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Hi, all. I do some very intensive Premiere Pro projects day in and day out, so I just built up a powerful new 3970x system and have gotten some learnings so far that I thought I'd share.
My system: 3970x overlocked by 200MHz using AMD Master software; Gigabyte TRX40 Designare board; 128GB 14-14-14 3200MHz RAM; 4 NVME drives in RAID 0 for media files via Gibabyte Aorus M2 card; 3 separate NVME drives for project files, media cache, and software/OS; old 1080ti GPU; backup RAID 10 array on spinning drives.
My typical workload: 2 or 3 10-bit h264 150mbps VLOG streams in multicam, with LUTs applied across entire footage; 6 to 10 audio tracks; noise reduction on 3% - 20% of clips; ProDad Mercalli on 3% - 15% of footage; moderate use of other effects. Footage comes in at 4K, and because some lenses are anamorphic, often end up being scaled/interpolate up to about 5K when desqueezed.
Learning 1: Exports are extremely fast! Wow!
Learning 2: I'm able to do real-time multicam editing at full resolution with the high-quality playback setting enabled, even on my h264 4K/5K clips. I wasn't expecting this after reading the Puget System benchmarks, which show only 9.76FPS in their benchmarks. So I don't know if there's something different about my system vs theirs, or if I'm skipping frames while retaining the same overall timing and my eye just can't tell. If the latter, well, it doesn't matter, because I'm not using the multicam view, with its little windows, to evaluate the motion of my footage. I switch to single cam view to review things like that.
Learning 3. Fast-forwarding was bottlenecked when I first built this system by the 1.1GBps spinning hard drive array I brought over from my previous system. Fast-forwarding and moving around to different parts of the timeline is a big part of my every day work, and this puts much greater burden on the media drive, I realized. When I switched to the NVME RAID, my fast-forwarding and rapid moving around the timeline got much smoother. But then I hit a new bottleneck: my GPU. The 1080ti just couldn't draw the frames fast enough to keep up with my fast-forwarding, in particular. So here again, there's a lot of info on Puget's Website that fell apart for me. I have found that having the 3970x really requires more GPU for what I do, despite what they say about there not being much difference among the high-end GPUs. I doubt even the 2080ti would remove the bottleneck; I'm looking forward to the Ampere. Maybe I'm missing something and am wrong somehow, but I also find their hard drive recommendations to be dated and inapplicable for a high-end system like this when you consider real-world timeline performance, which is about more than fps at one point in a sequence.
Learning 4: I'm getting 52fps on Neatbench. This is great relatively speaking, but it still takes hours to reduce noise on long clips. I'm thankful I got the 3970x, because this is an area where I need every bit of CPU power. I'm going to experiement with a second GPU here as well.
Learning 5: ProDad Mercalli flies on this beast! It seems to do what Warp Stabilizer does in less than 10% of the time. The difference is almost comical. Maybe Warp Stabilizer is better in ways I'm not skilled enough to perceive, but Mercalli looks great to my eyes and performs awesomely on this system.
Learning 6: Thunderbolt 3 works seamlessly for me on this system! The old wisdom on Puget's site about Thunderbolt not being good with AMD just isn't applicable to my system. I am using Thunderbolt for the backup RAID array where I keep copies of my old media files and such, and am using it regularly without issue now.
Learning 7: RAM amount is overkill. I do go over 64GB sometimes but didn't need 128GB. If I were building this again, I would go with 96GB.
In conclusion, this system is a game-changer for me! I can do everything I want and need with the exception of fast noise reduction. Sadly, that's the bottleneck in my workflow now, and I would love to find a way to speed that up.
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Hi Lawrence,
Thanks for the info, I'm planning to upgrade my system also.
Are you willing to post your complete partlist of your build ?
Thanks in advance
Simon
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Hi, Simon.
I'm not the type to keep detailed component lists here, but let me try to help as best I can.
Lawrence
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Thanks Lawrence!
ps: late response due to my notifications weren't on apparently 🙂
Simon
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Well, the RTX Titan just came out...
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Been thinking about it. But at that price point, might want to wait to see what Nvidia has up their sleeve with their upcoming Ampere series.