[SOLVED] Computer upgrade recommendations

[urbandeathwish]

Hi all,
im thinking of slowly upgrading my comupter and I kinda wonder how can I maximize the performance...the plan is to kinda upgrade as much as possible, so that it will be compatible for some time on.
Current components:

• MSI X99 Raider
• i7 5820K (3.30Ghz/6C/12T)
• Asus Strix 1080Ti 11GB
• 8x 8Gb Kingston Hyperx Fury DDR4 2400MHz
• Samsung SSD 970 Evo 1TB (nvme)
• Samsung SSD 860 Evo 1TB
• 2x HDD Seagate 6TB

Maybe I should mention that the computer is used for video editing (Adobe Premier pro, Adobe After Effects) but I want to get involved with Resolve for color grading and 3D modeling in the future...

So at the moment im thinking of switching from 64gb memory to 128gb and adding another 1080Ti into sli setup. Opinions? Any other things I should consoder upgrading aswell?


Thank you in advance for sharing knowledge and your advices.

 

[Darkbreeze]

SLI is dead, so adding another 1080 ti is a waste of time and money. There are very few games that even continue to support SLI or Crossfire profiles because developers are not optimizing for it since single card solutions now are more than capable of practically any screen resolution or settings. Furthermore, as far as I know, there are ZERO applications outside of games that support SLI in any way. There ARE applications that can support multi GPU configurations, but not SLI.

You would be MUCH wiser to simply sell your existing card and buy something from the recently released Nvidia 30 series Ampere family. Besides which, buying a 1080 ti means buying a used card and used 1080 ti's out there are going to be like 3-4 years old, which is a lifetime when it comes to high end graphics cards and you will be seriously rolling the dice on whether or not you end up with something that actually works, and for how long. A bad investment these days.

Also, AMD's Big Navi cards will be coming soon as well, so that's another factor that might drive down the prices, along with the 30 series release, of 20 series cards. In fact, the 30 series cards are the least expensive for the most performance from any Nvidia generation in many, many years. Maybe ever.

I would abandon the idea of an SLI configuration. Additionally, scaling isn't terrific anyhow so you will lose some of the performance, like 50-60% of the second cards performance, or more, will be lost in an SLI configuration. There are a LOT of games out there where the SLI performance is WORSE than the single card performance. If you search for it, you will see, many threads on that.

Your platform really has nowhere to go that makes sense. A full platform upgrade would be the only wise decision unless you want to spend thousands of dollars on a Xeon upgrade that ONLY gives you more cores. It won't give you more single core performance, IPC, lower power consumption or any other benefit, because it will be the same architecture, and with a 6/12 configuration right now you might not even benefit much at all from additional cores in most of the Adobe applications. There will be SOME applications that you could benefit from, but for the cost of a worthwhile CPU upgrade on that platform, you could easily get a new CPU, motherboard AND faster memory, that would surpass just about anything you could do with what you have now, even with the highest end CPU that fits your motherboard.

 

[Eximo]

My understanding on Premiere is that it tops out around 10 cores being the most it will handle properly. So a Ryzen 3900x has been the common recommendation for enthusiasts. I suppose you could try for a Threadripper to get higher memory bandwidth and more memory slots like you have now.

An argument could be made for an Intel 10 core (10900 would get you quite high clocks) or even a 10 or 12 core on the HEDT side of things, again for the memory bandwidth and slots.

I don't think SLI or multi-GPU does anything for Adobe products based on some quick research. I guess what they do is actually use one for playback/editing and one card for exporting. Minimal gains.

Davinci Resolve seems to scale with multiple GPUs, if you want to switch softwares. Which I imagine is more expensive then picking up an RTX 2080Ti or RTX3080/3090. 3090 certainly has the GPU memory going for it.

 

[Darkbreeze]

Even an RTX 3070 would probably give you more gaming power than 1080 ti SLI, and certainly would be better for productivity and 3d applications. Multiple GPU support, of the non-SLI variety, is a lot of power consumption and headaches for not much gains. Certainly not enough to justify the cost.

Even a plain old 10700k would give you better performance than that 5820k, by a long shot. About 50% better single core performance and nearly double the multithreaded performance.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-5820K-vs-Intel-i7-10700K/2340vs3733

 

[urbandeathwish]

SLI is dead, so adding another 1080 ti is a waste of time and money. There are very few games that even continue to support SLI or Crossfire profiles because developers are not optimizing for it since single card solutions now are more than capable of practically any screen resolution or settings. Furthermore, as far as I know, there are ZERO applications outside of games that support SLI in any way. There ARE applications that can support multi GPU configurations, but not SLI.

You would be MUCH wiser to simply sell your existing card and buy something from the recently released Nvidia 30 series Ampere family. Besides which, buying a 1080 ti means buying a used card and used 1080 ti's out there are going to be like 3-4 years old, which is a lifetime when it comes to high end graphics cards and you will be seriously rolling the dice on whether or not you end up with something that actually works, and for how long. A bad investment these days.

Also, AMD's Big Navi cards will be coming soon as well, so that's another factor that might drive down the prices, along with the 30 series release, of 20 series cards. In fact, the 30 series cards are the least expensive for the most performance from any Nvidia generation in many, many years. Maybe ever.

I would abandon the idea of an SLI configuration. Additionally, scaling isn't terrific anyhow so you will lose some of the performance, like 50-60% of the second cards performance, or more, will be lost in an SLI configuration. There are a LOT of games out there where the SLI performance is WORSE than the single card performance. If you search for it, you will see, many threads on that.

Your platform really has nowhere to go that makes sense. A full platform upgrade would be the only wise decision unless you want to spend thousands of dollars on a Xeon upgrade that ONLY gives you more cores. It won't give you more single core performance, IPC, lower power consumption or any other benefit, because it will be the same architecture, and with a 6/12 configuration right now you might not even benefit much at all from additional cores in most of the Adobe applications. There will be SOME applications that you could benefit from, but for the cost of a worthwhile CPU upgrade on that platform, you could easily get a new CPU, motherboard AND faster memory, that would surpass just about anything you could do with what you have now, even with the highest end CPU that fits your motherboard.

So the thing is that I really dont play games, neither I think I could if I wanted to . The gpu is runing 49" ultra wide Dell sreen (dell u4919dw) and as far as I know there arent much games optimized for such resolutions, so im really having only work in mind with this pc.

It made more sense to me to save a bit and gamble on the used gpu then spend money on the latest rtx series, which i think would come in very handy with previewing 4K,6K,8K footage and also resolve software (but i havent got the time to get there yet)

I was thinking if there is any possible cpu change that comes to mind, but xeon is kinda way out of my price range because i would like to max out the things on same platform to keep it runing smooth for a few more years and then do the completely new build.
And please dont get me wrong I really appreciate your feedback <3 Thank you

 

[urbandeathwish]

My understanding on Premiere is that it tops out around 10 cores being the most it will handle properly. So a Ryzen 3900x has been the common recommendation for enthusiasts. I suppose you could try for a Threadripper to get higher memory bandwidth and more memory slots like you have now.

An argument could be made for an Intel 10 core (10900 would get you quite high clocks) or even a 10 or 12 core on the HEDT side of things, again for the memory bandwidth and slots.

I don't think SLI or multi-GPU does anything for Adobe products based on some quick research. I guess what they do is actually use one for playback/editing and one card for exporting. Minimal gains.

Davinci Resolve seems to scale with multiple GPUs, if you want to switch softwares. Which I imagine is more expensive then picking up an RTX 2080Ti or RTX3080/3090. 3090 certainly has the GPU memory going for it.

Yeah something like that and with that in mind im thinking of maybe switching from 5820K to 5960X (to gain more cores...but i know that overal performance is like there there probably not even noticable difference?)
I am not interested in changing the whole platform at the moments :/.

Well there has been a lot of pressure on the Adobe lately for not using the gpu so im kinda hoping they will change the software around more in our favour in the future (fingers crossed)

The i9-10900 processor i think would not fit on 2011-3 socket, so we are back to changing the whole platform.

Thank you for your thoughts and help on this, really appreciate it.

 

[SamirD]

You're clearly heading into workstation territory so I'd look into what you can buy--lots of time there are great off-lease ones from Dell and HP that have the power of a whole rack server at your desk with dual xeons and hundreds of gigs of ram. And they can end up being cheaper too because they're not high-end consumer gear which is overpriced for what it is.

 

[urbandeathwish]

You're clearly heading into workstation territory so I'd look into what you can buy--lots of time there are great off-lease ones from Dell and HP that have the power of a whole rack server at your desk with dual xeons and hundreds of gigs of ram. And they can end up being cheaper too because they're not high-end consumer gear which is overpriced for what it is.

To be quite honest I already checked on that aswell, because it made more sense to kinda buy one of dell or hp workstation with dual xeon, already equiped with 128gb ram and solid gpu... Its actually not a bad decision id say from price/performance point of view...

 

[urbandeathwish]

Since at the moment i am using adobe the most on current machine just to share their thoughts...

Upgrading your system
Adding memory is the easiest and usually most impactful place to start if you want to upgrade your system to improve performance for both Premiere Pro and After Effects.
Upgrade Premiere Pro system in this order of priority:

1. More RAM — up to 128GB if your motherboard supports it.
2. A faster GPU (or additional GPUs) for faster rendering and export
3. Faster (or more) NVMe or SSD drives
4. Faster CPU

Upgrade your After Effects system in this order of priority:

1. More RAM — 128GB is a good target for top-of-the-line systems.
2. Faster (or more) SSD or NVMe drives
3. Faster GPU (or additional GPUs) for faster rendering and export
4. Faster CPU

Full article is here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/hardware-recommendations.html

 

[Darkbreeze]

49" isn't a resolution, it's a size. For that "size", you'd want it to either be 1440p or 4k most likely, and yes, there are plenty of graphics cards that can handle gaming at those resolutions. The last two generations could easily handle 1440p gaming at Ultra resolutions depending on the card model, and Turing could handle 4k if you had a flagship card and didn't mind high settings or come combination. Now with Ampere, 4k gaming is going up into the 100+ FPS range, and potentially even 30+ FPS at 8k, which is ridiculous, as 4k is even ridiculous unless you have an enormous monitor.

But since you don't game, there is ZERO reason to consider any kind of SLI configuration. None. At all. Nada.

SLI is ONLY beneficial to gamers. It offers nothing at all for rendering, 3d development, architectural, artistic or any other GPU oriented applications. Multiple graphics cards NOT in SLI or Crossfire, MIGHT, but it would depend highly on the specific application and exactly how and what you were trying to do.

There are literally NO processors that will fit your current motherboard, that would give you a reasonable enough gain to be worth spending money on, that isn't outshined by simply changing platforms. It's just the way it is.

And the only way that adding memory is going to do you ANY good at all, is if you are IN FACT running out of memory now. If you have not checked memory availability using HWinfo while running your most demanding projects to see where memory usage is at, then you should do that, because if you are not running out of memory then adding more isn't going to do you a hell of a lot of good.

 

[SamirD]

Since at the moment i am using adobe the most on current machine just to share their thoughts...

Full article is here:
https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/kb/hardware-recommendations.html

It's amazing how much this has changed since Premiere 1.0 on windows 3.1, haha.

 

[SamirD]

But since you don't game, there is ZERO reason to consider any kind of SLI configuration. None. At all. Nada.

SLI is ONLY beneficial to gamers. It offers nothing at all for rendering, 3d development, architectural, artistic or any other GPU oriented applications. Multiple graphics cards NOT in SLI or Crossfire, MIGHT, but it would depend highly on the specific application and exactly how and what you were trying to do.

Adobe says otherwise in the link from the OP...

• (Optional) Multiple GPUs, including eGPUs, can be used to speed up rendering and export.

 

[urbandeathwish]

Adobe says otherwise in the link from the OP...

Eqactly why I was thinking about this possibility as an upgrade of my system (the second 1080ti)...

 

[Darkbreeze]

Adobe says otherwise in the link from the OP...

Multiple GPUs is NOT the same thing as SLI, so no, what they say does not contradict what I said. They are totally, COMPLETELY different things.

Multiple graphics cards operate INDEPENDENTLY from each other, in one system. Multiple graphics cards IN SLI operate as one card, alternating the load, with the slave card sending it's information to the master card. Non-SLI configurations do not do that, and the compute and signals are rendered independently of each other and sent directly to the display, not to the other card. If you don't understand what SLI is or what it does, then I'd suggest you read this.

https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/technologies/desktop/sli.htm

 

[ScrewySqrl]

given the age of teh cpu, a full upgrade is probably worth it, if you can afford it.

What sort of budget do you have?

 

[urbandeathwish]

given the age of teh cpu, a full upgrade is probably worth it, if you can afford it.

What sort of budget do you have?

I mean I can afford im just prioritising things a bit and pc is currently on second place XD (because in whole honesty thing still works as a charm, just wanted to have a piece of mind for a few more years). But initally from the start I had a plan to throw in around 1000€...

 

[Darkbreeze]

I think the isn't so much budget, as region. Hardware is not as easily available in the OPs region as for most of us, and likely it is significantly more expensive for newer, current gen hardware.

 

[Darkbreeze]

PCPartPicker Part List

CPU: Intel Core i7-10700K 3.8 GHz 8-Core Processor (€363.99 @ Mindfactory)
Motherboard: Asus PRIME Z490-A ATX LGA1200 Motherboard (€199.00 @ Amazon Deutschland)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 128 GB (4 x 32 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory (€444.40 @ Mindfactory)
Total: €1007.39
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2020-09-24 22:16 CEST+0200


Plus, depending on what cooler you have now, you might need to get an adapter from the manufacturer if the cooler is capable enough AND compatible, or a different cooler altogether based on case accommodations.

Obviously, that's just one of the least expensive options that adds cores AND doubles your memory capacity. If you want or are more interested in HEDT or enterprise solutions, you might as well figure on doubling that amount. I would not waste any money on your current platform if it is still doing what you need it to. Save the money to put towards something that will have some legs, which yours will not as it is already several years out of relevance.

 

[SamirD]

Multiple GPUs is NOT the same thing as SLI, so no, what they say does not contradict what I said. They are totally, COMPLETELY different things.

Multiple graphics cards operate INDEPENDENTLY from each other, in one system. Multiple graphics cards IN SLI operate as one card, alternating the load, with the slave card sending it's information to the master card. Non-SLI configurations do not do that, and the compute and signals are rendered independently of each other and sent directly to the display, not to the other card. If you don't understand what SLI is or what it does, then I'd suggest you read this.

https://docs.nvidia.com/gameworks/content/technologies/desktop/sli.htm

If an SLI setup works as a single card and Adobe supports multiple gpus, then even though it is not stated I bet they support SLI as well since SLI support probably predated multi-gpu and they never removed that capability.

 

[Darkbreeze]

They don't. I've already told you they don't. SLI is ONLY applicable to gaming. NOTHING ELSE. At all. Ever.

Not even all games support SLI. The game has to specifically have a profile or support for SLI built into it. NO applications, productivity software or 3d modeling or rendering application has this. If there is something that has it and if using SLI for non-gaming applications was possible, I assure you, EVERY (Insert choice word here) on the planet would be using it.

https://www.build-gaming-computers.com/sli-requirements.html

 

[SamirD]

I always hear about these absolutes shouted from the mountaintops, but there's always an exception to the rule. And before multi-gpu usage was easy to implement, there was sli, so I would tend to guess that the earlier gpu utilization code probably had sli support. I am just guessing but I'm sure there's an answer out there.

 

[Darkbreeze]

There was support for the use of dual graphics cards long before there was ever SLI or Crossfire. And by dual graphics cards or multi-GPU configurations, I mean completely independent operation, supported through the operating system, with separate outputs and compute processes, not modern day configurations like scalable link interface or NVlink.

The biggest problem really isn't that SLI doesn't support these kinds of applications, it's that how SLI works offers no benefit to them AND the applications themselves are not designed with built in support for these kinds of configurations, especially since traditionally these kinds of applications would be intended to be run on workstation cards that don't support SLI anyhow, in any way, shape or form.

 

[SamirD]

It would be interesting to address the question of sli support directly to adobe and see what they have to say about current and past support for it. With sli having a lot of market presence many years ago I would think they at least had support for it at some point, even if they dropped it now.

 

[Darkbreeze]

There is no need to do that.

https://community.adobe.com/t5/vide...will-it-make-a-difference/td-p/6812705?page=1

 

[SamirD]

But that's from 2014--the code has changed a lot since then.