Is GHz the most important for After Effects?

[dannit15005301]

Hello fellow After Effect'ers.

I have been using Mac for as far as I remember. My Macbook Pro has been a dear friend for many years, but the past year or so I have been wanting to get a more powerful GPU, and in particular also taking advantage of CUDA cores (What I can use in some of the other software packages I use, ie 3D, also real time). 
The 2020 Razer Advanced with a RTX 2080s MAX-Q has caught my attention.

Not only does it remind of a Macbook in terms of looks - but also a powerful machine I can read in the reviews.
My question is:

1. The most powerful has a 3.2GHz CPU - and the less powerful has a 3.6GHz, but less cores and threads - I read that some who use the very powerful and expensive AMD processors with tons of cores, experienced slower speeds when AE starting to go more for GHz, than if they used a smaller and cheaper processor but with more clock-speed.
So will I experience slower rendering on the more powerful 3.2, than the slower 3.6, because of the GHz?
Will it be an advantage in terms of rendering times to have a heavy graphic card with CUDA cores?
I have experienced on my mac (being a mid 2018, 3.6) very heavy rendering times, and I hope a new machine will help that a bit.

2.  The Coffee Lake processors has a Turbo Boost of around 5GHz
It's single processor though as far as I understand - will that be an advantage if GHz is the important thing?
I also plan to add an additional 16 GB so I end up with 32GB.

 I just hope I can get some faster rendering times.

I would just be very sad spending so much money, just to see my mac being faster despite the GPU being sooo much slower.

Cheers,

Dan

Any input would be much appreciated

[Mylenium]

First off: Spending money on an expensive RTX card is utterly pointless for AE. AE's hardware acceleration doesn't even use a GTX 1060 fully or any such cards. Save your money on that and unless you have other use cases for this card such as obviously gaming, 3D programs with GPU-based renderers, specific plug-ins like Sapphire or editing programs like Premiere when using 4k editing or such, where brute power would be beneficial.

The rest is pretty much like you already figured out - less cores tend to beat more cores almost every time, even if the CPU as a whole appears less powerful. You may find more info on your specific processors on Puget System's web site. they have a benchmark and comparative tests.

As for whether or not TurboBoost will even be used is entirely up to the circumstances. Sometimes this isn't even noticable because the cycles are to short to show up in task manager and things like using older plug-ins that have not been compiled using the respective intel-libraries for these newer processors may never even trigger it due to how they behave. Only experimentation can tell you that, but don't expect miracles even if it works. A fast-running AE could choke the rest of the system, too, you know.

Mylenium

[dannit15005301]

Thank you so much for the reply Mylenium

Damn, how annoying that it's all about clockspeed.
It would rather have a more powerful system that I can use for others things too, such as 3D, real time, gaming etc, than getting something slower. Hard to believe that its a disadvantage to have a slower CPU (The slower cpu in Razer laptops have a higher clock speed).

I'm wondering if my old mac from 2018 with clock speed of 2.6 would be faster than the 2020 razer with a 2.3 (I wrote 3.2  and 3.6 in my first message - it was a mistake).

Do they plan to make to take advantage of also GPU and cores ?

[Martin_Ritter]

If you want a fairly good system for AE, you should consider a desktop PC instead of laptop. Clock speeds of 2.3 are kind of sweet and maybe it's enough for simple text animations. If you plan to work with AE, you shouldn't get below 4Ghz base clock. You won't find such CPUs in the laptop market.

Actually, there are only 3 CPU families currently suitable for AE: i7, i9 and the latest and largest Ryzen (3900, I think). In each family, the CPU with the highest clock speed is at most preferable.

Adobe is working on better multicore and GPU support - as they do it already for years. The result so far is a handful of GPU effects and slower rendering times if the CPU has more than 4 cores. So, better don't expect any changes soon.

*Martin