Rob Ainscough
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COW Coins
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DaVinci Coins
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Premiere Pro Coins
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I don’t know what your typical projects are with Adobe which will determine what you need and if “time is money” factors into your equation.
I build my own systems because they offer the most flexibility and can be very specifically configured for the tasks I want them to perform.
Dell/HP use proprietary components and any failures means you have to go to Dell/HP and wait for parts and pay a premium for those replacement parts. For example motherboard and power supply in the Dell/HP are non-standard and can only be replaced by going to Dell/HP.
The Lenovo is a little better because they use less proprietary components. But they don’t use the “best” components, for example their RAM timings will not be top tier (RAM speed is VERY important for Adobe), their UEFI/BIOS configurations will not be optimized for best performance, minimal rated power supply (poor transient response).
Mac … well, I wouldn’t consider anything less than the Mac Pro for video/audio workflows. A few months ago I priced out a Mac Pro well equipped for video/audio work and it was around $18,000 US (and that was the now old M2 processor).
I’m primarily a DaVinci Resolve/Fusion user now but occasionally work on Adobe projects (not on my dime as there is no way I’m paying Adobe subscription prices anymore). I run 4 computers and run headless Resolve/Fusion workstations for projects I can run in the background while I continue to work. As I pointed out in another thread, I’ve never needed more than 64GB RAM but I do buy the best RAM timing options available for 64GB (2X32GB modules DDR5). Also very important is your network performance if you have external storage (NAS) or computers to do processing … I run 10GbE network and looking to do some Trunking (pair up some 10GbE ports) to get 20GbE all via Cat 8 RJ45 (SFP so fiber is an option but Cat 8 is good to 40Gbps).
My typical media sources are 4K – 60 RAW HDR (but not always) … on the audio side 6 track recordings but often just 1-3 tracks.
But important to know a key factor … you need to provide the “time is money” factor. If not, then any of those options you listed will work, just more slowly … for example if you have a project that take 1 hour to render out in one of those computers, on a faster computer you could easily drop that down to 15 minutes. If you do this day in and day out, that’s A LOT of time saved (or time earned pending how you want to look at it).
Cheers, Rob.
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Out of those choices, none. Sorry.
But if I’m restricted to those choices then Lenovo because of CPU and GPU options.
Not sure what you mean by similar price? The base P620 is over $3000 and the others are $1500 to $2000.
Regardless, the P620 will allow for more future expansion at a cost effective price. When it comes to Adobe apps the fastest GPU/CPU + fastest RAM = best performance.
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What are you using to read RAM usage? I’ve used those two FX and more and never got to 32GB usage. The biggest memory usage I get is when I start using Mocha and do a lot of tracking.
Not to mention both Blur and Warp are GPU supported/accelerated.
Even HDR doesn’t impact RAM that much.
Do you have some plug-in that might have a memory leak?
Cheers Rob
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Hey Tom,
If one is going to the pagefile for memory operations then that usually means they’re running out of physical RAM address space. Going to a pagefile will be 100X slower than RAM even on the fastest SSD. Pagefile access is to be avoided at all costs.
To Quote:
“In storage, a pagefile is a reserved portion of a storage drive that is used <b style=”font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; color: var(–bb-body-text-color);”>as an extension of random access memory for data in RAM that hasn’t been used recently”
I’ve never seen Adobe be intelligent about RAM usage regardless of how much I allow it to use. In my testing 64GB of faster RAM will out perform 128GB of slower RAM. Normally, as RAM capacity increases it’s access frequency specification are slower (increase load on the memory controller forces frequency drop and increased timings). In fact, if you can get away with 32GB of faster RAM, that would provide better overall performance so long as you don’t swap to pagefile for “data as RAM”.
To summary, if one uses smaller projects and/or never exceeds 32GB, then get faster 32GB RAM (can gain as much as 18% in render performance). Otherwise get the lowest capacity RAM and highest frequency and best timings you can to stay “just above” the project RAM requirements.
Cheers, Rob.
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Neither of those options will make much of a difference as your existing specs are more than good enough for Adobe suite even if you work in 8K resolution.
If you want more performance, then look at GPU and CPU. If you end up doing a lot of software rendering the CPU will govern performance. On the GPU side you want to see what specific FX are accelerated via the GPU and final render. Many higher quality output formats (HDR etc.) don’t have hardware accelerated support from the GPU so will be CPU based.
Faster RAM can gain 10-18% but going from 64GB to 128GB will not be noticeable even on very large projects. Next time you run a large Adobe Pr/Ae/Ps project check how much of your RAM is being used, you’ll be surprised how little is used. One of my largest projects and I was at 36GB.
I even experimented with virtual RAM drives setting up a 128GB RAM drive (out of a 256GB total RAM), made no difference at all.
Cheers, Rob.
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Try the free version of Davinci Resolve and decide for yourself. That’s what I did when I moved from Adobe to DaVinci … used a project I knew was having issues in Adobe Pr and replicated it in DaVinci … it was such a great performance experience and overall workflow improvement, I paid my $295 for DaVinci Resolve Studio (one time charge).
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Depends on what you edit and file sizes … you’ll not see a huge difference between top end Gen4 M.2 vs. Gen5 M.2 but since you’re building new system, the price difference isn’t that significant $260 for 2TB Gen5 vs. High speed Gen4 2TB at $160.
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The DDR5 performance will help. H.265 Adobe doesn’t like for timeline editing, I’d convert that to a ProRes flavor before starting a project.
I used to be a fan of ASUS, but their quality and performance seems to have taken a dive for the worse over the years (especially recently). I’ve used Gigabyte boards many years ago but it did fail me, haven’t tried them recently. I’ve been using MSI boards recently and they seem good (not great but good) and stable.
So far DaVinci has been faster in everything, timeline, renders, FX, and even DaVinci Fusion (equivalent to Ae) working faster than similar Adobe projects. But I do use BMD external hardware that only works with DaVinci so my workflow is much improved there also. Learning wise, DaVinci is node and Adobe is layers. DaVinci UI is more intuitive and the “pages are just tabs” are one click where-as in Adobe Pr I have to change “workspaces” to get the optimal UI layout … so going back and forth between Color grading and edit and fusion is super easy.
As far as Timeline boost, you will improvement with Gen5 but don’t expect miracles, much of what happens is the timeline is decoding (hence my suggestion to convert H.265 to ProRes) … some compressions just turn Pr into a performance nightmare. You can always use proxies for editing, but for color grading no way one should be using proxies IMHO.
Oh, you listed 4070Ti … I would recommend the 4070Ti Super 16GB variant at $829 or the AMD 7900XTX at $929 … both work well, but the 7900XTX will render faster. I use Topaz Video AI as my benchmark tool since they leverage the GPUs rendering performance almost entirely and reflect relative performance rendering.
I posted some benchmarks on my 7900XTX 24GB and nVidia 3090 using Topaz Video AI here:
4090 24GB here:
4070 Ti Super 16GB using Topaz Video AI here:
community.topazlabs.com
Video AI 4.2.X - User Benchmarking Results
My AMD 7900XTX and nVidia 3090 are pretty close in performance with the AMD slightly better overall. I haven’t tested my 4090 nor 3060 yet.
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Saw this a week ago, but got swamped with work. Before I add my 2 cents, just be aware the is no magic hardware to make Pr go that much faster. Things to look for are FX that are GPU accelerated (very few of the good ones actually are GPU accelerated).
I have to put my 2 cents in for DaVinci Resolve … I know I sound like a fanboy for DaVinci, but I’m not, it’s only because I’ve worked/work both Adobe and BMD path and see users tossing excessive money at Adobe to make it go faster. It’s just super easy to setup a headless DaVinci workstation that will render your project in the background allowing you to continue on the same project … what I call “no wait” workflow.
Anyway, onto your hardware choices.
ASUS “Prime” motherboards are ASUS low end variants … look for the Z790-E chipset which provides PCIe 5.
I would remove the “Cache M.2 drive”. Get a Gen5 M.2 4TB and put it in the PCIe 5 slot from the Z790-E supported.
Don’t add 8TB HDD, that can actually slow your entire system down. If you want Backup storage I suggest getting a external HDD (USB3) or NAS … 8TB seems kinda small for backup … what sort of video files/formats are you working with?
The nVidia 4070Ti is a good card but for a few $$ more the AMD 7900XTX will render out faster especially if you’re using Topaz Video AI plugins (AMD fully support CUDA).
Cheers, Rob.
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Vote for Option 1 also … I still use Adobe Pr but only “in the office” per project requirements (otherwise DaVinci Resolve for majority projects). Pr 2024 is not going to make things less stable, in fact likely the opposite. Also Pr 2024 has higher list of requirements both OS and hardware.