Budget Computer build for Vegas Pro

[Stephen Mann]

1) AMD vs. Intel?
I have always used Intel – No specific reason, but Intel invented the CPU family we use in the PC world, AMD made it’s money making cheaper copies.

2) More cores vs. more CPU clock speed?
Cores and Clock speed are linked. But, do the CODECS you plan to use operate on more than one core? Are the CODEC processes multi-threading? Even if they aren’t, they will be in the future.

3) $$$ into CPU vs. GPU if I don’t go APU. All of the above applies.
A couple of years ago I ran a Rendertest database (Password: vegasuser). You can download the results to see for yourself. As expected the dual-Xeon’s blew everything else away.

Bottom line is that the most bang for the buck is in the processor speed. GPU support is (in my opinion) a band-aid for slow processors. The faster processors benefit very little from GPU support, and in some cases using the GPU could slow the overall process because it takes the processor longer to send the data to the GPU than to just do the work itself.

But, I avoid Radeon GPU’s because I have had driver problems with every PC I built using the Radeon cards.

I recently built a new editing PC, specs below. The total was $1300, but it’s not a fair quote because I already had a 240Gb SSD for the system drive and I reused a 2Tb “documents” drive from the PC that was retiring. (Executed is more like it).

Summary
Operating System
Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit SP1
CPU
Intel Core i7 4770K @ 3.50GHz
Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM
32.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 798MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z87X-UD4H-CF (SOCKET 0)
Graphics
DELL 2007WFP (1680×1050@60Hz)
DELL 2007WFP (1680×1050@60Hz)
DELL 2007WFP (1680×1050@60Hz)
Intel HD Graphics 4600 (Gigabyte) (On-moherboard)
2048MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 650 Ti Boost (Gigabyte)
Hard Drives
2795GB ATA ST3000DM001-1CH1 SCSI Disk Device (SATA)
238GB ATA M4-CT256M4SSD2 SCSI Disk Device (SSD)
Optical Drives
ELBY CLONEDRIVE SCSI CdRom Device
HL-DT-ST BD-RE WH14NS40 SCSI CdRom Device
Audio
Realtek High Definition Audio (on-motherboard)

Welcome back.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[John Rofrano]

You can’t go wrong with the VideoGuys.com DIY9 specifications. Pick your price point:

DIY9 Hot Rod: $3,537
Videoguys DIY9 Choice: $2,387,
DIY9: $1,561
Budget DIY8 Sandy Bridge: $1,384

One of them will probably fit your budget. Just order the parts and build knowing they have been tested together. I built the DIY9 Hot Rod with the CPU from the Videoguys DIY9 Choice and it rocks!

My workstation specs are on my web site:

Intel Hex Core Video Editing Workstation

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[James Kumorek]

Speaking more generally about one point — GPUs — how much a good GPU will help depends on what your timelines look like. Vegas has generally been good about being able to play back clips smoothly. Where a GPU can help is when you start scaling, compositing and applying effects — DEPENDING UPON how the application was written. I switched from Vegas to Premiere a year and a half ago, so I don’t know the current state, but I had found that Vegas produced incorrect results with the GPU support turned on often enough that I always had to disable it. Hopefully it’s better now. But many CODECS are not written to make use of the GPU for decoding/encoding, so you might not get an help there. If you’re not scaling and compositing much, you wouldn’t get much help. If you’re doing a lot of color correcting of clips, you might get benefit there. But for simply timelines, it probably would not have a big impact.

I’m evaluating an nVidia K4000 now, it’s made a huge difference in Premiere’s performance. In one project where I do a lot of laying a color slide on top of video with the color at 50% transparency, then add text slides on top of it, with color correction added to all the clips, the same computer went from very stilted, low frame-rate playback with all six cores maxed out to completely smooth playback with 50% CPU utilization when I put in the K4000. But, if it was just straight cuts with no effects, it wouldn’t have mattered. The built-in CODECs that come with Creative Suite don’t use the GPU, so there’s no help in encoding/decoding.

[Dave Haynie]

You do have to qualify “budget” here 🙂 If you’re thinking hex-core, you’re already well ahead of nearly every consumer PC.

1) AMD vs. Intel. I’ve been doing a little bit of ping-ponging. I had an Intel Q6600@2.4GHz (quad core) some years back. I switched to an AMD 1090T@3.2GHz (hex core), which was pretty nice upgrade for relatively low amounts of cash (just a main board upgrade).

But as you get a faster core, and more of them, memory performance does suffer in any of the standard memory systems (2×64-bit, which is pretty much what you find for all AMD and everything from Intel except the high-end). So if you can, get an Intel Socket 2011 main board. Socket LGA2011 also gets you 40 PCI Express links, versus only 16 on the standard LGA1150 socket (just over half the pins, something has to give). Could be overkill, but hey, you’ll never run out! If some day you had a legit video use for 4 GPU boards, you could run that.

I built such a system recently, based on the Gigabyte GA-X79-UP4 motherboard. Pretty happy with it so far. This board included four PCIe x 16 slots — way more than I’ll ever need, but also 12 SATA ports (2x eSATA, 10x internal SATA), which really comes in handy (my old system had an add-in SATA card, as the main board only had 5 SATA ports). I chose the i7-3930K over the i7-3960X… I couldn’t see paying nearly $500 more for an extra 100MHz 🙂

AMD’s CPU micro-architecture has definitely fallen behind Intel’s. It’s interesting — they have a standard core that’s actually two CPU cores sharing a single FPU core. They kind of suggested this as a better answer to Intel’s hardware multithreading (Hyperthreading), and they do actually offer large core count chips, but you have to go to Opteron to get 12 or 16 cores. Those run much slower, and seem more likely to accelerate web applications on a server, applications not usually very FPU intensive anyway. I looked into those, and was not convinced they’d be a good deal for a media workstation. In their desktop processor family, the top chip is the AMD FX-9590, which runs at 4.7GHz and sports 8 cores (4 piledriver modules)… not really competitive against Intel. Part that may well be the problem of keeping the cores fed from the 2-way memory bus, even given a slight advantage in cache size (smaller L3 cache, larger L2 caches, 2MB per piledriver module… but of course, they’re 2-way shared L2 caches, which is probably a contention issue from time to time).

Intel currently has a process advantage, too. The FX-9590 runs a TDP of 220W, the i7-3930K only 120W. My newly revised PC is the quietest PC I’ve had, well, since CPUs needed cooling fans. Part of that’s also in the build. I have a heat sink with a 120mm fan (Cooler Master Hyper T4 — lots of cooling for little cash), very quiet. And three other larger, slower fans on the case, all designed to speed up based on heat. I used a Cooler Master HAF XM case, which, along with room for a crazy number of fans, includes this modern idea of routing pretty much all of the cables behind the main board. So there’s nothing in the way of airflow, anywhere in the case.

The APU idea is kind of a cool one. If you look at lower-end consumer chips and gaming performance, the AMD APU chips are slaughtering Intel on performance. Part of that’s a better GPU, and I’m convinced part of that is the tighter coupling of the GPU and CPU in these chips. Unfortunately, none of these chips are using GPUs fast enough to make any difference in video rendering, far as I can tell. Maybe something for the future, but not useful yet.

2) Cores vs. Clock speed… yes! You want both. Worst case, running a single threaded application, naturally the clock speed wins. This is built-in on i7 chips anyway… my aforementioned i7-3930K has a base speed of 3.2GHz, but will clock up to 3.8GHz if only one core is being stressed. Best case, which is usually attained in multithreaded rendering, all N cores are completely fed with work, and you get a linear scaling per core. So it’s a trade-off… you can make up for clock speed by adding cores, and cores by increasing clock speed. It’s linear, as long as you’re not cache-thrashing. Both faster clocks and more CPU cores can put additional stress on the caches, but particularly the additional cores. And of course, only within the same CPU core family. Comparing different families, like AMD vs. Intel, you have to look at the micro-architecture too.

3) GPU vs. CPU? Right now, for Vegas, I’d put the money into the CPU. Here’s the thing… GPUs are faster. MUCH faster. But there are two problems with that speed. It’s complicated to get your computing into a form that the GPU will help with, and then, well, you have to send that problem to the GPU for computation. What this means is that there’s an overhead for using the GPU. The GPU program has to be compiled (that’s what OpenCL is doing for you in Vegas, and CUDA in other programs), then the program and data have to be sent to the GPU’s memory buffer. One reason I like the APU idea is that this communication is much, much faster, and memory is shared between CPU and GPU (if you look at the design of the new Sony PS3, this is done for the first time basically making the shared bus a video memory bus, not using slower CPU memory as in the typical low-end PC).

So on my old system, the GPU helped. Quite a bit on some things. But you could see the issues. Rendering on the 1090T only, I got 95% or so CPU use. Using the GPU (AMD HD6970) I got more like 75% CPU and maybe 30-40% GPU, and things could go twice as fast, in some cases. That missing CPU time is communications overhead between CPU and GPU; the lower use of the GPU is indicating that Vegas can only translate so much work into the GPU’s language right now (I’m pretty sure Adobe’s doing this better these days, at least for edit-time rendering, not sure about the final render). There’s also some compilation overhead; the time the CPU is involved in compiling OpenGL programs and transferring data to the GPU is measured as CPU use, but it’s not CPU use directly applicable to the job at hand.

What this tells me is three things. One: I’m probably not going to see much of a performance increase going to a new GPU. Maybe a little, based on clock speed, but nothing based on more cores — GPU advances typically come from small boosts in speed and large boosts in parallelism (more cores, wider buses). This also tells me that, as the CPU can do that work better, that missing 25% of my CPU time could start to match or even exceed that GPU help, once you factor in all of the overhead inherent in using that GPU. And finally, it tells me that Vegas isn’t great at pipelining this work. If Vegas was looking far ahead and preparing new data for the GPU while the GPU was working on the previous problem, working during the communications delays, etc. better, I wouldn’t expect to see that CPU and GPU downtime. But it’s a complex problem, and not yet fully solved. On the other hand, there’s no problem using CPU resources to their fullest, as long as your system isn’t hitting other bottlenecks.

So I kept my GPU for the new system. And yeah, it’s AMD. When Sony moved to more complete GPU acceleration (eg, using it in the compositing engine, not just on specific renderers), I bought both the AMD Radeon HD6970 and the nVidia GeForce GTX570, and benchmarked them both. On my system, the Radeon did much better… the GTX570 was not faster on anything I tried, it often lost to the Radeon, particularly on edit rendering, and at the time, the OpenCL implementation on the nVidia was buggy — it actually failed to run a number of standard benchmark programs. I’m sure that’s no longer a deciding factor, and of course, other programs may only support CUDA, nVidia’s compute language, which was out before the OpenCL standard.

But I think, if you’re looking at a six core Intel, spend you money there, not on the GPU for now.

Memory-wise, I’ve honestly never found Vegas using more than maybe 10GB for any single operation… and I’m talking about 40+ compositing layers and uncompressed video files doing animations. And it was actually photography work, not video, that had me upgrade my old system to 16GB. My new system is built with 64GB of DDR-1866 DRAM… again, for Photography (50+ raw 20Mpixel photos composited into 10-20GB individual photo files… yeah, that takes some memory). Of course, if you run multiple copies of Vegas (or other tools) at the same time, it’s really nice to have it all in RAM. For video only, I wouldn’t go over 32GB. It’s also a good idea to buy matched memory modules, a 32GB set rather than a 16GB set now and another later. And of course, you want SSD for a boot drive… that’s kind of a no-brainer these days. I used a Crucial M500 960GB drive, still a bit spendy, but I’m filling this with programs for video, audio/music, photography, and electronics CAD. You know your drive capacity needs.

-Dave

[Ron Shook]

Good Vegas folks,

A shout out to all who responded with detail I should have expected but didn’t. Since as near as I could search there hasn’t been a comprehensive DIY build thread on here for about 6 months, this was perhaps due, as fast as these things change. Unfortunately due to budget constraints I can’t take the best advice here, but I did discover how stupid one of my initial contentions was, “…this could be the last editing computer of my life.” Very bad thinking! I should be thinking to start with quality but modest and build up as the need arises or not if it doesn’t. That’s kind of like the libertarian, anarchist, prepper, survivalist Jack Spirko’s key raison d’etre, “Helping you live a better life, if times get tough, or even if they don’t.”

But dang, Dave, my geek Greek is pretty rusty. Your wonderful response took a little soldiering and googling, part of the reason I haven’t gotten back on the thread horse sooner. (grin)

So some clarification on my part and an additional question or 3. I start with a solid full tower and 600w power supply, with 2 500GB hard drives for system and audio, monitors/keyboard/mouse, and Vegas Pro 11. The rest must come out of $800, Total max $1k. I’ve pretty much decided after your advice and considering costs that the base will be the top AMD APU (4 cores, 3.8GHz,) with the top Asus motherboard for this APU. It won’t be as fast as Intel, I realize, but it’s so inexpensive that it leaves more room for everything else, and replacement and downgrade to personal productivity computer without too much regret, if the future warrants it. Stability is a key feature to me and no one here has indicated that there’s any significant difference for this in the AMD vs. Intel debate. If there is significant difference, let me know now.

The things I need to get with the budget:

AMD Trinity 3.8GHz (4.2GHz Turbo 100W Quad-Core Desktop APU $130

AMD A85X HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard $130

16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory $120

2, TOSHIBA 7200 RPM 64MB SATA 6.0Gb/s Internal AV Hard Drives $200

2, ASUS 24X DVD Burners $40

Pioneer Blu-ray Burner BDR-208DBK $70

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional $70

So…, this totals to $760, practically $800 with some S&H and a few cables I might not already have.

Three more questions:

1) Dave wrote, “And of course, you want SSD for a boot drive… that’s kind of a no-brainer these days.” Well…, old brain here, but perhaps it can be updated. After looking at prices I’m afraid that a fully SSD boot drive isn’t in the cards. However, I’ve noticed that there are hybrid drives, and I remember seeing a discussion after a search here that seemed to say that you could configure your own hybrid boot drive with a small SSD and regular hard drive. If that’s correct, how small of an SSD drive would get you most of the benefits on a computer relegated primarily to editing and not packed with other stuff? I hope someone get’s my drift. If a no more than a 128 GB SSD would do the trick I might be able to swing it, smaller even more likely.

2) With the above system am I liable to get largely steady, smooth real time editing preview and external monitor on editing codecs like HDV, H264, QT stuff, and the like. I’m assuming not a problem with the MPEG2 (35 & 50mbps) Sony Codecs.

3) Production and post here in Chicago has a heavy Panasonic flavor. Are those codecs in VP11 (I’ve purchased, but not downloaded and installed), or must I go to VP12 or 3rd party to get them? If 3rd party, what? How do these codecs work in terms of question 2 above?

Opps…, 4) Have I forgotten anything significant?

I hope everything is clear here, because decently detailed questions elicit good and priceless answers.

I’m most appreciative of you experts who have stuck with it and continue to give of your expertise.

Ron Shook
One & Only Full Time Bottle Washer (O&OFTBW)
Shoulder-High Eye Productions

[Dave Haynie]

If you can’t pony up enough for an SSD boot drive, I can definitely recommend a hybrid drive. Last summer I built a system for my son, gaming oriented with a four core i7 and a decent nVidia GPU, along with a 750GB hybrid boot drive. At the time, this was the fastest PC I had made, and the hybrid drive made it plenty fast. That drive, with something like 8GB fast flash cache, was close to $200 last year, but this year you can find them for only a little more than straight HDDs.

You can add on a small SSD to cache a large HDD, but there’s kind of a jungle of software options too enable this. Unless some of the folks here have found a great system, I couldn’t recommend this, though only because I have no experience setting up a successful system.

-Dave

[Ron Shook]

Dave,

Well, we’ll see if anyone speaks up about hybrid drives made from separate devices. I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t already have the drive device of the pair.

The other thing that puzzles me with the unfamiliar is how a unified hybrid drive that you describe (which I’ve looked at) with only 8GB of the super fast stuff makes such a significant difference with anything as bloated as Windows. Do you just load on the operating system as normal or are there special load procedures that place significant sections of the Windows software on the 8 gigs of SSD.

Boy, am I behind the 8-ball, and must be asking questions that have been answered earlier.

[Fortunately, I looked around more before posting and can now mostly answer my own questions. It seems that the one device SSHD drives are smart enough to learn what you use most and adapt over time to your use and style coming very close to SSD only speed over time particularly for operating system and programs, better, but not so much for documents and heavy data like AV. I didn’t find a direct answer to the question of loading the operating system, but I’m guessing that there is no difference from just loading it to a hard drive. Could someone confirm this?]

I’m thinking very seriously of adding an SSHD drive to the system as the boot drive because as Dave said, they aren’t much more than just a hard drive. Thanks, Dave!

Thanks again for your attentions and particularly for real world reports.

Ron Shook