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!

Will all software automatically make use of six cores?

Yeah, I figured the power supply upgrade would be a no-brainer.



That was my concern with the CPU. I know that bleeding-edge usually costs $$ and getting something a bit under that is usually the best value. I just wasn't sure if it wouldn't be worth the premium in this case.

I thought that since that Quadro card had the CUDA technology, it would speed things up. Adobe is saying either of the two cards are certified with their Mercury rendering engine, being touted as providing much more real time with Production Premium Suite CS5 coming out next month or so.

If the software makes use of 4 cores, it will make use of 6. Or 8. Or 12.

With the 9xx series of i7s, though there are big jumps all through the line. $290 to start, then $550, then $999. I'd say that the 980x at least offers more value for that extra dough than the other jumps. Architecturally, it's also superior, from what I've read.

Yeah, I already want to upgrade my CPU. Isn't that sick?

Shut.
Up.

For the most part software which supports multiple threads (anything new and CPU heavy) will count the cores and launch an equal number of threads. Although there were a couple of poorly designed programs which expected the core count to be a multiple of 2, but since AMD and now Intel have 6-core CPUs out, those programs have been fixed.

The only time it's worth paying the premium for the faster CPU is if you're going to make more than the difference back by finishing early.

All recent Nvidia cards support CUDA. Anything from the 8800GT 512 up has excellent CUDA support. The Quadro cards are just Geforce cards with a different name slapped on them, and their price quadrupled because some CAD software used to only certify that line.

While the CUDA acceleration helped some, it's nothing like the speed up gained from the Spurs. Of course the software you're using has to be able to make use of the hardware you have. TMPGEnc uses all 8 CPU cores I have, the CUDA of my 8800GT 512, and the SpursEngine. I get about 5x realtime when encoding video (H.264 1080p24 input being transcoded to MPEG2 3:2 pulldown 480i60), so a 50 minute clip takes 10 minutes to encode. Without the Spurs I was seeing about 1.25x realtime with just the CUDA filtering. As a test without CUDA I get very close to realtime with just the 8 CPU cores from my dual Quad Opterons.

[pedant] 6 is a multiple of 2 [/pedant]

Grrr, I was tired. Power of 2.

I figured that's what you meant.

Mark, if nothing else, overclocking is fun. I have my EVGA 680i motherboard and 2.4 GHZ Q6600 processor overclocked to 3.2 GHz, but I did have it up to 3.6 GHz, (dropped it because I didn't feel comfortable with the CPU voltage required).

There is quite a lot to know about overclocking, and it's a very methodical process. Thankfully my motherboard/processor combination is quite popular so there were many guides online from well respected overclockers.

I won't choose any other motherboard other than an EVGA, as their forum is extremely helpful and their members will walk you through the entire process.

Even if I had decided to do my own build, I don't think I would have started tinkering to that level right off. Reliability is even more important to me than speed and, though I would trust someone else to do it, I wouldn't have had the gumption to do it myself this time around.

I'm ordering the above build tonight. Thanks to everyone for their help and suggestions!

Ken, as I didn't acknowledge the specific suggestion yet, I asked my dealer about the 6-core new CPU and though he's excited about it, evidently it won't be available till next week and I need this system by the weekend...