Ultimate Vegas Machine?

[Matthew Jeschke]

Finally pulled the trigger on the purchase. I bought all the parts minus a fancier graphics card. I think I will use my old one for time being. Was just getting way to choppy with new 4k footage I get and am upgrading my DSLR with an Atomos Ninja ☺

My current machine has Windows 10 Pro. However, I’m not sure I can transfer it as it was the free upgrade. I’m curious, what is the different between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro? Do both support the functionality needed (e.g. how much memory can they access, how many cores do they support etc). I googled but found little info on this. Am I okay running a editing machine on Windows 10 Home?

FYI ~ Specs on new Machine:

i7 6800k 6 cores
Asrock x99M killer 3.1
Deep Cool 240EX Liquid Cooler
Samsung 950 pro 512gb M.2 PCIe
Cosair Carbide 9011070 Case
32GB DDR4 PC4-1700 Cas15 – This is a bit of a pooch but was 30% cheaper than latency of 13. Hopefully it’s fine.

Reuse:
2TB 7200 RPM capture scratch (wanted to get a 1 TB SSD but figured I’ll wait a little bit).
ATI Radeon 7900 (someday might replace with two GPU(s) but we’ll see how this unit works).

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I do Architectural Photograph & Cinematography as a part of being a Residential Real Estate Consultant.

Some of my work can be seen at,
https://www.youtube.com/keystoaz/
https://www.keystoaz.com/

PS. It’s an excellent excuse to ride of what I love, Camera equipment 🙂

[Aaron Star]

“what is the different between Windows 10 Home and Windows 10 Pro?”

Mainly Enterprise/business class needs with Pro vs Home. Home cannot host a Remote desktop session, and only supports 128GB of RAM vs 2TB on Pro. Most of the other things are focused around business needs like joining a Domain, group policy enforcement, and encrypting the boot disk. WIn10 Home should be fine for a single workstation editing setup.

If you have an x99 chipset, I would have selected the i7-5830K or 60K over the 6800.

5830K = 40 PCI 3.0 lanes off the CPU, which will support 2 full speed GPUs (16x), and still support a 8X SSD PCI card or Blackmagic interface without crossing the DMI bridge.

6800 = 28 lanes for only 1 full speed (16X) GPU

Hopefully the 7900 GPU is a 7970 or 7990, as those had very high TFLOP scores for the day.

[Matthew Jeschke]

Thanks for the help clarifying Windows versions. I’ll have to jot down your notes for my next build ????

My hope with this build is it hack out:

1080p ProRes and NDxHD editing / color grading from my Atomo Ninja 2
1080p RAW from Magic Lantern (on rare occasion).
4k h.264 & h.265 from DJI Mavic Drone

I’m running SVP 14 and the free version of Davinci Resolve.

I’m not exactly sure which graphic card I have. Only that it is 7000 series Radeon. I threw away the boxes. I had bought it form a guy mining bitcoin. All I knew is it made a night and day difference in SV timeline playback on my old system. I assumed with this build my next big purchase would need to be a new graphics card… Or two for the system but sounds like the processor I selected might not do well with two graphics cards?

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I do Architectural Photograph & Cinematography as a part of being a Residential Real Estate Consultant.

Some of my work can be seen at,
https://www.youtube.com/keystoaz/
https://www.keystoaz.com/

PS. It’s an excellent excuse to ride of what I love, Camera equipment 🙂

[Ole Kristiansen]

Why do you want two graphics cards ?

Vegas Pro only support a single gpu !

Davinci Resolve 12.5 free Windows version supports two gpu’s – BUT only one gpu for processing and one gpu for display – so if you want two gpu’s for Davinci Resolve 12.5 free version – buy a cheap gpu for display !

My system
Intel i7 5960x 8-core
Asus Deluxe II motherboard
64GB Memory
4. SSD and 3. Harddrive 7200/10.000 rpm
1300W psu
Two AMD R9 390x 8GB GPU’s
BlackMagic Intensity Pro 4K card
Davinci Resolve 12.5 Studio – full version

[Matthew Jeschke]

Shucks I just realized… Had I known that I would have built the mini system I was specing out. Only reason I went with the larger motherboard & case was to have flexibility so I could update in future to two graphics cards :/ None the less very good to know ☺

Was the 64 GB of memory beneficial? Did it help with dynamic ram previews? Why so much memory? I had thought of buying another two DIMMs to have a total of 64 GB.

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I do Architectural Photograph & Cinematography as a part of being a Residential Real Estate Consultant.

Some of my work can be seen at,
https://www.youtube.com/keystoaz/
https://www.keystoaz.com/

PS. It’s an excellent excuse to ride of what I love, Camera equipment 🙂

[Matthew Jeschke]

Would there be a disadvantage to using Windows 7 Ulitmate for a high powered Editing Machine?

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I do Architectural Photograph & Cinematography as a part of being a Residential Real Estate Consultant.

Some of my work can be seen at,
https://www.youtube.com/keystoaz/
https://www.vimeo.com/matthewjeschke/
https://www.keystoaz.com/

PS. It\’s an excellent excuse to ride off what I love, Camera equipment 🙂

[Aaron Star]

Vegas actually does support 2 GPUs, but maybe not the way most think. If place two AMD GPUs in your system, you could leave one GPU with no monitors plugged into it. Then have all monitors plugged into the other GPU. With no monitors plugged in, Windows will not include that card in the Display system. That leaves the open card free of display overhead.

Inside Vegas, you can choose the free card as your OpenCL compute device under preferences. This makes Vegas use only the free card for timeline compute (GPU FX) along with the compute units on the CPU. Clearly you would want to do this only if you are trying to dedicate the most amount of compute units you can afford. I would not attempt this without an x99/Xeon board, and not with less than 32 compute unit cards. Preferably your “compute card” would have 44-64 compute units.

This configuration would also leave your display card free to do display only. The key is having enough PCI lanes to support 2 GPUs at 16X, for full bandwidth and low latency. Also resisting the temptation of using your best card for display, and shooting yourself in the foot by dedicating an older card to compute. Compute is just as important as display, possibly more important with the displaying speed that most GPUs perform at these days.

Here is a list of caveats:

90% of the users out there fail to understand that their system boards will not FULLY support 2 GPUs at 16X. This is one of the main benefits of the x99 board with the 5960 CPU.

Laptops are not as powerful as desktop/workstation architectures. Laptop GPUs are miles behind desktop GPUs in GFLOP performance.

90% of users attribute poor GPU acceleration or stability with poor software implementation, when it is probably user hardware selection that is at fault. There were a couple versions of Vegas that stumbled with GPU, but those days were in the infancy of OpenCL. Today cheap binned GPU chipsets that are gimped out of the gate, or poor motherboard design are more likely causes of instability.

[Aaron Star]

One thing to keep in mind with Win10 Home vs Pro, is that 10 Home has the same max memory as Windows 8-64bit release. This shows evidence that Win10 Home could be the same memory control system from Windows8-64 . The fact that Win10 Pro supports 2TB shows evidence of another upgrade in memory control. This is one of the main under the hood reasons to move from Win7.

Max memory is not about how much memory you have installed at the moment. Max memory to me, is about MS spending man hours on re-designing the old system to make improvements to the way things operate. Back in the day, NT3.5 seemed insane with its ability to address 4GB of memory. 2TB of memory may not be as far off as we think.

I prefer using the best, most up to date, memory system. Which normally is the most recent OS release.

Win10 Pro – 2TB Memory Max

Win8-64 Pro – 512GB

Win8-64 – 128GB

Win7-64 – 192GB

Win7-64 Premium – 16GB

[Matthew Jeschke]

This is great information. Thanks for sharing.

1. Can you elaborate on “compute units”.

2. Also how does Radeon cross-fire work… I always thought it ended up functioning as if there was one graphics card in the system.

3. I actually have several older GPU units laying around I could easily use one of them for the display. How do I optimize PCIe bandwidth? Such that the rendering card get’s the better slot?

Thanks!

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I do Architectural Photograph & Cinematography as a part of being a Residential Real Estate Consultant.

Some of my work can be seen at,
https://www.youtube.com/keystoaz/
https://www.vimeo.com/matthewjeschke/
https://www.keystoaz.com/

PS. It\’s an excellent excuse to ride off what I love, Camera equipment 🙂

[Aaron Star]

1. Can you elaborate on “compute units”.

https://forums.khronos.org/showthread.php/9429-Relation-between-cuda-cores-and-compute-units

With AMD you can divide the stream processing units by 64, that will give you the compute units. Marketing likes the larger number, since that is what NVidia started doing. OpenCL is optimized by having the largest amount of Compute Units working to solve a problem. The CPU will perform as a compute unit virtually, which is why Vegas will run with no GPU enable BTW. The CPU compute units are basically determined by the number of CPU cores you have, including the HT cores.

The FLOPS of a CPU are generally much less than a GPU, normally around .200-1GFLOPS. The R9-Fury-X single chip/card is around 8500 GFLOPS. The So you can see why having the GPU enabled is a good thing.

If you go to some place like techpowerup, you want to look for AMD cards that have XT chip designations. The XT line will have the max compute units, and are less likely to have suffered manufacturing errors. All the top AMD Pro line cards run XT chips.

2. Also how does Radeon cross-fire work… I always thought it ended up functioning as if there was one graphics card in the system.

Crossfire is card linking tech that basically divides the screen lines in Game mode by half. Each GPU only renders half the screen. This does not work with 3D visual apps, or NLEs like vegas.

3. I actually have several older GPU units laying around I could easily use one of them for the display. How do I optimize PCIe bandwidth? Such that the rendering card get’s the better slot?

Research the x99 chipset clock diagram, then determine which slot is connected to the CPU directly. Normally the 1st 16x slot is the CPU PCI lanes.

6800 = 28 lanes for only 1 full speed (16X) GPU

With less than 32 lanes on the CPU, the motherboard will auto switch your slots and divide the bandwidth between the cards. Making them both 8x speed. I would just stick with one GPU, unless you get a CPU that can take advantage of the full x99 design.

The remaining CPU PCI lanes are spread out across the other PCI slots and onboard devices like M.2, or thunderbolt. All this switching tech on desktop boards can actually create problems, and is a good reason to go Xeon class boards and chips.