooler that I'm currently using with my i7-4790K, and it is (surprisingly) still functioning after more than four years. I thought I might carry that over to the newer platform, and with the current hardware LGA 115x would be a no-brainer at that point. However, if I were to switch to AMD, then I might have to either get a new mounting kit for the cooler or stick with the cooler that comes boxed with the CPU.

In either case, I will use software H.264/H.265 encoding more often than I will hardware encoding.

I think I might get the hardware either tomorrow or Friday.

Randall

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