Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler New build...Processor/overclocking question

I'm looking at having a new HD editing workstation built.

Any thoughts on how much real-world difference I'd find between an i7 950 and an i7 975 extreme when, say, encoding H.264?

How reliable is overclocking? (The build quote was originally for an i7 860 overclocked to 3.66Ghz)

In the same vein, I'm wondering how much can be offloaded to the GPU for encoding, and with which software. I imagine Chris is the one with the knowledge on this. It's just curiosity on my part, though, since I don't intend to actually utilize the hardware for encoding at this time, but I do kind of want a new Nvidia card, if I can actually get ahold of one. CUDA is a compelling idea, but I don't know what the real-world implications are.

Hey, no horning in on my thread until AFTER I get at least one serious or joke response.

I claimed Chris first!

Hey, my response was a serious joke, if that counts.

What software were you planning on using with your new workstation, by the way?

For video cards, I'm looking at the Quadro FX3800 because it's approved for the coming Adobe CS5 Production suite, which will evidently lean heavily into the graphics card for real-time performance.

But, if I really knew what I was talking about, I'd probably be building my own! Actually, some of you HAD inspired me to go that route, but now I need this up and running in a week and I have too much else to do!

In case anyone is curious, here's the build:

$7500
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Intel i7 975 Extreme Quad Core 3.33GHz x 4 core/8 thread CPU 6.4 GT/s

4TB User Swappable 4 Bay Raid Array w/PCIe x4 SATA-600 Hardware Raid 0+1

500GB System Drive w/ 500GB Replacement/Restoration Clone Drive

1TB SATA-600 Misc. Media Drive

12GB (6 x 2GB) DDR3 1333MHz High Performance Tri-Channel Memory

10X BD Blu-Ray Burner / CD & DVD +- R/RW Burner w/ Software

Nvidia GeForce GTX-285 1GB PCIe 2.0 x16 Graphics Card, Adobe Mercury Ready

750 Watt – Industrial Duty Single Rail Modular Power Supply with 7 Year Warranty

Cooler Master Sniper-X Advanced Black Mid Tower Chassis

12’ HDMI 1.3 HD AV Cable, 12’ Stereo Audio Cable, 12’ Digital SPDIF Audio Cable

Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit

Peripherals: (included)

Dual 24" LED LCD's - 1920x1080 - 8,000,000:1– 2ms – 0.276mm –

Professional Black LED Illuminated Keyboard & Advanced Wireless Dark Laser Mouse

Video Editing Options: (included)

1) Adobe Premiere CS4 Production Premium
2) BlackMagic Design – HD Decklink Extreme v3

Upgrade Options:

160GB SSD System Drive w/ 160GB Replacement/Restoration Clone Drive Add $375

1.5TB SATA-300 Misc. Media Drive Add $25

Dual 10X BD Blu-Ray Burners / CD & DVD +- R/RW Burner w/ Software Add $180

Nvidia Quadro 3800 1GB Graphics Card w/Elemental accelerator, Adobe Mercury Ready Add $600

950 Watt – Industrial Duty Single Rail Non- Modular Power Supply with 5 Year Add $30

BTW, I told him he can keep the cables!

Does anyone know what pattern has to be projected into the night sky for SuperBatChris to show up?

An exploded view of a Vita-Mix blender, I think.

I just need to be done watching [REC]2 (which I transcoded last night).

So what's the question? About clock speeds? An increase in CPU clock yields pretty much linear results. So an 8.8% increase in clock will make little difference. When picking out a CPU, there's usually a point where the price jumps up considerably from the previous increases from model to model. I buy the one just below that large jump.

As for over-clocking. If you're buying a chip well into the manufacturing cycle of a particular product range, it's likely that most of the chips are of very high quality, and have just been under clocked to fill the demand for the less expensive models. At that point they over-clock well, and are completely stable. That said, if you'd doing 12 hour renders, you don't want the machine to shutdown 80% of the way through for an 8% time savings. So be sure to do a prolonged burn-in before trusting an OCed part for production.

As I mentioned in my lead-in, I transcoded a Blu-ray rip of [REC]2 to MPEG2 for a DVD for a friend. These days I'm using PEGASYS Inc's TMPGEnc4. It can output DVD or BD ready video files. A couple months ago, I added a SpursEngine card (half a Cell processor on a PCIe card) to my PC, and the plug-in for TMPGEnc. Talk about a speed increase! Best $190 I've spent for a while. So I'm using CUDA for decode and filtering (resize, denoise, etc.), and the SpursEngine for encode. I'm seeing results pretty close to what is predicted by these graphs: http://tmpgenc.pegasys-inc.com/en/images/spurs/txp4_Spurs_plugin_test_en2.gif

In closing, don't worry too much about the CPU. Put the extra money into some General Purpose Computing accelerator card (or two). I wouldn't bother with the Quadro card either. It's not any faster than the 285, just cost $600 more. If your software says it only works with the Quadro, find other software, because they're charging you too much too.

If you're looking at a 975, there is absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be looking at a 980x instead. That's a 6 core processor for $999.

I'd want a bigger PSU than a 750 for that rig, especially if you're going to start loading a lot of drives into it.

13K!