Building an Affordable 16-Core, 32-Thread Xeon Monster PC

Well I want more than just encoding. I do lots of movie making from the video I shoot. Id do lots more with a much faster PC. But there is no point to more PC than my software can run with. Pinnacle cant use all that power without bending over backwards. So if I can economically switch to a high threaded movie maker, then this Xeon setup would be compelling. So far I dont know of another affordable movie maker for this. So the computer savings would be more than spent on new software capable of using all those threads. Those ripping Blurays for file sharing would love this. But I dont do that stuff.

Okay so I guess we can leave it at this isn't for you. That said I do think you are missing the point, which is the price! What do you plan to build instead?

Side note: you don't have to build a 16-core system, for $70 plus the cost of an X79 motherboard you can have an 8-core/16-thread system. How can you turn your nose up at that?
 
The problem is what can use all these cores. This article is missing a very important section. A list of software that can make use of all this power. Photoshop cant use it, and I use Pinnacle moviemaker and it cant use it either. What 4k video editing software not owned by Hollywood can use 32 threads? That is what I want to know or a higher electric bill and no audio capabilities wont be worth it.

Kindly put, Pinnacle studio isn't professional grade software. This is a project for serious computational use, like rendering visual effects, raytracing, and other mathematically intense number crunching that uses as many cores and you can throw at it.

What's really appealing with this article is that the price for such project is insanely low. Similar options costs thousands of dollars, and very valuable to the few people that can benefit from this amount of raw power.
 
Kindly put, Pinnacle studio isn't professional grade software. This is a project for serious computational use, like rendering visual effects, raytracing, and other mathematically intense number crunching that uses as many cores and you can throw at it.

What's really appealing with this article is that the price for such project is insanely low. Similar options costs thousands of dollars, and very valuable to the few people that can benefit from this amount of raw power.

"Serious" computational "professional" work is done mostly by people funded with pockets deep enough not to care about a $1000 CPU. Because the software will be costing multiples of that. Smartcam and Pro Engineer are "professional" modeling software that companies spend roughly $20 grand for. And they cant use any more than 4 cores and 8 threads. The everyday hobyist that has serious computer budget constraints are the kinds of people that this xeon setup would interest. But there just isnt enough affordable software to fully make use of this. I myself am leaning towards an overclocked 4 core i7 setup for my intensive pinnacle movie making usage. And every other usage, for that matter. Its just going to run faster than on this grosely underutilized power hungry machine. Most everything everybody uses could run faster on this machine if the apps were multi thread efficient. But not many affordable apps fall in this catagory.
 
"Serious" computational "professional" work is done mostly by people funded with pockets deep enough not to care about a $1000 CPU. Because the software will be costing multiples of that. Smartcam and Pro Engineer are "professional" modeling software that companies spend roughly $20 grand for. And they cant use any more than 4 cores and 8 threads. The everyday hobyist that has serious computer budget constraints are the kinds of people that this xeon setup would interest. But there just isnt enough affordable software to fully make use of this. I myself am leaning towards an overclocked 4 core i7 setup for my intensive pinnacle movie making usage. And every other usage, for that matter. Its just going to run faster than on this grosely underutilized power hungry machine. Most everything everybody uses could run faster on this machine if the apps were multi thread efficient. But not many affordable apps fall in this catagory.

Did you not notice he's said Premiere benefits from this considerably?

Do some research, there ARE a fair amount of software packages out there that will utilize as many cores as you have (InAudible for instance).

The POINT of the article, however, was that if you're already planning an uber computer with a 5960, try this instead - it beats the 5960 and costs less... As a person who already bought the 5960, I can definitely say I'd have done this if I'd known about it 9 months ago :(
 
"Serious" computational "professional" work is done mostly by people funded with pockets deep enough not to care about a $1000 CPU. Because the software will be costing multiples of that. Smartcam and Pro Engineer are "professional" modeling software that companies spend roughly $20 grand for. And they cant use any more than 4 cores and 8 threads. The everyday hobyist that has serious computer budget constraints are the kinds of people that this xeon setup would interest. But there just isnt enough affordable software to fully make use of this. I myself am leaning towards an overclocked 4 core i7 setup for my intensive pinnacle movie making usage. And every other usage, for that matter. Its just going to run faster than on this grosely underutilized power hungry machine. Most everything everybody uses could run faster on this machine if the apps were multi thread efficient. But not many affordable apps fall in this catagory.

You are looking at this from one angle and one angle only. Do you realize how massive YouTube is now and how many people encode their videos for use on YouTube? I will tell you, significantly more than those using Pinnacle Studio, it’s not the 90s anymore :)

The vast majority of them use Adobe Premiere and rendering times on Core i5 and even quad-core Core i7 processors for 1080p videos that are just 10mins long is huge.

“I myself am leaning towards an overclocked 4 core i7 setup for my intensive pinnacle movie making usage.”

Which model are you getting? I assume something from Sandy Bridge onwards.

“It’s just going to run faster than on this grosely underutilized power hungry machine.”

Again you don’t seem to understand but if four of the sixteen cores are being used it will consume less power than a quad-core Core i7 processors. It isn’t at all power hungry, yes when using 4x the amount of cores your i7 will have the power consumption is greater! Who would have thought?

Did you not notice he's said Premiere benefits from this considerably?

Do some research, there ARE a fair amount of software packages out there that will utilize as many cores as you have (InAudible for instance).

The POINT of the article, however, was that if you're already planning an uber computer with a 5960, try this instead - it beats the 5960 and costs less... As a person who already bought the 5960, I can definitely say I'd have done this if I'd known about it 9 months ago :(

Squid Surprise gets it.
 
You are looking at this from one angle and one angle only. Do you realize how massive YouTube is now and how many people encode their videos for use on YouTube? I will tell you, significantly more than those using Pinnacle Studio, it’s not the 90s anymore :)

The vast majority of them use Adobe Premiere and rendering times on Core i5 and even quad-core Core i7 processors for 1080p videos that are just 10mins long is huge.

“I myself am leaning towards an overclocked 4 core i7 setup for my intensive pinnacle movie making usage.”

Which model are you getting? I assume something from Sandy Bridge onwards.

“It’s just going to run faster than on this grosely underutilized power hungry machine.”

Again you don’t seem to understand but if four of the sixteen cores are being used it will consume less power than a quad-core Core i7 processors. It isn’t at all power hungry, yes when using 4x the amount of cores your i7 will have the power consumption is greater! Who would have thought?



Squid Surprise gets it.

Well I dont use Pinnacle 5. Pinnacle 18 is very well advanced into the 21st century with everything you could ever want to do on 4k video including shake removal and green screen fun. And at the end of all that fun, it takes care of all the encoding needed for any of the internet video hosts. Its a one stop video shop that works best if it was lightning quick. That part is the PC part. But its only average in multithread utilization. So Pinnacle would actually run slower on this 2.6Ghz machine than a 4 core 4Ghz i7 because pinnacle cant use all those extra threads. If this setup were close to 4Ghz then I would be more favorable to it. But for all apps that cant use these extra threads, your simply buying a slower machine than a similarly priced 4 core i7 that overclocks well. And hotter and more power hungry too. People that build this machine need to have a specific use already laid out with software KNOWN to be able to really shine with 32 threads. Because most all software out there is single threaded software facing a 2.6Ghz machine.

I cant sell this machine to manufacturers using the 2 most popular engineering programs because they will run faster on an overclocked 4 core. I wish it wasnt like that, but thats the way it is. Thats why 32 cores have only been servers. The software world has never fully embraced the multi core paradigm. I have an old dual processor pentium machine. Its cool, but I dont run it. Because everything else I have is faster. And thats the way it is with this dual Xeon. For a few things it will be faster. But for everything else it will be slower. I will investigate other movie software. But what I have is paid for, highly capable, and waiting for a really fast machine compatible with it. So I kinda doubt I will find a different affordable movie maker that can use 32 threads.
 
Well I dont use Pinnacle 5. Pinnacle 18 is very well advanced into the 21st century with everything you could ever want to do on 4k video including shake removal and green screen fun. And at the end of all that fun, it takes care of all the encoding needed for any of the internet video hosts. Its a one stop video shop that works best if it was lightning quick. That part is the PC part. But its only average in multithread utilization. So Pinnacle would actually run slower on this 2.6Ghz machine than a 4 core 4Ghz i7 because pinnacle cant use all those extra threads.
So you are basing the entire benefit of building this machine on the performance it would have with Pinnacle? Alrighty then!

That's about like the long over used "Will it run Crysis" phrase. Lets start a "Will it run Pinnacle" phrase instead.
 
Well I dont use Pinnacle 5. Pinnacle 18 is very well advanced into the 21st century with everything you could ever want to do on 4k video including shake removal and green screen fun. And at the end of all that fun, it takes care of all the encoding needed for any of the internet video hosts. Its a one stop video shop that works best if it was lightning quick. That part is the PC part. But its only average in multithread utilization. So Pinnacle would actually run slower on this 2.6Ghz machine than a 4 core 4Ghz i7 because pinnacle cant use all those extra threads. If this setup were close to 4Ghz then I would be more favorable to it. But for all apps that cant use these extra threads, your simply buying a slower machine than a similarly priced 4 core i7 that overclocks well. And hotter and more power hungry too. People that build this machine need to have a specific use already laid out with software KNOWN to be able to really shine with 32 threads. Because most all software out there is single threaded software facing a 2.6Ghz machine.

I cant sell this machine to manufacturers using the 2 most popular engineering programs because they will run faster on an overclocked 4 core. I wish it wasnt like that, but thats the way it is. Thats why 32 cores have only been servers. The software world has never fully embraced the multi core paradigm. I have an old dual processor pentium machine. Its cool, but I dont run it. Because everything else I have is faster. And thats the way it is with this dual Xeon. For a few things it will be faster. But for everything else it will be slower. I will investigate other movie software. But what I have is paid for, highly capable, and waiting for a really fast machine compatible with it. So I kinda doubt I will find a different affordable movie maker that can use 32 threads.

You keep saying the same things and they are still factually wrong. The dual Xeon’s are not hotter or more power hungry in Pinnacle Studio, can we move past this now? Slower maybe if it is only using 4-cores, but not hotter or more power hungry.

“Because most all software out there is single threaded software facing a 2.6Ghz machine.”

LOL no that isn’t true. I am not going to name the software suite that I have named near on half a dozen times now. Again as I said in my previous post you are looking at this from a single angle without knowing the full picture. There are so many use cases for this and you don’t need $20K software to take full advantage of it. Hell for those that deal with a lot of file compression free applications such as 7-zip deliver performance previously unseen on consumer grade hardware.

“If this setup were close to 4Ghz then I would be more favorable to it. But for all apps that cant use these extra threads, your simply buying a slower machine than a similarly priced 4 core i7 that overclocks well.”

Now asking for the third time, what similarly priced Core i7 processor are you using? This is really the only thing that matters in this entire round about conversation.
 
Alright, I will drop the hotter and power hungry part. Its not my greatest concern. As for what I have, its a busted 1155 i3 I will be replacing. 1155 is already obsolete so I am thinking of doing 1150 or 1151 i7 4 core in the 4Ghz range. They are roughly $300 CPU, $200 MB, and highly overclockable DDR3 or DDR4. The PSU will be half what a dual Xeon needs and it will have all the bells and whistles normal for consumer boards including M.2 SSD slots.

As for "Premiere", you said it was encoding software, so I dismissed it as unuseable for my needs. I looked it up and saw the it was movie software. That makes a huge difference. I will research it to see more of what it can do.
 
Alright, I will drop the hotter and power hungry part. Its not my greatest concern. As for what I have, its a busted 1155 i3 I will be replacing. 1155 is already obsolete so I am thinking of doing 1150 or 1151 i7 4 core in the 4Ghz range. They are roughly $300 CPU, $200 MB, and highly overclockable DDR3 or DDR4. The PSU will be half what a dual Xeon needs and it will have all the bells and whistles normal for consumer boards including M.2 SSD slots.

As for "Premiere", you said it was encoding software, so I dismissed it as unuseable for my needs. I looked it up and saw the it was movie software. That makes a huge difference. I will research it to see more of what it can do.

Sorry I just assumed if you have done anything before with video you knew exactly what Premier was, since it is without a doubt the best option available. Where the Xeon’s come into their own is in the encoding process which is what you do with any video once the editing is complete.

The cheapest Core i7 you will be looking at then is the $360 6700K if you want to overclock and a decent Z170 motherboard is around the $200 mark as you say. That is almost 40% more costly than my 16-core Xeon build and it will get completely annihilated in decent video editing software.

The PSU won’t be half what the dual Xeon needs, in fact price wise you will be in the same ball part. While you will actually have much better options for M.2 SSDs using PCIe adapters, 6700K (16 PCI Express 3.0 Lanes) and the E5-2670 (40 PCI Express 3.0 Lanes) per CPU.
 
Ill probably get a used i7 to cut the cost abit. So $290 + $70 + $70 + the cost of add on boards for audio, M.2, and extra heatsink setup and now we are up to the cost of a late model 4 core i7 in the 4Ghz range that most programs can handle at best. I will do research with Premiere to find out exactly what it can do with all those extra threads. If indeed it will shine with them, I may pull the trigger on this. Because its not just the final encoding that takes forever. Everything I change in a 5 min 4k video requires about 20 minutes to render thru the entire video. Just importing it takes 20 minutes for each video imported when Im cutting and splicing several videos together. Lightening it is another, 20 minutes. Stabilize it, 20 minutes. Enhance the audio, 20 minutes. Watermark it, 20 minutes. Then finally export it to MP4 format can take an hour. All that is on an SSD but the i3 certainly was no help. Pinnacle will run faster on overclocked i7s because others have expressed frustration in Pinnacle forums that Pinnacle does no better with additional cores. I need to verify if Premiere can indeed do better. Adobe Premiere is like $300 so thats not too hateful of an investment. Pinnacle was like half that and its very good. But 4 core CPUs is all it can handle.
 
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Ill probably get a used i7 to cut the cost abit. So $290 + $70 + $70 + the cost of add on boards for audio, M.2, and extra heatsink setup and now we are up to the cost of a late model 4 core i7 in the 4Ghz range that most programs can handle at best. I will do research with Premiere to find out exactly what it can do with all those extra threads. If indeed it will shine with them, I may pull the trigger on this. Because its not just the final encoding that takes forever. Everything I change in a 5 min 4k video requires about 20 minutes to render thru the entire video. Just importing it takes 20 minutes for each video imported when Im cutting and splicing several videos together. Lightening it is another, 20 minutes. Stabilize it, 20 minutes. Enhance the audio, 20 minutes. Watermark it, 20 minutes. Then finally export it to MP4 format can take an hour. All that is on an SSD but the i3 certainly was no help. Pinnacle will run faster on overclocked i7s because others have expressed frustration in Pinnacle forums that Pinnacle does no better with additional cores. I need to verify if Premiere can indeed do better. Adobe Premiere is like $300 so thats not too hateful of an investment. Pinnacle was like half that and its very good. But 4 core CPUs is all it can handle.

Just to confirm you realize that the E5-2670 can be paired with a high-end desktop X79 motherboard, they can be had for the same price as a decent Z170 motherboard and include great audio and a ship load of PCIe lanes for high speed storage. Again this costs way less than even a used Core i7 and in quality applications it will be worlds faster.

“Everything I change in a 5 min 4k video requires about 20 minutes to render thru the entire video.”

Is this GPU accelerated or what? That is horrendous, how do you get anything done? The E5-2670 system with a basic GPU is instant, you can change anything in a 4K video and it is INSTANT!

“Just importing it takes 20 minutes for each video imported when Im cutting and splicing several videos together.”

Importing a 5GB 4K clip takes less than a minute using a basic 2.5” SSD on the Xeon system.

“Lightening it is another, 20 minutes. Stabilize it, 20 minutes. Enhance the audio, 20 minutes. Watermark it, 20 minutes.”

That stuff should all take a matter of seconds, certainly no more than 10 seconds for a 5min 4K clip.

“Then finally export it to MP4 format can take an hour.”

A single Xeon will do that for a 5min 4K clip in well under 20mins, I would place it around 10mins.

I am not sure how much real research you have done and without being rude it sounds like very little. Do you realize that a Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K still costs well over $150 (twice that of the Xeon using the same architecture)...

http://www.ebay.com/sch/I.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_sop=15&_nkw=2600K&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1

If you want a previous generation Haswell 4770K for example expect to pay at least $300, twice that of the dual Xeon E5-2670 setup!!!!

http://www.ebay.com/sch/I.html?_odk...12.TRC2.A0.H0.X4770K.TRS0&_nkw=4770K&_sacat=0

We are well aware of processor pricing, I know the market top to bottom and believe me when I say you won't do better than a $70 E5-2670.

I just purchased a copy of Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate, in the process of downloading. I will test the Xeon system, I am now interested to see the 4K performance.
 
I just purchased a copy of Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate, in the process of downloading. I will test the Xeon system, I am now interested to see the 4K performance.
Could you compare Pinnacle's Xeon performance to an i3 in a quick comparison, for the sake of this conversation?
 
Great article, but from my point of view, this is just a "more-wants-more" kinda pc.

Totally overkill, just like one of my colleagues at work who uses a 4-screen setup at home, and no, he does not play simulation games, I have never seen him play anything bigger than solitaire. He only uses his pc for ordinary office work and some netflix streaming.

I understand and recognize the "urge" to build something new and exiting, but only a handful of people would ever max this rig out.

I'm quite happy with my recent mITX build with Skylake Core i7-6700 (not the K-version). I have all the power I need, even for rendering video, and the pc is quite quiet (Noctua coolers all around) and does not require a huge amount of power. The Gigabyte GTX 750Ti graphics card easily gives me 50-60 f/s in 1080p without breaking a sweat.
 
Could you compare Pinnacle's Xeon performance to an i3 in a quick comparison, for the sake of this conversation?

Absolutely, I will run both tests with a low-end GPU and an extreme one as well.

Great article, but from my point of view, this is just a "more-wants-more" kinda pc.

Totally overkill, just like one of my colleagues at work who uses a 4-screen setup at home, and no, he does not play simulation games, I have never seen him play anything bigger than solitaire. He only uses his pc for ordinary office work and some netflix streaming.

I understand and recognize the "urge" to build something new and exiting, but only a handful of people would ever max this rig out.

I'm quite happy with my recent mITX build with Skylake Core i7-6700 (not the K-version). I have all the power I need, even for rendering video, and the pc is quite quiet (Noctua coolers all around) and does not require a huge amount of power. The Gigabyte GTX 750Ti graphics card easily gives me 50-60 f/s in 1080p without breaking a sweat.

If you are regularly rendering 4K video this isn't overkill. You seem to be missing the point that both the processors and the motherboard cost about the same amount as your 6700, just the processor. So in a way your build was much more wasteful, of course it is brand new vs. second hand so the comparison doesn't really need to be made (or at least it isn't exactly apples to apples), but you get the point.
 
Great article.

I have an HP workstation at work and its quite old now and was looking to be upgraded. I said no I'd rather keep it and just put an SSD and more RAM in. Its a dual E5-2670 machine and is a beast. Now with 32 GB of RAM and an SSD it's as good as anything around despite being 4 or 5 years old.
 
Ill probably get a used i7 to cut the cost abit. So $290 + $70 + $70 + the cost of add on boards for audio, M.2, and extra heatsink setup and now we are up to the cost of a late model 4 core i7 in the 4Ghz range that most programs can handle at best. I will do research with Premiere to find out exactly what it can do with all those extra threads. If indeed it will shine with them, I may pull the trigger on this. Because its not just the final encoding that takes forever. Everything I change in a 5 min 4k video requires about 20 minutes to render thru the entire video. Just importing it takes 20 minutes for each video imported when Im cutting and splicing several videos together. Lightening it is another, 20 minutes. Stabilize it, 20 minutes. Enhance the audio, 20 minutes. Watermark it, 20 minutes. Then finally export it to MP4 format can take an hour. All that is on an SSD but the i3 certainly was no help. Pinnacle will run faster on overclocked i7s because others have expressed frustration in Pinnacle forums that Pinnacle does no better with additional cores. I need to verify if Premiere can indeed do better. Adobe Premiere is like $300 so thats not too hateful of an investment. Pinnacle was like half that and its very good. But 4 core CPUs is all it can handle.

Okay so here is some updated info and concrete facts. Pinnacle Studio 19 is by no means limited to just 4-cores, I suspected it wasn't. I can confirm it will heavily utilize 8-cores, I am yet to try on the 16-core Xeon system. Using the Core i7-6700K overclocked past 4GHz I was 100% utilization across all cores when rendering a 4K video. With GPU acceleration disabled the 5min video took a little over 10mins to encode to MPEG-4 using the Ultra HD (4K) preset. The original file was 3.3GB in size, the output was 740MB.

Here is a screenshot and it proves that a single 8-core E5-2670 will beat the 6700, two E5-2670's which I will soon test, will most certainly crush the 6700. Given how many cores the application uses and how demanding it is on a Core i7, I now understand why the Core i3 render times you face are so extreme.

With the GTX 980 Ti installed and the program set to use CUDA acceleration CPU utilization sits at 80% and all cores are heavily utilized. The utilization was much the same when setting the hardware acceleration option to 'INTEL'.

In my opinion Pinnacle Studio 19 is very basic and quite clunky when compared to Adobe Premiere so I recommend checking the Adobe software out.

Studio19.png
 
I did this myself a month ago. Haven't looked since. 16 hyperthreading cores is wonderful for CAD and simulation.

I allowed myself to splurge a bit on the board, though, and got a Z9PE-D8 WS. Absolutely wonderful board, IMO well worth the extra money just for the features that make it more user-friendly than server boards (sufficient USB, built-in audio, 6x SATA 3, etc) but still powerful enough for workstation use. It also looks damn good, and 7 PCIe 16x slots are a nice bragging point even if I'm nowhere near using all of them.
 
Okay so it is currently 5:30 am on the east coast of USA and I just had to log in to show my appreciation. Mind you I haven't logged in or posted a comment since about October 2015 but navigate this site just about everyday.

Thank you very much for the work you guys put into this site and community. I am signaling @Steve in particular since he wrote this article and has gone out of his way with extensive feedback in this comment section. I also want to thank @cliffordcooley who always contributes and shares his vast knowledge and opinion with us all.

Just for shits and giggles, let it be aware that Techspot's comment section is much more exciting that Yahoo's.

Keep up the great work!!!!
 
Lots of critics, but obviously a machine like this has a specific target audience. My only criticism about the energy savings/costs discussion above is that you guys only spoke of the energy consumed by the machine itself vs. newer ones. But for many people, at least through part of the spring, all of summer and part of fall, heat dissipated in to a living space is heat that an AC will have to absorb and dump outside, at the cost of electricity, and AC isn't 100% efficient by any means. However, the upfront cost savings on this hardware is so large that for that target audience I referenced it's still probably not enough to tip the balance. Only someone looking to run something 24-7, like the scientific distributed computing projects out there, might want to look elsewhere.
 
Good one , I was thinking the same thing recently to build a beast with old server hardware.
 
Just to confirm you realize that the E5-2670 can be paired with a high-end desktop X79 motherboard, they can be had for the same price as a decent Z170 motherboard and include great audio and a ship load of PCIe lanes for high speed storage. Again this costs way less than even a used Core i7 and in quality applications it will be worlds faster.

“Everything I change in a 5 min 4k video requires about 20 minutes to render thru the entire video.”

Is this GPU accelerated or what? That is horrendous, how do you get anything done? The E5-2670 system with a basic GPU is instant, you can change anything in a 4K video and it is INSTANT!

“Just importing it takes 20 minutes for each video imported when Im cutting and splicing several videos together.”

Importing a 5GB 4K clip takes less than a minute using a basic 2.5” SSD on the Xeon system.

“Lightening it is another, 20 minutes. Stabilize it, 20 minutes. Enhance the audio, 20 minutes. Watermark it, 20 minutes.”

That stuff should all take a matter of seconds, certainly no more than 10 seconds for a 5min 4K clip.

“Then finally export it to MP4 format can take an hour.”

A single Xeon will do that for a 5min 4K clip in well under 20mins, I would place it around 10mins.

I am not sure how much real research you have done and without being rude it sounds like very little. Do you realize that a Sandy Bridge Core i7-2600K still costs well over $150 (twice that of the Xeon using the same architecture)...

http://www.ebay.com/sch/I.html?_from=R40&_sacat=0&_sop=15&_nkw=2600K&rt=nc&LH_BIN=1

If you want a previous generation Haswell 4770K for example expect to pay at least $300, twice that of the dual Xeon E5-2670 setup!!!!

http://www.ebay.com/sch/I.html?_odk...12.TRC2.A0.H0.X4770K.TRS0&_nkw=4770K&_sacat=0

We are well aware of processor pricing, I know the market top to bottom and believe me when I say you won't do better than a $70 E5-2670.

I just purchased a copy of Pinnacle Studio 19 Ultimate, in the process of downloading. I will test the Xeon system, I am now interested to see the 4K performance.

When you import a 5 min clip, take note of the shading progress bar on the time line just above your video track. You can do stuff while the bar is progressing, but I found that if I do, the audio runs out of synch on my resultant clips. So I have learned to wait until the rendering over the entire clip is complete before doing something else to the clip. And yes its hard to get many videos done with a system running so slowly. Thats why Im in the market for a better PC. My Gigabyte Sniper3 motherboard just blew up and it cant be fixed or replaced under warranty. So Im looking for a whole new situation. The best bang for the buck. And I just realized that Premiere is a subscription service. $240/year. You cant just buy the program or subscribe for just a month. That does not turn me on at all. I will look at other stand alone Movie makers to see if something else is more thread friendly. For me, movie making would make this machine worthwhile because I have a ton of camera clips in archive waiting for better CPU power.

Yes I know used sandy bridge is still expensive. Its been very disappointing that AMD gave up on the CPU wars. But the comparison I use has been 4 cores at 4Ghz versus 4 cores at 2.6Ghz where 12 cores go unused. Its better to spend an extra $230 for more Ghz, better more overclockable ram, and more of the latest power I/O "IF" I am stuck with 12 other cores that run mostly idle. Thats the comparison of importance here. Budget people looking for a great deal on a powerhouse machine must have the "right" software that uses all this power or its mostly just a 4 core 2.6Ghz machine. Certainly faster than the i3 I came from, but still not as fast as I could be. And for movie editing, a powerful GPU is not alot of help. Most of the number crunching done is CPU related. Weather I build one of these or not depends souly on weather I can find a movie maker that can use all these threads. And 7zip is not incentive. When I get something and unzip it, its done. No matter how long it takes.
 
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Okay so here is some updated info and concrete facts. Pinnacle Studio 19 is by no means limited to just 4-cores, I suspected it wasn't. I can confirm it will heavily utilize 8-cores, I am yet to try on the 16-core Xeon system. Using the Core i7-6700K overclocked past 4GHz I was 100% utilization across all cores when rendering a 4K video. With GPU acceleration disabled the 5min video took a little over 10mins to encode to MPEG-4 using the Ultra HD (4K) preset. The original file was 3.3GB in size, the output was 740MB.

Here is a screenshot and it proves that a single 8-core E5-2670 will beat the 6700, two E5-2670's which I will soon test, will most certainly crush the 6700. Given how many cores the application uses and how demanding it is on a Core i7, I now understand why the Core i3 render times you face are so extreme.

With the GTX 980 Ti installed and the program set to use CUDA acceleration CPU utilization sits at 80% and all cores are heavily utilized. The utilization was much the same when setting the hardware acceleration option to 'INTEL'.

In my opinion Pinnacle Studio 19 is very basic and quite clunky when compared to Adobe Premiere so I recommend checking the Adobe software out.

Studio19.png

Cool. But it has been clear that Pinnacle does use all 4 cores. Lets see what 16 cores show. And yes, i3 has been a grind on my patience. But its blown up now and I wont be looking back as I get something WAY better. I was waiting for better CPU prices to drop in a huge upgrade, but with my Sniper MB fried, Im going to be switching sockets entirely. Maybe even DDR4. But it all depends on what will be best for movie making.
 
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