AMD CPUs and Adobe After Effects

[pdxgfx]

I'm looking at getting a new system and one of the new AMD Phenom II X6 CPUs is in one of the builds I'm thinking of. Has anyone tried running AMD with Adobe After Effects and what would you say the performance is in comparison to a similar Intel CPU. For the record the 3 CPUs I am pitting against each other is the Phenom II 1090, the Core i7 860 and the Core i7 930. Budget wise they seem to come pretty close. Thanks in advance.

-Rob

 

[LePhuronn]

I've used all the Creative Suite since CS2 on both Intel and AMD systems, and I always see better performance from Intel.

That being said, CS4 is nicely multi-core aware so using all 6 cores on the X6 will bring it within performance range of the i7 930 and be cheaper - CPUs are about the same price but a good AM3 motherboard is cheaper than a good X58 motherboard and you only have dual-channel RAM to get too.

Personally, if you're doing any serious AE work I'd get a good X58 motherboard (Asus P6TD Deluxe or Asus P6X58D if you want SATA III and USB 3.0), the i7 930 and some serious cooling like a Thermalright Ultra 120 Rev C, Thermalright Venomous-X or Prolimatech Megahalems with good 120mm fans and overclock the CPU as far as you can push it. You're then set up nicely to upgrade to the i7 970 6-core when it comes out and overclock that bitch too lol

12GB RAM would be good too, but be mindful of RAM with tall heat spreaders because they will interfere with the fan if you use a Megahalem and possibly interfere if you use the others.

 

[pdxgfx]

The system I'm thinking of going for would end up using that basic Crucial DDR3 1333 Ram so heat spreaders won't be too much of an issue. I might get the G-skill stuff if I think it's going to heat up a bunch. Thanks for the advice, I think it's time to put the old Core 2 out to pasture. Shame about the DDR 2 1066 ram though.

 

[pdxgfx]

Best answer selected by pdxgfx.

 

[LePhuronn]

Add the Core 2 as a network renderer - every little helps

 

[pat]

The system I'm thinking of going for would end up using that basic Crucial DDR3 1333 Ram so heat spreaders won't be too much of an issue. I might get the G-skill stuff if I think it's going to heat up a bunch. Thanks for the advice, I think it's time to put the old Core 2 out to pasture. Shame about the DDR 2 1066 ram though.

If you have decent amount of ddr2, then the X6 with an AM2+ compatible motherboard would make sense too. Check Asus and Gigabyte. They both have lots of compatible motherboard.

 

[pdxgfx]

If I get a motherboard that needs a BIOS update to see the 1090, can I even boot with it before updating the BIOS? If that's the case I'll look into an AM2+ MB. I do have 8GB of DDR2.

 

[pat]

You're in my situation. I bought 8 gigs one years ago for the price of 4 today.. So I'll rather keep the memory and maybe sacrifice a bit of performance. In fact, when you read benchmark, there is one factor that is not calculated .. the human factor. I bet that you're not as fast as your computer and it sometime wait for you.. so at the end of the day, the few seconds between both CPU don't really matter...especially if you go for coffee sometime..

And depending of the board, it may just complain about unknown CPU or don't boot at all. But I'm sure the seller will be happy to flash it for you, 1 motherboard and 1 cpu is good money for them.

I'll keep the DDR2 until ddr3 price (or ddr4, who knows!) get lower and then update to the next best thing!

 

[pdxgfx]

It's kind of a catch 22 really. I'm almost tempted to stick with my socket 775 board. If I were to say what was killing me was visual feedback in Lightwave 3D (move scene, wait, respond) and render time.

I'm running an E8500 paired up with an older 9600 GTX video card which is decent for animating but it's starting to stink when rendering. The closest thing I would probably get if I were to stick with a 775 would be a Q9550 (or 9500 if I'm feeling cheap) but that plus a new 5770 video card would run about $500-600.

That's a tough call to make when I can get a 1090, new motherboard, card and windows 7 (just in case I need to run a new copy since I'm swapping pretty much everything out) for about $700.

Or I can just suck it up and build myself an i7 930 system nice and loaded for about $1600.

The irony is that the idea of "futureproofing" is a hoax when it comes to computers. Intel does it's darnedest to make sure people buy a new motherboard every 2 years or so. AMD has done a better job of that with it's AM2+ platform but ultimately next year both will be launching new stuff that will require a new socket I hear.

Ultimately though, It's when the box can pay for itself and what I can get past my wife (the Co-CEO) of my freelance business what determines what I can do.

-PDX

 

[LePhuronn]

Honestly I'd not pour any money into a dead platform if I could help it. For some reason the top-end Core 2 Quads cost the same as Core i7 and DDR2 RAM is getting more expensive then DDR3 as manufacturing winds down.

You could however make some choice investments that will carry over to the next system.

Look at getting a hefty cooler that works on socket 775 and socket 1366/1156/AM3 so you can overclock the E8500 now and reuse the cooler on the next system - something like a Megahalems or Venomous-X with good 120mm fans. The E8500 is known to overclock to 4GHz+ and be stable so you can wring some extra juice out of it.

A Radeon 5770 wouldn't be bottlenecked by a stock E8500, so it would be fine paired with an overclocked one.