3XS PC's Scan

Report · Apr 21, 2021

Hi,

I'm looking to replace some of our editing systems and wondering if anyone has used/purchased 3XS Video Editing PC's from Scan.co.uk - Looking at the Higher end Ryzen and Threadripper CPU's for two of our PC's. Both suites are used for Premiere Pro and Adobe After Effects with some Davinci Resolve work.

Are the Thunderbolt 3.0 options reliable enough? Not providing exact specifications as really just looking for advice/reviews of these systems if someone has purchased previously.

Thanks!

Report · Apr 21, 2021

Personally i would avoid AMD processors for now.

Too many people with issues that come here for help have AMD processor plus Nvidia GPU. AMD+Nvidia seems to have more strange, hard to solve, performance issues that Intel+Nvidia.

Report · Apr 21, 2021

Thanks for the tip - Are these just random hard to pin down issues? The Threadrippers on 3XS at a cheaper cost bench far above the Xeon chips. Passmark has the Threadripper at double the points as the Xeon.

Intel Xeon Silver 4216 @ 2.10GHz

AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3955WX

Obviously stability is better than higher performance but with hard to resolve issues/crashes. Just interesting to hear.

From what I can gather the talk online is that Intel has lagged behind and AMD chips are far superior now.

Report · Apr 21, 2021

Thanks for the tip - Are these just random hard to pin down issues? The Threadrippers on 3XS at a cheaper cost bench far above the Xeon chips. Passmark has the Threadripper at double the points as the Xeon.

By @michaelm11605974

I have just noticed over a long period of time here that AMD+Nvidia generates more issues with rendering speeds and other performance issues. I have no numbers such as any percentage values and don´t even know who´s to blame, AMD or Nvidia.

Good to know no matter what processor you choose is that Premiere Pro preferes fast clock speed over the amount of cores. You are comparing a 2.10 GHz processor with a 3.90 GHz processor and that will create a skew result though the core count is the same. Aim for the fastest clock speed, always.

Report · Apr 21, 2021

I would also be very, very careful about the latest Intel CPU platforms for now.

The problem with these CPUs is that they all too frequently overheat at even "stock" speeds. That is because most motherboard manufacturers completely ignore the Intel-recommended power limits at their default settings, allowing the CPUs to run at their maximum all-core Turbo speed full-time. That, in turn, causes the CPUs to draw far more power than they are supposed to!

AMD, on the other hand, has a different problem: In addition to the aforementioned conflicts between the AMD and the Nvidia drivers, the AMD motherboards' chipset-controlled USB ports have been having random disconnect issues, requiring fixes to the AGESA in motherboard BIOSes.

Report · Apr 22, 2021

Thanks for the tips - I currently use for my home machine a Ryzen 5 2600 + NVIDEA 2060 Super and can't say I've had any issues to note with Premiere / AE. The PC did come with a AMD GPU which did cause the PC to crash once/twice a day. It's been solid since the switch to the 2060 Super.

The GPU that will be in the new systems will be NVIDEO Quadro RTX 4000 for one system and a RTX 5000 for the other. Much like the CPU I'm not necessarily looking for the fastest, it's also about longevity in terms of them being a workhorse that won't burn themselves out after a few years. Our current Mac Pros are from 2013 so we'd need the new systems to last just as long ideally.

Report · Apr 23, 2021

Short answer between the two:

I would not recommend that Xeon Silver even though it has 16 cores and 32 threads: It is based on the Cascade Lake architecture, which in turn is merely a tweaked Skylake-X architecture that made its debut in 2017 with the Intel 7th-Generation Extreme Edition CPUs, which in term is a derivative of the Skylake architecture that dated back to the 6th-Gen mainstream Intel CPUs which debuted in 2015.

In the case of the 4216, its maximum all-core Turbo speed is only 2.7 GHz, which when combined with the relatively poor IPC performance, will actually result in that Xeon system actually performing slower than even today's mainstream 6-core/12-thread CPU-powered PC.

Report · Apr 23, 2021

Thanks for your input its appreciated. What's your view on something like a AMD Ryzen™ Threadripper PRO 3955WX paired with a Quadro RTX5000. Most of the grunt work will be using Resolve to transcode down ProRes 4K DCI down to ProRes HQ 1080p. We never have that many streams running on our timelines, however After Effects is used somethings very heavily in complex projects.

Looking at loading in 128GB ECC Registered DDR4 3200 RAM.