To Overclock or Not to Overclock

kdog

That is the question. I'm thinking of building a new PC based on the Intel I7-2600 3.4GHz, and it seems the first question that needs to be addressed is whether to overclock. The usage for the computer will be photo-editing with CS5, and hopefully video-editing in the not-to-distant future. I'm not a gamer. I suppose I could build a PC capable of overclocking and just not overclock it unless I feel some compelling need in the future. Not sure if there's any downside to that other than a bit of extra cost. Maybe $100 difference in getting the "K" variant of the chip and an enthusiast class motherboard.

All thoughts are welcome.

-joel

Dan7312

Another thing to keep in mind, if you think you are going to use Adobe Premiere for video editing, make sure the video card you choose is supported by Premiere's Mercury playback engine. That's probably more important than overclocking for video editing.

kdog wrote: »

That is the question. I'm thinking of building a new PC based on the Intel I7-2600 3.4GHz, and it seems the first question that needs to be addressed is whether to overclock. The usage
All thoughts are welcome.

-joel

basflt

not necessary
modern motherboards do a good job , no need to set speeds manually
if you insists on overclocking , use AMD

overclocking is not an easy thing to do , especially with Intel

my idea ; hold your horses until windows8 is out , then choose MoBO and CPU
[ = what i am doing ]

kdog

Dan7312 wrote: »

Another thing to keep in mind, if you think you are going to use Adobe Premiere for video editing, make sure the video card you choose is supported by Premiere's Mercury playback engine. That's probably more important than overclocking for video editing.

Great thought, Dan. Assuming their published requirements are up-to-date, that seems to greatly limit the number of compatible cards. And they're super-expensive.

This is the list of compatible GeForce graphics engines from Adobe's website here: http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/tech-specs.html

• GeForce GTX 285 (Windows and Mac OS)
• GeForce GTX 470 (Windows)
• GeForce GTX 570 (Windows)
• GeForce GTX 580 (Windows)

Probably the cheapest option is this one for $329. http://www.amazon.com/EVGA-PCI-Express-Graphics-Lifetime-012-P3-1570-AR/dp/B004EHZD5W/ref=sr_1_3?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1314986921&sr=1-3

kdog

basflt wrote: »

not necessary
modern motherboards do a good job , no need to set speeds manually
if you insists on overclocking , use AMD

overclocking is not an easy thing to do , especially with Intel

my idea ; hold your horses until windows8 is out , then choose MoBO and CPU
[ = what i am doing ]

Thanks for your thoughs, Bas. I'm not sure waiting that long is an option, because my PC is crashing once a day as it is.

basflt

if PC crashes there i something wrong w it


my idea ;
MoBo should have
- 64bit
-RAID
-several SATA-slots
-at least 4 RAM-slots

kdog

basflt wrote: »

if PC crashes there i something wrong w it

I know, that's why I need a new one.

basflt

kdog wrote: »

I know, that's why I need a new one.

then build or buy one

overclocking is not needed IMO
storage space is ....IMO

my setup ?
3 HDD in one RAID array
1 HDD for backup

8GB RAM - no virtual RAM

win7 , 64bit , no problem

[ only game i have is ; ages beyond myst ]

MileHighAko

Save your money and apply it towards SSD and more memory.

basflt

SDD in not reliable and have limited lifetime and very small size

save money ,,,,,,, like SDD were cheap , ... , HAH ,,,,

for photo-editing , only RAM counts , [ and disk-space ]

kdog

Thanks guys. System will have 16gb ram (4x4) because 8gb gig sticks are uncommon and slower. Will go with either ssd or raid for system disk.

Dan7312

Some of the i7 processors support triple channel memory (and 2 channel also). Triple channel memory will give you higher throughput, but you need a mobo that supports it and mem chips are added in three's.

kdog wrote: »

Thanks guys. System will have 16gb ram (4x4) because 8gb gig sticks are uncommon and slower. Will go with either ssd or raid for system disk.

kdog

Dan7312 wrote: »

Some of the i7 processors support triple channel memory (and 2 channel also). Triple channel memory will give you higher throughput, but you need a mobo that supports it and mem chips are added in three's.

Right, but none of the I7 gen-2 boards seem to support that unfortunately.

angevin1

kdog wrote: »

Thanks guys. System will have 16gb ram (4x4) because 8gb gig sticks are uncommon and slower. Will go with either ssd or raid for system disk.

Admittedly I'm on the older i7 930 system.

I have 2 SSD's

RAM trumps ALL things Video. Get a decent Video card that Adobe perhaps recommends and leave it at that. Though if it comes with elemental accelerator for premiere pro, then that is a good extra! My Quadro FX ( $1k Card) does not outperform my straight RAM when in render mode or in RAM preview or working in layers.

I am presently overclocked to 4.0Ghtz and thats from 2.8Ghtz. Everything is snappier with the overclock. I bought a simple aftermarket air based cooling fan (<$40) and it keeps things cool sufficiently. My MOBO and CPU and RAM were all matched to work in unison for overclocking. and it does work and work well, even after my last upgrade to 24GB.

If you get a board that uses 6GBS HDD, that'll work as well or just as well as a SSD. SSD's have come down in price, but RAM is where you need the most money for video and I suspect all Adobe products.

MileHighAko

basflt wrote: »

SDD in not reliable and have limited lifetime and very small size

save money ,,,,,,, like SDD were cheap , ... , HAH ,,,,

for photo-editing , only RAM counts , [ and disk-space ]

My experience is different. LR3 is file system intensive when creating preview copies, etc. Adding SSD to my systems have increased performance significantly. Yes, I'd prioritize RAM over SSD, but I wouldn't build a new computer today without both heavy RAM and SSD. Even a small SSD for system and temporary files creates an amazing difference.

Your mileage may vary. Just speaking from actual experience.

mstens

SSD's shine on short writes/reads. You'll see improvements if you're using them as your OS disk, Applications disk, scratch disk etc. You'll not really see any advantage for long writes/reads, so it's not worth it IMO to use SSD for storage (Lr's previews etc are relatively small files in comparison to the actual RAW images).

BradfordBenn

In most applications there is a tradeoff with overclocking the chips, most typically heat. I agree that putting more memory in instead of overclocking will end up getting more performance and not shorten the life of your chip due to heating issues.

stuffjunkie

I am pondering the same questions you have. Are you building or buying? I built my current system and was just considering a refresh (MB, RAM, SSD and a 2600K) My current research is picking a MB.

Kevin

kdog wrote: »

That is the question. I'm thinking of building a new PC based on the Intel I7-2600 3.4GHz, and it seems the first question that needs to be addressed is whether to overclock. The usage for the computer will be photo-editing with CS5, and hopefully video-editing in the not-to-distant future. I'm not a gamer. I suppose I could build a PC capable of overclocking and just not overclock it unless I feel some compelling need in the future. Not sure if there's any downside to that other than a bit of extra cost. Maybe $100 difference in getting the "K" variant of the chip and an enthusiast class motherboard.

All thoughts are welcome.

-joel

angevin1

Dan7312 wrote: »

Another thing to keep in mind, if you think you are going to use Adobe Premiere for video editing, make sure the video card you choose is supported by Premiere's Mercury playback engine. That's probably more important than overclocking for video editing.

Guaranteed! But only in Pre-Pro pretty much. And if you find one with elemental accelerator, it'd be really stank for Pre-pro. You'll notice that the amazon link you linked reads that these cards are SLI ready: My translation is: they want you to buy two or three cards to really make that thing shine. THAT is why I say, get a decent card and forgetaboutit! When I built my current workstation and ponied up for the quadro, I went thru Nvidia-hell trying to figure out what they H was wrong. Did tthe Online Chat, up-graded to a phone call with an engineer from Nvidia. The basic thing outcome was: Mr. Wise, uh, this is supposed to work even better with a more powerful computer. 2nd translation, oh, now I need a more powerful computer to make your card really Shine? Geesh! go with the mid-grade cards: $500 and like I said, forgetabout it!

I regularly use evga to monitor when my card is actually doing anything. And unless I am using premier pro AND elemental accelerator, it does: NOTHING during a render! That said if I elect to use elemental accelerator, it really cranks out a render in 1/5th the time!

kdog

angevin1 wrote: »

Admittedly I'm on the older i7 930 system.

I have 2 SSD's

RAM trumps ALL things Video. Get a decent Video card that Adobe perhaps recommends and leave it at that. Though if it comes with elemental accelerator for premiere pro, then that is a good extra! My Quadro FX ( $1k Card) does not outperform my straight RAM when in render mode or in RAM preview or working in layers.

Sorry, I'm lost. What do you mean by "straight RAM". Are you referrering to the base graphics engine on the motherboard? So are you saying the base graphics unit of the MOBO performs as well as your $1000 graphics card for some operations?

I am presently overclocked to 4.0Ghtz and thats from 2.8Ghtz. Everything is snappier with the overclock. I bought a simple aftermarket air based cooling fan (<$40) and it keeps things cool sufficiently. My MOBO and CPU and RAM were all matched to work in unison for overclocking. and it does work and work well, even after my last upgrade to 24GB.

+1 for overclocking. <img src="https://us.v-cdn.net/6029383/emoji/deal.gif&quot; border="0" alt="" >

If you get a board that uses 6GBS HDD, that'll work as well or just as well as a SSD. SSD's have come down in price, but RAM is where you need the most money for video and I suspect all Adobe products.

The MB's I'm looking at support 6GB/s HDD. I will definitely check this out.

Thanks, Tom.

-joel

kdog

MileHighAko wrote: »

My experience is different. LR3 is file system intensive when creating preview copies, etc. Adding SSD to my systems have increased performance significantly. Yes, I'd prioritize RAM over SSD, but I wouldn't build a new computer today without both heavy RAM and SSD. Even a small SSD for system and temporary files creates an amazing difference.

Your mileage may vary. Just speaking from actual experience.

Appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.

angevin1

kdog wrote: »

Sorry, I'm lost. What do you mean by "straight RAM". Are you referrering to the base graphics engine on the motherboard? So are you saying the base graphics unit of the MOBO performs as well as your $1000 graphics card for some operations?

No. Not at all. using evga [(link) Which is for overclocking your graphics card] as a monitoring tool, I can see when/if my graphics card is engaged in duties. For instance when I watch a high bit rate video, I'll see it (the Quadro FX card) come up and work at about 16 to 20 % load.
Now I can have that little monitoring program open while After Effects or Premiere Pro is open and see if/when it does any work.

If I render a video from Premiere Pro (in Media encoder) And watch the card. The Card does no work during the render. My Quadro has elemental accelerator and if I choose one of the elemental options from within Media Encoder, then the card comes up to full song and renders very quickly by comparison.

Or if while working in After Effects I do a RAM preview I can elect to turn the card on/off from within After Effects. If I turn the Card on (called OPEN GL) it renders the preview ( of my work so far) slower and is doing about 5% work. I usually just leave it off because Just using the RAM ( my ref. to Straight RAM) instead of Card AND RAM is faster. Much Faster. I'd have to shoot a Screen Shot video of it to Show you, but if you can take it on trust ( $1000 dollars worth of Graphics card trust), then this should satisfy.

below captured Screen SHots (FULL SIZE link: http://www.tomwisephotos.com/Photography/Mega-Challenge/i-9pRkH7N/0/X3/openGL-on-X3.jpg)


GPU turned off below (FUll Size link: http://www.tomwisephotos.com/Photography/Mega-Challenge/i-tF52H4T/0/X3/SSopenGL-off-X3.jpg)


You'll also note that I asked for 1/4 resolution for the Open GL render preview and FUll resolution for the straight RAM preview. That was to lighten the load of the Open GL preview, which it has such a hard time doing apparently.

Bottom line: Ram Trumps Quadro FX 3800 workstation graphics card!

Large amount of RAM along with this new CPU family and a decent graphics card ought to really bring it home.

I love my SSD's no doubt, but I also love both of my scratch disks which are 6Gbs/HDD and plugged into 6Gbs sata ports on the MoBo.

Dan7312

The examples you are showing are for AfterEffects, not Premiere Pro. Does AfterEffects use the Adobe Mercury engine?

PremierePro has a lot of video effects that you add in layers and, I think becuase I don't have a supported video card to find out:cry, that besides just rendering the bits the Mercury engine also renders the effects faster than the CPU can. Also Premiere Pro tells you if what it renders is being done with the Mercury engine or not with a little highlight line just above the sequence.

None of the fancy video cards do much unless the application you use supports them. I think it mostly games that support these advanced features, Premiere Pro is probably one of very few non-game apps that do.

Also in Premiere you can choose the quality of preview is shows when you are editing. For the simple video stuff I do I choose a "low res" preview so things don't slow down, but is good enough and fast enough for what I do.

The reason I would like a supported video card is that I think it would speed up the final rendering, which for me right now takes a bit longer than real time. I'd love to cut that down.

angevin1 wrote: »

No. Not at all. using evga [(link) Which is for overclocking your graphics card] as a monitoring tool, I can see when/if my graphics card is engaged in duties. For instance when I watch a high bit rate video, I'll see it (the Quadro FX card) come up and work at about 16 to 20 % load.
Now I can have that little monitoring program open while After Effects or Premiere Pro is open and see if/when it does any work.

kdog

angevin1 wrote: »

No. Not at all. using evga [(link) Which is for overclocking your graphics card] as a monitoring tool, I can see when/if my graphics card is engaged in duties. For instance when I watch a high bit rate video, I'll see it (the Quadro FX card) come up and work at about 16 to 20 % load.
Now I can have that little monitoring program open while After Effects or Premiere Pro is open and see if/when it does any work.

If I render a video from Premiere Pro (in Media encoder) And watch the card. The Card does no work during the render. My Quadro has elemental accelerator and if I choose one of the elemental options from within Media Encoder, then the card comes up to full song and renders very quickly by comparison.

Or if while working in After Effects I do a RAM preview I can elect to turn the card on/off from within After Effects. If I turn the Card on (called OPEN GL) it renders the preview ( of my work so far) slower and is doing about 5% work. I usually just leave it off because Just using the RAM ( my ref. to Straight RAM) instead of Card AND RAM is faster. Much Faster. I'd have to shoot a Screen Shot video of it to Show you, but if you can take it on trust ( $1000 dollars worth of Graphics card trust), then this should satisfy.

below captured Screen SHots (FULL SIZE link: http://www.tomwisephotos.com/Photography/Mega-Challenge/i-9pRkH7N/0/X3/openGL-on-X3.jpg)


GPU turned off below (FUll Size link: http://www.tomwisephotos.com/Photography/Mega-Challenge/i-tF52H4T/0/X3/SSopenGL-off-X3.jpg)


You'll also note that I asked for 1/4 resolution for the Open GL render preview and FUll resolution for the straight RAM preview. That was to lighten the load of the Open GL preview, which it has such a hard time doing apparently.

Bottom line: Ram Trumps Quadro FX 3800 workstation graphics card!

Large amount of RAM along with this new CPU family and a decent graphics card ought to really bring it home.

I love my SSD's no doubt, but I also love both of my scratch disks which are 6Gbs/HDD and plugged into 6Gbs sata ports on the MoBo.

Thanks, Tom. Very interesting and I appreciate the time you put into this post. I always thought Open GL and hardware acceleration were geared towards rendering 3D graphics for games and CAD tools. So maybe they're really not the best tools for rendering video. It kind of sounds that way from your experimentation.

angevin1

Dan7312 wrote: »

The examples you are showing are for AfterEffects, not Premiere Pro. Does AfterEffects use the Adobe Mercury engine?

Yes. I know. I use this to show just how much a graphics card will really work for a graphics intensive program. Joel was looking at graphics cards, and I feel like these examples I give are really good at showcasing what graphics cards can/can-not do.

Now. Isn't that the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine I've heard so much about? Premiere Pro is divinely suited for such an engine. After Effects is not. Premiere Pro actually only renders a small fraction of a frame and uses algorithms to conjure up the rest so it can play back at real time in it's viewing window. After Effects on the other hand has to render each and every pixel of each and every frame so that you can do detailed compositing work, hence once again why I use it more often to show graphics card examples. So no. Adobe After Effects cannot use the Mercury Playback Engine.

Dan7312 wrote: »

The reason I would like a supported video card is that I think it would speed up the final rendering, which for me right now takes a bit longer than real time. I'd love to cut that down.

A bit longer than real time? Thats actually pretty darned good Dan! I have done simple 60 second video renders that take an hour or more.
But the real deal has been elemental accelerator. Elemental is a separate company and VERY responsive via e-mail. I got lucky that my Quadro had it when I bought it, and when I choose one of elementals' codecs to render with, it speeds up a render-time hugely

angevin1

Unfortunately, visiting the Elemental site, I found that my accelerator is only good with CS4 and the Mercury Playback Engine is the CHoice Du jour. Taking a tour over to Nvidia linked from Elemental, I find that Nvidia only needs you to Spend about $1795 for a decent Workstation card. And that of course is only to speed things up in the rendering of media from Premiere-Pro via Media Encoder.

On one hand it makes hardly any sense to me that a graphics card costing close to 2 grand cannot really do anything for a graphics intensive program. And yet on the other hand in my reading some weeks ago, I read where certain movies took over night just to render 2 frames of content, and I know they have better computers than me.

angevin1

kdog wrote: »

Thanks, Tom. Very interesting and I appreciate the time you put into this post. I always thought Open GL and hardware acceleration were geared towards rendering 3D graphics for games and CAD tools. So maybe they're really not the best tools for rendering video. It kind of sounds that way from your experimentation.

You're very welcome. I hadn't grasped that idea as well as you. Otherwise I'd have never ponied up for the QuadroFX-3800 last year when I built my Workstation. In my defense though, Nvidia and their marketing hyperbole boiled me over and fooled me totally.

To do it all over again. I'd have 2 Cpu's, As much RAM as I could reasonably afford (like 48GB), a Simple yet effective graphics card that all the After Effects Geeks like ( just peruse their forums) like those GTX cards you mentioned earlier, Win7 Pro And CS5.5.

Good Luck on your build!

Dan7312

My videos are usually between 30-40 minutes long, but I have a quad core hyperthreaded i7 with 12G of triple channel memory, so I'm sure that helps. Also my videos have a lot of static content.

What the Mercury engine does is use the instruction set in the graphics card to render the video. That's why only certain cards are supported. Premiere has lots of video effects and supports multi track of video which are really layers, so it is much like Photoshop in that respect. I use Premiere to do simple animation too, though it would be really tedious for anything all that complex. Pushing all that into the processor on the graphics card is a real win.

In premier you usually do editing in a preview window that is in effect lower resolution that what you are going to produce, just for performance. In my case even without a supported graphics card I haven't noticed any slow downs while editing though someone else I know who makes videos similar to mine does sometimes experience pauses while he is editing.

Premiere is much like Photoshop in that edits and effects are non-destructive. So you can always produce the highest quality output your source material is capable of even if you are doing editing in a low res mode. Once you are done with your edits Adobe's media encode renders you final output.

On my next system I'l will be sure to get one of the graphic cards that the Mercury engine supports though.

angevin1 wrote: »

Yes. I know. I use this to show just how much a graphics card will really work for a graphics intensive program. Joel was looking at graphics cards, and I feel like these examples I give are really good at showcasing what graphics cards can/can-not do.

jeffreaux2

My Core i7 build....now two years old.....and purring like a kitten still.

http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=128564