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.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Both of those Xeon's are End-Of-Life so it extremely difficult for me to recommend either one.  Iwould not be surprised if the single new 6-core i7-8700 would beat those old Xeons.  But if you already have that HP z600 I can sympathies with your intentions so sort of arbitarily go with the 12 cores since you only have minor usage of After Effects.

[Samtastico]

There is  a big difference in price. The i7-8700 costs around £300. This is about the same as my whole HP Z600 build with two xeon x5675s   .

According to a recent benchmark test adobe premiere pro only really utilises around 8 Cores - 12 cores before the benefits of extra cores really drops off.

Thank you for your help

[RjL190365]

It's not just the processing power. It's all of the other I/O parts of the system as well. You see, your old system cannot sustain more than about 270 MB/second from any of its SATA ports because they are only SATA II compliant. And the primary PCIe slot is only PCIe 2.0 compliant, which will bottleneck most of the newer GPUs from the GTX 1060 upwards. And any PCIe x1 or x4 slots in that system are only PCIe 1.0 compliant. These three combined increase the load even further on the CPU, which negatively impacts CPU-only performance. And to boot, dual-CPU systems have greater latencies to deal with than any single-CPU system.

You got what you paid for – a system that's slower and less powerful than many newer single-CPU systems and will become obsolete and useless in a couple of years because it cannot support newer, more secure and better-supported technologies, in other words. And it has now gotten to a point that you will have to spend an astronomical amount of money just to stay even minimally current, let alone be prepared for the immediate future, because of the current stratospherical pricing of several critical components in high-performance PCs.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Randall, great catch on the vintage motherboard.  Lousy starting point to run Premiere Pro.  But I guess we cannot help much in this case.  I am about to recycle one of that same SATA II, PCIe 2.0 era.

[Samtastico]

However for the purposes of social media video encoding etc and from a business perspective the ROI is fantastic. The £300 that was used to build this system will make me many times that amount where as a midrange newer system may do things slightly quicker the depreciation in the first 6 months is likely more than my whole build 

At the moment I get 1 to 1 render times using 2k and 4k footage and since it's for social media and YouTube the source bitrate does need to be at a Red cam level.

Just looking for the best upgrade path with what I have.

[RjL190365]

At this point your upgrade path is absolutely nothing. Especially since newer GPUs won't work properly on it since they require a UEFI system while that system of yours is AFAIK legacy BIOS based. Plus, any CPU upgrades for that socket, while seemingly "inexpensive", still cost you more money than what their performance benefit delivers.

And did I forget to mention that using a PC that's that old for anything Internet is now a severe security risk? You see, the reason why you paid this little because that PC is now on the verge of total obsolescence. Windows 7, the most recent version of Windows that's supported in that PC, will turn EOS (End Of Support) in only 23 months (less than two years). And when an OS goes EOS, the major antivirus companies will cease supporting that OS as well. As a result, your old PC will become increasingly vulnerable to malware and outside hackers, and those exploits will not be patched at all after the EOS date.

[Bill_Gehrke]

I would like to suggest running my hardware evaluation tool, Premiere Pro BenchMark (PPBM) and Submitting the results and I wiil be able to help in the upgrade path.  You might even want to do a test now and after your CPU upgrade to measure the change.

I just found a PPBM submission of a Z600 with a pair of E5620 4-core (no hyperthreading) chips

[Samtastico]

Here are my benchmarks .....

204,"138","45","111",

Premiere

Version:,

12.0.0.224

Also the 750ti does allow for CUDA GPU acceleration

[RjL190365]

That cannot be correct. You see, it is totally impossible for an 8-year-old system with a dual lower-power Westmere-EP CPU of its vintage to outperform a recent dual-full-power Broadwell-EP Xeon system with more cores, more threads and higher clock speeds in the CPU-only MPEG-2 DVD exporting test. Did you follow the instructions completely? Or did you really forget to enable "Maximum Render Quality" for any of the DVD and/or Blu-ray tests?

At least the Disk I/O result is correct, as expected from a system with only SATA II capability.

[Samtastico]

I will perform the test again and confirm the numbers.

I will also clear all cache on the drives to be sure.

[Samtastico]

You are right I must have not checked one of the boxes ....

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

Premiere

Version:,

12.0.0.224

[RjL190365]

That sounds about right. That dual-LP 12c/24t Westmere barely beats a much more recent "economical"-class Kaby Lake 4c/8t build. And 45 seconds is about right in the GPU-accelerated MPEG-2 DVD exporting test for a GTX 750 Ti. I had a GTX 960 to replace the 750 Ti that I gave to my brother, and it was barely any faster in CUDA applications than the 750 Ti to be worth the trouble despite having more CUDA cores. (Although the GTX 960 did perform better than the 750 Ti in the H.264 Blu-ray exporting test due to the better optimization of the second-generation Maxwell architecture versus the 750 Ti's first-generation Maxwell architecture.)

[Samtastico]

After switching to a higher power X5675 what sort of improvement do you think I would see?

[RjL190365]

You should see the software-only MPEG-2 DVD export results improve to the 330-ish second range. And the H.264 Blu-ray result should improve slightly, as well.

This now results in a narrowing down to this: "Is the roughly 20 percent improvement in the CPU performance really worth whatever amount of money (in UKP) that I will be paying for, in the cost of the two X5675s?"

[Samtastico]

It will cost a total of £90 to upgrade to the X5675 but I can sell my other CPUs for £40 so it works out around £50 total to upgrade.

The question is for £480 which I could sell my system for could I get something much better?
If I could what would you suggest?

Many thanks for all your help

[Bill_Gehrke]

Thank you Randall!

I agree with you analysis of the PPBM tests.

I do not understand the disk drive improvement from 204 seconds which I would expect from a SATA II drive to the 157 seconds.  Did you export that to the SSD or to a hard disk drive?  Do you only have the one SSD you listed?  IS everything on the SSD?

[Samtastico]

The OS and some programs including Premier Pro as well as the source files are on the SSD. After I have completed a project I move the whole folder onto the backup drive.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Maybe I will have to try a SATA III SSD on ac SATA II port and see what I get.  Later today as I have to go.

[RjL190365]

In addition to what I had stated in my recent posts, that 157-second score in the Disk I/O test is actually very, very close to what the SATA II interface can sustain in write speeds at its maximum - around 230-ish to 240-ish MB/second. The previous 204-second result is about what would be typical for a single recent 7200-rpm HDD.

And as I tried to mention, that 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO SSD is capable of achieving write speeds of over 400 MB/second (or just under 80 seconds) in the PPBM Disk I/O test - when connected to a SATA III port. It's the ICH10R's SATA II interface on the system's motherboard that's limiting the 850 EVO's performance.

[Bill_Gehrke]

Randall here are the CDM results for my CT256M550 limited by the SATA II port.  Just like you stated.

I would strongly suggest adding a second SSD even though it operates at half speed,  It will be redeployable to a newer system if and when.  But operation with only one storage device is not a good mode for Premiere Pro.

[Samtastico]

My last upgrade is to the X5675. HP did release an uodafed bios for security late 2016. I'm running Windows 10 pro and it's working quite well.

Don't be so hard on a guy who is trying the best with what he's got. Sometimes a £2000 rig is out of reach of some people. Still it shouldn't stop them from working with what they have to develop their video production and editing skills.

[Samtastico]

I will do.

At the moment I have ...

Dual Xeon L5640

36gb DDR3 10600r RAM

256 SSD Samsung 850 Evo

750ti graphics card

The rest is pretty much standard but I'll run the test

Thank you

[RjL190365]

Now that you're already running Windows 10 on that system, do note that you already have 12 total CPU cores (with 24 processing threads) in your current PC (albeit at low Turbo-boosted clocks of only 2.53 GHz). In Premiere Pro two quad-core X5672s at a Turbo'd speed of 3.46 GHz would have only improved the responsiveness of the interface but would not have improved the rendering or exportiing performance much. Two hexa-core X5675s would have improved overall performance over your current L5640s due to the 5675's all-core Turbo'd clock of 3.33 GHz. (Note that I listed actual all-core Turbo speeds in these CPUs while you listed only the base CPU speeds.)

The questions now become "Is this increased level of performance really worth the higher cost?" and "Would I be wasting my money on the two cheaper options that might not make much if any improvement whatsoever over my two current CPUs in rendering performance?"

And even after the upgrades, you'd still be let down by slow disk I/O performance even with an SSD (which, by the way, is specced to deliver read/write speeds of 540/500 MB/second but will actually produce results of only about 275/256 MB/second due to the limitations of SATA II). And stick with the current GeForce GTX 750 Ti for that vintage workstation, as any newer GPUs would have cost you far more money than what their real-world performance increase (as installed and configured in your vintage workstation) justifies.

By the way, I am guesstimating that your system as currently configured would produce a CPU-only ("software-only") MPEG-2 DVD export score in the PPBM suite that's roughly equal to that of my newer (currently in storage) i7-7700 (non-K) quad-core PC: around 460-ish seconds. That's about at the bottom end of all of the dual-CPU PC configurations in that PPBM8 site as listed by CPU - and that vintage workstation is more trouble than it's worth as you get a behemoth with 12 total CPU cores and 24 total processing threads that performs no better than a newer system with only four total CPU cores and only eight total processing threads. To use full-sized US-market family sedans as an analogy, it's like you would be entering a 1991 Chevy Caprice (base model) with its underpowered 5.0-liter 170-horsepower V8 engine in a race against a 2017 Chevy Impala LT (the mid-level trim version) and its base 2.5-liter 196-horsepower 4-cylinder engine.

[Samtastico]

Other than building a new system is the best way to move forward attaching the SSD to a PCIe slot which should increase the possible speeds to 5GB/s and upgrade to a pair of xeon X5675?

On CPU bench this shows the a dual X5675 would fall between a 6700k and AMD Ryzen 1700x