i7 6700k beats Ryzen 3950X! What?! Help!

[markmorris1980]

So, I've been editing on an Intel i7 6700k (Z170 platform) for the past 5 years, it's served me well but time for an upgrade, I've gone for a AMD Ryzen 3950X (X570 platform), and well, I'm annoyed.

In benchmarks the 3950X crushes the 6700K, but when I export a project I did recently, it takes 10 mintues long on the 3950X!

I'm truly at a lose, on paper the new build should win. But it's not confind to exports either. I work in both After Effects and Premiere Pro and use the Dynamic Link feature heavily on some projects. I usually Open AE, let that load, then open Premiere up, and then it locates all the AE linked elements - even this seems slower to me - and there's absolutely no reason, the project file and assests are on a Samsung 970 Evo nVME 1TB SSD, and the cache disk is on a Samsung PM981 nVME 1TB SSD, there is no bottleneck on storage. The only thing that I've changed is move the project files from the PM981 drive to the "new" 970 Evo, coz its faster, and the cache disk was on a Samsung 850 Sata SSD previously.

The project/timeline I'm exporting is a 10 min video with a mix of video and AE elements overlaying, plus AE transitions, I timed the export before I did the PC teardown, the 6700K did it in 20 mins, give or take a few secs, and it was bumping 100% utilisation, with temps of 90-98 degree C. The 3950X did is in 30 mins maybe a little longer, with utilisation 3-5% and temps not much about idle range, 30-45 degrees C.

Specs are as follows

6700k build

Intel i7 6700k
ASUS Z170 Deluxe Motherboard
G.Skill Ripjaw V 3200Mhz - 32GB
Gigabyte Aorus 1080Ti
Boot Drive - Samsung SM851 256GB nVME
Project drive - Samsung PM981 1TB nVME
Cache drive Samsung 850 Evo 500GB Sata SSD

3950X build

AMD Ryzen 9 3950X
MSI X570 Unify motherboard
G.Skill Ripjaw V 3200Mhz - 32GB
Gigabyte Aorus 1080Ti
Boot Drive - Samsung SM851 256GB nVME
Project drive - Samsung 970 Evo 1TB nVME
Cache drive Samsung PM981 1TB nVME

Any suggests or help, would be most welcome, as I've really no idea why the 3950X is at such a disadvantage.

[Ann Bens]

Even without knowing the test results I would have picked the intel over the amd anytime.

But gathering you are using the same footage with the same settings on the same Pr build and OS on both machines?

[Sumeet Kumar Choubey]

Hi markmorris1980,

What kind of media files (format/codec, frame rate and frame size) are you working with and what are your export settings? If you are using h.264/h.265 codecs then the Intel CPU might perform slightly better as it will be able to use Intel Quick Sync for Hardware Decoding/Encoding. Let us know, we're here to help.

Thanks,

Sumeet

[RjL190365]

As Sumeet stated, what is your source material?

In addition, do you have an adequate cooler on that Ryzen 3950X? A cheap or a stock cooler will not perform adequately on that CPU: The temperatures will rise to well past the throttling-down point with such an underperforming cooler. (This point is more likely the case if you had been running the i7-6700K at the motherboard's default settings, which automatically disables the integrated Intel HD Graphics - and therefore QuickSync, as well - when nothing at all is connected to the motherboard's video-out ports.)

That said, if you're working with H.264 or H.265 video material, then it's Intel QuickSync in play with your i7-6700K even though it is only a quad-core CPU. And when I disabled the integrated Intel graphics on my i7-7700, it consistently performed slower than on my current Ryzen R7 3800X: What took 10 minutes with my 3800X took well over 22 minutes with my i7-7700.

And when it came to update/upgrade my system's CPU platform after five years with my previous i7-4790K, I selected AMD because the similarly-priced 8-core/8-thread Intel i7-9700K turned out to be a downgrade from the older 6-core/12-thread i7-8700K - too much so to justify it's current street price. And according to the tech tip posted, the only Intel CPU that I would have considered was the i9-9900K, which would have cost me significantly more than the R7-3800X.

Randall

[markmorris1980 · Accepted solution]

OK, now we're cooking with gas! Performance I was more expecting.

It seems the root of the problem was the Windows install, I noticed some strange little hangs even when using a browser, or when I restarted the computer and I'd get a slight hang between the user log in screen and the actual desktop, so since I'd only just installed Windows, there was no harm it just wiping it and trying a reinstall. Everything in general seems a bit snappier now, so I don't know what went wrong, a bad installation of a DLL file or a driver conflict when I installed the motherboard drivers, by pure chance, as Windows update was installing them perhaps?! I don't know! I watched updates complete first before installing anything this time.

I knew it wasn't thermal related, although I did say that, as I was only getting 5% CPU utilisation, with idle temps (both the 6700K & 3950K were AIO liquid cooled), so I knew it wasn't the CPU, it had to be Premiere, or Windows as it turned out, not using all the cores available.

So, I exported the same timeline, coz it's one of the most complex timelines for one of my regular clients, it has mixed footage (sourced from several different people he works with), usually H.264 in some form or another MOV or MP4 mosxly, the timeline also has AE tranisitions, AE animated "intro" composites and a 3D human body skeleton. The 3950X was 6-7 minutes faster than the 6700K this time. that's the 30% increase in performance I'd been expecting based on research and charts I'd seen.

I am now getting between 40 and 70% toal CPU utilisation, instand of the 3-5% before the Windows re-reinstall, during the heavily AE part of the timeline I get 10-20% utilisation, and upto 4-5 threads being used, which is epected given AE is more of a single core/thread application, and I would get reduced CPU utilisation with the 6700K too, so that correlates, then the moment the render gets to less AE heavy parts/more video, I'm seeing 85%+ thread untilisation on 12 threads, with the remaining 20 threads above 56%. Cores were boosting well too, 3 of them 4.7Ghz (which the 6700K maxed out at), 5 cores at 4.6Ghz, and the remaining 8 at 4.4Ghz.

Nothing wrong with the CPU then, and it is an upgrade after all, must've been a weird "communication" glitch, must admit, yesterday I was beginning to think maybe I made an expensive mistake.

I think I could gain even more performance with 64GB of RAM instead of 32GB, I was playing about with the max media cache size in AE, I've had it set to 23GB for the past 5 years (mostly coz of the limeted space on the SDD I originally had the cache on), I set it to 400GB, now I have a larger drive for the cache, and quickly ran into AE and Pr giving me "out of memory" warnings and errors, I reduced it to 100GB, same issue. So I set the max media cache to less than the installed RAM, 30GB amd no warnings or errors. I'm no expert on how media cache works, but it seems to me the size of the cache is tied to the amount of available memory somehow. That, I'm not fused about, as the only benefit I saw from the breif testing was faster project loading times.

To answer a few questions:-

Yes, the same timeline/fottage was used, and yes the same OS build, the same Adobe builds, with much of the other hardware the same ("transplanted" over). The 2 exports were done 2 days apart, with the intention of a marker/guide as to where both machines were.

As mentioned above, the files are mostly H.264 in some form or another, frame rate is 25FPS or 30 variable FPS if it''s come from a phone, I usually transcode that down to 25FPS if there's any issures when put on the timeline, timeline is 1080 25FPS, export is Vimeo 1080 (H.264) as it's an online deployment.

Adequate cooling, yes. Temps never exceeded 60c, much lower than the 6700K ever was doing an export. Cooler is now a Corsair H150i Pro for the 3950X, was a H115i GTX for the 6700K FYI,.

Thanks for all your replies, I appreciate the time you took to get back to me.