Requesting Help on my PC build

[Aivis Zons]

I’d recommend going for something like a Ryzen 7 5800X and an RTX 3060 TI, that should be fairly balanced. That’s not the very latest gen, but good luck finding that at reasonable prices. From personal experience a better CPU has actually given me more performance as not everything’s GPU accelerated. So perhaps see if you can upgrade that within your budget. Don’t hesitate to check the 2nd hand market. I also don’t recommend you go for an AMD card yet, because while AV1 encoding is improving, it’s not the standard quite yet.

Go for 32GB of RAM at 3200MHz or higher.

Motherboard – maybe some B550 model.

Don’t save on storage. Get a good ssd for your projects and assets, and maybe a hard drive for archival purposes. Fills up faster than you think.

To find the most “optimal” setup that’s also compatible I always use pcpartpicker and I suggest you do the same, might even find a build that someone else has already made with similar components and copy that. Just don’t skimp out on RAM & storage, that’s very important for video editing.

[Derek Charles]

My Reuired tasks are – color correction/grading on hours of clips with mixed audio tracks. Weddings, concerts, events… So besides LUTs I’m not doing any motion graphics, effects or whatever else… I should probably start that when I get this more capable computer… I need render times down. My current laptop always overnight renders. for a 30-50 minute file ~4gb would take 8+ hours to render.

I shoot with a Sony A7iii XAVC-S codec 24p 4k but my next camera will be the Sony A7Siii and that will shoot 60p in 4k at a high bitrate. I always edit and deliver on a 1080p timeline though.

I shared your replies above to a friend and they replied

“Puget say Intel has better performance overall right now. GPU acceleration is probably important if supported. and 32GB is minimum but I think I can find good deal on 64GB as long as motherboard will support that much. Storage is very important for workflow and scratch disk”

Again, touching on all these subjects for me would be a huge help. Also, I do process astrophotography stacking as well, if that matters.

Thanks!

[Aivis Zons]

Judging by your current render times you should see a drastic improvement in performance.

With 4K definitely look into using Proxies if you’re not doing it already.

“Intel has better performance overall” – not sure about this one, but you shouldn’t look at “overall” as you have a pretty specific use case. There must be some benchmarks out there that roughly match your projects. In the more recent years AMD has simply had the better price for performance in my region +more cores.

32GB vs 64GB – I personally stopped at 32GB and haven’t run into any bottlenecks so far. I’d say go for 32 and upgrade in the future if necessary as you can just add more sticks.

[Derek Charles]

Hey, I greatly appreciate the help so far!

I’ve been doing research and had some additional follow-up questions:

1. With the Ryzen recommendations, in the attached benchmark it looks like Intel is the better performer especially in the $400 USD price point and below or am I missing something?
Do the E-cores within some of these current Intel CPUs matter in Resolve? I’m assuming DVR and Fusion will take advantage of them properly.

2. How about the IGPU on some of the Intel CPUs and Quick Sync? Does DVR utilize Quick Sync in a beneficial way compared to the latest Ryzen CPUs, which lack any onboard graphics?

3. As for the RAM topic, I believe I read that the price-to-performance of DDR5 is not quite there yet compared to DDR4. Guessing there’s not a huge boost yet in DVR/Fusion/etc. going with
DDR5 today over DDR4? If I can, I’m looking to get a 64GB 3600MHz CL18 DDR4 (2x32GB) kit for only ~$10-20 USD more than a 32GB DDR4 kit and over a more expensive 32GB DDR5 kit.
Unfortunately, DDR5 motherboards look to still carry a price premium over DDR4 boards as of right now too.

4. How efficiently are dedicated GPUs leveraged in the DVR suite? Is it true that Nvidia and its CUDA cores are preferred over AMD GPUs here?

Any thoughts on a great value previous generation Nvidia GTX/RTX card that would work well? Current graphics card prices esp from Nvidia are becoming laughable.
Is VRAM capacity crucial in the DVR suite for a 4K workflow?

[Aivis Zons]

1. I reckon that AMD should come out on top in multi-threaded tasks, but perhaps that’s no longer the case at this price point. I wouldn’t really give much thought to e-cores though. If the pricing and performance makes sense – just go for the better deal, but don’t forget to take the motherboard pricing into consideration.

2. Quick Sync is likely beneficial in some cases, but can’t really comment from experience. I believe it depends on which codecs you use as I doubt that completely everything is supported.

3. DDR5 is still pricey and I’d say that the benefit isn’t worth it yet.

4. Haven’t used an AMD gpu in a very long time, but from what I’ve heard CUDA is still preferred. I’d suggest you look for something with at least 8GB of VRAM and do consider the used market. There should be plenty of 30 series sellers who are selling just to upgrade to 40 series.