An update on my planned retirement from hardware upgrades...

[RjL190365]

Back in August of 2018 I had planned a virtual retirement from hardware upgrading. But now with CC 2019 now here and requiring me to update some hardware once again, I am contemplating pulling out my miniITX i7-7700 PC from dormancy and putting my i7-4790K tower PC into semi-retirement. The holdup was that the i7-7700 has only 16 GB of RAM while the i7-4790K has 32 GB of RAM.

To attain that goal without spending much if any money on new parts I am planning to move my currently in-use GTX 1060 6 GB card, 512 GB Samsung 850 PRO SSD and Pioneer BD-R/RW drive into the mini-ITX PC and remove personal software from my current PC and possibly refresh the OS installation on the older PC.

Does that sound like a good plan? Or shall I get all-new hardware, such as a new CPU, motherboard, RAM and possibly an m.2 PCIe SSD or two, given my current financial situation (being on LOA from my day job, with possibly zero income)?

I would really appreciate your answers.

Randall

[Stan Jones]

I can't be of much use, but I like the way you are thinking. I'd like to do a big new build, but the options are just mind-numbing. And more than once, I've headed down the road of beefing my i7 930, RAM 24GB, GTX 760 (2GB VRAM). So far I still have CUDA.

The best thing I've done is to add SSD (not M.2 since my system won't support it).

But my system is behind your ITX, and anything I might do would be wasted toward any future build.

A real dilemma.

[RjL190365]

Thanks. For the foreseeable future the decision is made for me. Since my mini-ITX system supports m.2 SSDs, I think I will add a 500 GB or 1 TB PCIe 3.0 x4 m.2 NVMe SSD to that PC while moving the needed critical components to that bread-box. A new GPU or additional DDR4 RAM is at this time significantly more expensive than what I really want to spend.

[Stan Jones]

Good luck! Let us know how it runs...

[RjL190365]

My SSD upgrade has been delayed since I last posted in this thread. I had to wait until my tax refund arrived.

Now, I am facing a new dilemma:

A new m.2 PCIe SSD? A new lower-end GeForce 10-series or later GPU? More RAM for my i7-7700?

I do have spare SATA 2.5" SSDs that I could use for my reserve i7-7700 mini PC. But except for my GTX 1060 6 GB card that I'm currently using in my older main i7-4790K rig, all of the GPUs that I currently have in my possession are older-generation models with 2 GB or less VRAM. And I currently have only 16 GB of DDR4 RAM in my i7-7700 mini PC.

So, under these circumstances, which is my best option?

I would really appreciate your assistance.

Randall

[RjL190365]

One final update (for now):

I ended up with a GeForce GTX 1050 Ti for my current main rig, and will move my more powerful existing GTX 1060 6 GB card to my newer-generation i7-7700 mini PC (where I had it originally installed before I consolidated my work into my older rig). My luck finding a $129 500 GB Samsung 970 Evo Plus m.2 NVMe SSD was a strikeout: It seems as though everybody and their mother wants one; as a result; none of the stores that I visited had one in stock.

And since all of my current work has a resolution no higher than 1080p/60, it made more sense than my other upgrade/replacement options at this time.

Randall

[RjL190365]

I did a PPBM test with the GTX 1050 Ti, and compared it to the GTX 1060 - both in the same i7-4790K PC overclocked to 4.7 GHz:

MPEG-2 DVD (MPE CUDA on):

GTX 1050 Ti: 37 seconds

GTX 1060: 24 seconds

H.264 Blu-ray (MPE CUDA on):

GTX 1050 Ti: 111 seconds

GTX 1060: 91 seconds

Although this performance difference looks big on paper, it actually amounts to very little in real life. As a matter of fact, the GTX 1050 Ti performs about equal to the Kepler-generation GTX 660 when it comes to HD-to-MPEG-2 DVD rendering/export performance (and this in spite of my particular GTX 660 being a factory overclocked card while the particular GTX 1050 Ti that I chose is clocked at reference clock speeds). However, like most other Pascal GPUs, the GTX 1050 Ti is faster in H.264 Blu-ray exports than most of the Kepler GPUs. And despite having only 768 CUDA cores and an effective CUDA memory throughput of 105.6 GB/s (compared to 960 CUDA cores and an actual CUDA memory throughput of 144 GB/s in the Kepler GTX 660), it actually outperforms the 1,024-CUDA-core Maxwell GTX 960 (with its effective CUDA memory throughput of only 96 GB/s) in all of my GPU-intensive tests - and this despite the GTX 1050 Ti being clocked at its reference clocks while the GTX 960 was heavily overclocked at the factory that manufactured the card.

And while the GTX 1060 is still more powerful than the GTX 1050 Ti, the 1050 Ti may be a better fit for lower-end PCs with eight or fewer CPU cores and 16 GB of RAM (a typical configuration for such mainstream PC builds).

And by the way: The problems with the GTX 1050 Ti came largely from those people who bought massively factory overclocked cards - and that can, and in some cases does, cause problems in Premiere Pro CC and other CUDA productivity apps.

Randall

[Stan Jones]

Thanks for reporting! Sorry I don't have much to offer at the moment...

[RjL190365]

Now if you were wondering why I did not go for a GTX 1660 or GTX 1660 Ti or an RTX GPU, it's because the GTX 1660 (non-Ti) would have been only a sideways-grade from my GTX 1060 to justify its price, while (at close to $300 USD and up) the GTX 1660 Ti and the RTX series GPUs all cost more money than I wanted to spend for the foreseeable future.

[RjL190365]

I performed the first phase of my real-world workflow testing with the GTX 1050 Ti: Transcoding an H.264 30 fps VFR video of roughly 40 minutes length to a 30 fps CBR Cineform file. In addition to the Intel QuickSync hardware decoding, this transcode does use CUDA GPU acceleration for the render.

With the GTX 1050 Ti, my overclocked i7-4790K system took almost the same amount of time to complete the export as it did with the GTX 1060-around 20-ish minutes. The render did, however, utilize slightly more of the GTX 1050 Ti than it did the GTX 1060: around 23 percent of the GTX 1050 Ti versus about 21 percent of the GTX 1060.

When I ended up with the GTX 1050 Ti, I almost picked a GT 1030 GDDR5 card instead-until I realized that it would have slowed down large portions of my regular transcodes significantly. And if I had extended my maximum budget to $250, I would have picked a GTX 1660 instead and put that into my i7-7700 mini PC and kept the GTX 1060 in my i7-4790 main system. But my maximum budget, given my current income situation, was only about $175, so I had to compromise in this situation.

The second phase-a transcode from the just-made Cineform intermediate file to a 1080p 29.97 fps AVC H.264 file-will be coming soon.

Randall

[RjL190365]

Just this past evening I performed the other two phases of my real-world testing. First, from a Cineform HD 1080p/30.00 file to an HD 1080p/29.97 H.264 AVC file, then from that same Cineform intermediate to a 480p/29.97 MPEG-2 DVD file.

As it turned out, my system performed almost equally (speed-wise) with either the GTX 1050 Ti or the GTX 1060. (Within a minute or so out of around 20 minutes.) However, as in the first phase the renders utilized somewhat more of the GTX 1050 Ti than of the GTX 1060-around 20 to 25 percent in the H.264 renders and 35 to 40 percent in the HD-to-SD renders.

On the other hand, had I gotten the GT 1030 instead, the HD-to-SD renders would have utilized well over half of the GPU, leaving little room for GPU-accelerated effects. And if the render GPU utilization were to have come anywhere close to maxing out just for scaling, then that GPU would have been underpowered for that particular PC system-not what I wanted.

These real-world results meant that over the years I had been wasting my money on higher-end GPUs when the minimum GPU that doesn't slow down my other work is all that's needed for my particular PC and workflow.

I hope this clears the confusion between benchmarked performance and real-world performance.

Randall

[RjL190365]

Today I did something different: I installed the GTX 1060 into my i7-7700 mini PC. And when I ran PPBM, I found that the H.264 Blu-ray export performance was about equal to that of my current i7-4790K overclocked to 4.7 GHz - 92 seconds - when it was running the GTX 1060. But the MPEG-2 DVD performance was actually slower on the i7-7700 (477 seconds) than it was on the overclocked i7-4790K (461 seconds). And this was running Premiere Pro 2019 and the 419.67 Creator Ready drivers.

Benchmarks aside, my real-world export testing (a 1080p/30.00 Cineform file to 1080p/29.97 H.264 AVC, using the Intel QuickSync hardware H.264 encoder) showed the i7-7700 actually performed slightly faster than the overclocked i7-4790K when both systems had the same GPU. And this is in spite of the fact that the i7-7700 had only 16 GB of RAM versus 32 GB of RAM on the i7-4790K. And though the export on the i7-7700 used only 10 to 15 percent of the GPU, it is a much more realistic figure than the (I believe) over-optimistic 20-ish percent GPU utilization when that same GPU was in the i7-4790K system. Incredibly, both PCs used about the same amount of utilization from the Intel integrated HD Graphics (4600 in the i7-4790K, 630 in the i7-7700): about 50 percent. These anomalities - benchmark results that aren't commensurate with the actual real-world performance - is the biggest reason why Adobe strongly recommends a 6th-Generation or newer Intel Core i-series CPU in order to run Premiere Pro 2019 (formerly branded as Premiere Pro CC 2019).

Ultimately, given my sub-$200 GPU budget I made the right choice in moving the GTX 1060 to the i7-7700 and downgrading the i7-4790K's GPU to a GTX 1050 Ti. Had my GPU budget extended to $250-ish, then I would have kept the GTX 1060 in my i7-4790K system but purchased a GTX 1660 instead of the GTX 1050 Ti and put that GTX 1660 into my i7-7700 mini PC. A $300-ish GPU budget, which is more money than I would justify spending on my older quad-core CPU-powered PCs, would have offered me the chance to get a GTX 1660 Ti, which would have been more apropos (relative performance-wise) for the i7-7700.

[RjL190365]

With me working again now after my heart transplant earlier this year, I am getting back into the upgrade game. I am well set on my current GPUs, but now I want to update/upgrade my CPU platform on my main PC (which still has the i7-4790K from five years ago) by this Christmas.

I am thinking about either an AMD Ryzen 3000-series or an Intel i7 or i9-9xxx series. And I will be planning to purchase a new motherboard, new RAM and one new m.2 PCIe SSD with this upgrade.

When that's done, I will move my GTX 1060 to this refreshed main PC and move the 1050 Ti to my mini-PC.

Oh, boy... The cycle never ends!

Randall