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Advice on hardware for Vegas Pro 11 (i7 or i5?)
After much consideration, and after having spent years with FCP on an increasingly out-of-date PowerMac, I have decided to move my editing to the PC and opted to go with Vegas Pro 11 over Premiere.
Since, at this point, I am still running a not-very-new WinXP box, I’m obviously planning on a new-build rather than trying to run Win7 on my older machine. Since my initial inclination had been to go with Premiere and AE, I had been planning to build around an i7-2600K CPU rather than the less-expensive i5-2500 because, although many of the sources I researched indicated that the i5 gave virtually identical performance in most areas, tests showed that the hyper-threading of the i7 made a drastic difference in the results with those two Adobe products.
However, since I no longer plan on going the Adobe route, I have to ask: would the i7 still be justified over the i5 with Vegas? I’ve seen some posts in the archives here indicating that hyper-threading doesn’t make as much of a difference in Vegas as it does in Premiere/AE, with even a few posts claiming that they got better results with the hyper-threading turned off. Now that the dust has settled a bit, what is the current consensus: would the i7 and its hyper-threading make enough of a difference to justify the higher price, or would it make just as much sense to go with the i5 (and use the cost savings to make up for the extra I’m going to have to shell out for hard drives by not making this decision a couple of months ago 😉 )?
Thanks in advance.
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8 Replies
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Anyway you dish it out…if you were planning to go with the
i7 initially and stepping up other system specs up a notch,still
go with that.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Vegas thrives on processor horsepower. The more cores and threads the better.
Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com -
And do some research on a good Graphics card-GPU
you can afford.Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Maker
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
https://filmex-creative-media.blogspot.com/ -
Had very good results with the fastest Phenom II X6 as well. Saved a ton of cash vs Intel, very happy with the results. If $ is an issue, think about AMD, if not buy the most expensive Intel i7 you can afford. I would go AMD before an i5 though….just my two cents.
RegardsScott Francis
Mind’s Eye Audio/Video Productions -
[Steve Rhoden] “And do some research on a good Graphics card-GPU you can afford.”
At the moment, I’m looking at a Gigabyte GTX 560 — would there be any reason why that might be less-than-optimal? (The 580s are somewhat out of my price range.)
Right now, the big problem I’m having is, of course, storage. I wish I’d decided to move on this a couple of months ago, when the 3TB 7200 drives I was looking at were $170 each — now, they’re $400 apiece!
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Recently, I decided to build a new, updated platform expressly for Vegas Pro software running in the 64-bit environment and opted to go with an Asus P6X58-E motherboard with 24GB RAM, a GeForce GTX 560 GPU, and an I7 980 series six-core processor. Among the hard drives and RAID arrays I installed, I decided to go with a solid state system drive for speed and reliability, which boots up Windows 7 Pro from “cold steel” in well under 30 seconds. This system, my second Asus-based box, is running both Vegas Pro 9e and Vegas Pro 11, and it really screams. It’s also mildly over-clocked, and I’m quite pleased with the performance and stability it offers. The first Asus (quad-processor) box, which cost a whopping $1400 to build, is now more than five years old, has made me many thousands of dollars, and is still working perfectly. I built the new system, fully equipped, for well under $2K, and I believe a turn-key HP or other equivalent system would have cost several thousands more. While I am, like many others out there, still experiencing the frustrations of the Vegas Pro 11/New Blue Titler Pro combo’s frequent crashes, I certainly can’t blame it on this hardware combination. I can’t recommend this brand strongly enough to anyone considering building their own high-powered NLE workstation.
Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC -
Bill,
I have a very similar system, P6X58D, 24GB 2-GTX460, SSD, 4-cores on the i7, 9TB Raid, Win7-pro. All of it came in under $2000, a year ago (I’m a good shopper). I couldn’t agree with you more that this is a great system to work on.
Jeff
Windows 7 64-bit, ASUS P6X58D, i7 960 3.20GHz, 24.0GB DDR3, 12TB connected storage
http://www.narrowroadmedia.com -
Jeff,
I’ve enjoyed such good service from these Asus products I built, that I also decided to invest in an Asus N75sf notebook for some upcoming field work. It’s equipped with an I7 processor and even came with a built-in BluRay burner and sweet little portable Bang & Olufsen sub-woofer that sounds awesome! Very cool. But, unfortunately, it’s fully RAM populated at only 8GB (would have preferred at least 16). Even so, it boots W7 64-bit very quickly, and seems to be quite efficient. The only significant issue I’ve discovered in running SVP11 lies with the display card Asus uses – the GeForce GT555M (2GB), which isn’t certified for the New Blue Titler yet. It seems to be working much better now that I’ve installed the latest Nvidia beta driver 290.36, though. While I have set SVP11 prefs to turn off the GPU, Vegas still lets me use New Blue and it renders very quickly, so I think it’s a keeper. With a full 24 month warranty, what’s not to love?
Happy motoring!
Bill Church
Briarwood Productions LLC
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