New i7-8700K build too slow... opinions?

Report · May 16, 2018

I realise there are a few other posts like this, so glad I am not the only one. I just spent around £2000 on a new rig, to replace my 4-year old mac book pro (and move to PC). This is mostly for editing and compositing, using Adobe CC products.

I am really shocked to find that in After Effects, the time it takes to load a single frame (when I make a small change or apply a new effect) or perform a RAM preview, is at times even longer than it was on my Macbook, which had a much lower spec, and less memory! I have updated drivers, BIOS, overclocked the i7 to 5 Ghz, etc. I'm really out of ideas.

My only thought is, that I need more memory. This would mean swapping out the mobo so I could move up to 64GB. My other concern is that the CPU is just not performing as it should be - but then when I researched this, heavily, many people suggested this CPU specifically for Adobe products.

I tested the CPU with Cinebench and the score was a bit lower than those of others with similar, or lesser spec builds, which was a bit worrying.

My specs are:

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8700K CPU @ 3.70GHz Coffee Lake

ASRock model Z370 Gaming-ITX/ac

EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 8GB SC Black Ed.

32GB (2x16GB) Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 3000

Arctic Liquid Freezer 240 water cooling

750W EVGA SuperNOVA G3 PSU

500GB Crucial 2.5 MX500 SSD

2TB Seagate ST2000DM006 SATA3

Windows 10 Professional

Currently using After Effects CC 2017.

Any ideas of where I have gone wrong here would be very, very welcome!

Thanks guys!

Report · May 17, 2018

The airflow inside your PC's case may be to blame. You see, the i7-8700 PCs with better scores are housed in much larger cases with full-sized ATX motherboards. But mini-ITX cases typically has far less internal air circulation than larger form factors. As a result, despite the 240mm liquid CPU cooling the i7-8700K is running a lot warmer than it should, and in fact your particular CPU may be near its throttle-down temperature point. And not only that, but all of your system's other components are also running a lot warmer than they normally do.

Report · May 18, 2018

That does make sense, thanks for your input. Would you suggest a different mobo anyway, or just a different case? The clock speed generally seems to flip quite drastically between 800 mhz and 4700 mhz, but the fans are still equally as loud. The temp, for the most part is around 29 degrees, which seems good to me. When it's doing something intensive, it can go up to around 60 degrees. Would that be classed as throttling?

Report · May 18, 2018

Try another editing software and see how it works, davinci resolve it's free and hollywood favorite for color grading.

If another software works then it's Adobe fault, no reason to tear you system apart or buy more hardware.

Report · May 19, 2018

One caveat:

That suggestion would be of no help if everything else also runs sluggishly on that rig. If thermal throttling is not the problem, then it's likely that the OP may have OS software configuration issues. The PC may have far too many background processes running. In a decently tuned PC running the latest version of Windows 10, there should be around 150 total background processes running. If that PC is running way more than that, the OS configuration is likely the culprit.

Report · May 19, 2018

Its running 59 background processes, and 89 windows processes. Installing windows was pretty simple, there didn't seem like a lot of options. I'm concerned that I do need a bigger case/motherboard, but then, i'd hate to do that and find myself in the same situation...

Report · May 19, 2018

I love resolve, but I am doing motion graphics and compositing in After Effects so don't have much choice (plus this is for work, so I have to use the same software...)