8 Core Dual Xeon v 12 Core Dual Xeon - Premier Pro

[Samtastico]

So I'm halfway through completing my HP z600 workstation and I wanted to know your thoughts on the best cpu out of the following for video editing and a little after effects

Dual Xeon X5675 (12 cores total) at 3.06ghz

Or

Dual Xeon X5672 (8 cores total) at 3.2ghz)

These are the two fastest CPUs my system and budget can take.

[RjL190365]

Not really. You can't really do much with that system because the PCIe slots are severely limited in their bandwidth. If you use the PCIe x4 slot (the one located between the first and second full-length PCIe 2.0 x16 slots on your motherboard) for a PCIe SSD adapter, your SSDs will become even slower than SATA II because the PCIe slots are restricted to PCIe 1.0 bandwidth (one PCIe 1.0 lane is limited in theoretical throughput to only 2.5 Gbps, or about 250 MB/second). And attempting to use the secondary x16 slot will steal PCIe 2.0 lanes from the chipset's IOH (Northbridge), since the LGA 1366 CPUs such as yours do not have an integrated PCIe controller at all. Plus, most PCIe to SATA SSD adapters are only PCIe x1 cards, which won't work well in your system: The cards will fit and work, but the throughput will be significantly slower than your current SATA II connection (the only PCIe slot that might deliver anywhere close to the true maximum throughput of a modern SATA III SSD would be the x4 slot that's closest to the CPU and memory slots). And third-party SATA controllers are more trouble than they're worth: You must install the separate drivers for the card, and pray for the best.

[Samtastico]

That is some great information.

I think the only thing to check is if the encoding saturates my I/0 capacity on the SSD II channel 

Then I'll be pretty much maxed out.

[JEShort01 · Accepted solution]

Samtastico,

Definitely go with the Dual Xeon X5675 for the two options you mention. The extra cores will help a lot more overall with Premiere Pro CC with workflows that include 4K media. If you are concerned that you might have a workflow or workflows that will not benefit from the full suite of 24 threads (dual Xeon 6 core x 2 Xeons x 2 for Hyperthreadding) then simply monitor your task manager performance tab to see how fully you are loading your current CPUs (same # of threads, but significantly slower clock speed).

For the paltry price involved, your upgrade plan seems very reasonable to me.

Regarding SSD throughput speed, I'd suggest upgrading the CPUs first and seeing how it works. If some workflows are fully utilizing all cores/threads of both CPUs, then it is unlikely that your SSD is a bottleneck. And if you are I/O bound to your SSD, I'd suggest going with another identical SSD and doing a RAID 0 on them. Yes, it's more risky for data loss, but you should have backups of any important files anyway.

Cheers,

Jim

[RjL190365]

Jim,

Now that's one of the most sane suggestions that I've seen in this discussion thus far. An upgrade to CPUs that have the same # of cores and threads, but at significantly higher all-core Turbo clock speeds, for such a minuscule cost is a practical no-brainer. Worry about the disks and GPU later on, when costs become more reasonable. Sure, such a CPU upgrade would not have brought its overall performance level to that of a current single-CPU 6c/12t rig – but in this case, if Samtastico was to build a completely new rig around an i7-8700K, he would have spent a lot more money than what would have been justified by the performance increase because he would have needed to purchase not only the CPU, but also a new motherboard and DDR4 system RAM which currently is insanely expensive.

If Samtastico went with dual X5672s, he would not have gained sufficient overall performance with 4k video editing to justify even that minimal cost. In fact, he would have been downgrading from his current 12c/24t system to an 8c/16t system.

[Samtastico]

After a number of tests the SSD speeds are not the bottleneck as a the read / write speed while renderend  didn't go over 6 MB/s and the CPU maxed out at 90% to 100% on all threads.

My conclusion is that a faster CPU would benifit performance in render times but since the I/0 or RAM speeds were not maxed out or even close they would not be the main factor  improvement.

[Bill Gehrke]

OK

But by tomorrow expect a Private Message (PM) from me with something new, about something old, that might be helpful.  Very busy day today

[Samtastico]

Now I am intrigued!

[Samtastico]

The X5675s have been ordered so I will see if the SATA II SSD can keep up or if it is what the bottleneck was. 

[Samtastico]

These are my numbers after the CPU upgrade to the X5675s

160,"129","48","330",

Premiere

Version:,

12.0.0.224

there are my numbers before ..

157,"140","45","424",

Premiere

Version:,

12.0.0.224

[RjL190365]

Thank you, Samtastico, for the update. Although those Disk I/O and MPEG-2 CUDA-enabled scores are within the margin of error, the MPEG-2 software-only score and the H.264 Blu-ray score are just what I predicted. And sure, you could have gotten even better scores with an entirely new 6c/12t build – but it would not have been worth the cost and trouble, especially given insanely high prices for the GPU and RAM.

Randall

[Samtastico]

Yes, this system cost around $400 in total. An Amd Ryzen 1700x system with less RAM and very similar CPU benchmark scores would have been around $1000 .

I have a good system for the price point but next upgrade will be to something more modern , probably  from the AMD Ryzen family 

[michaelr97040360]

Nice story! Thanks everybody..!