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Building a PC - Xeon or i7

aemilia scott

aemilia scott

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After haunting this forum for a while, I thought I'd run this build up the flagpole and see what people think.

My usage will be in the neighborhood of 4k playback, effects in both Premiere and After Effects, and Resolve.

http://pcpartpicker.com/user/bothari/saved/VkCZxr

I'm building this setup with the idea of down the road, replacing the motherboard and buying a second CPU so that I can someday get the x99 excitement with a dual-CPU system, as some have mentioned that splitting cores across chips increases efficiency. However, I'm running up to a question I've had for a while -- what are the differences, benefits and drawbacks of i7 chips versus Xeon chips?
 
if youre exporting h.264 for web content i believe i7 chips are much much faster at that specific task
 
From Eric Bowen:

The only difference between Xeons and i7 CPU's are firmware related that are absed on security features used by servers. None of those effect performance computing or editing. Also the Xeons are what is required if you want to put 2x Intel CPU's on a board. The I7 chips are for single boards only. The Xeons are locked which means you cant control the GHz ie frequency. That is due to Intel's Server Engineering team having 0 tolerance policy on overclocking any Xeon CPU's. I have never been given a good reason from their engineering as to why and even the Intel Desktop CPU engineers shake their head. None the less it is what it is so cant clock Xeons above stock. Now the new V3 Xeons also wont allow memory clocking above their rated support with regards to DDR4. Once again this is really foolish and does nothing but make the more expensive Xeons more attractive. None the less it is the case. For overall performance the i7 with 8 Cores and 16 threads is the ideal point for current applications with the 4GHz clock speed or higher. None of the Xeons push that clock speed. So essentially you need 24 to 28 cores to try and make up the performance difference with the I7 at 4GHz plus. Those are expensive Xeons and often times codecs or effects will limit the threading to well below what those Xeons can handle. In those cases the faster 8 core is by far the better choice. When the threading is not limited the the Dual Xeon wins out but only if the processing load is utilized. More often that not it just ends up as idle CPU power not doing anything unless your projects are very complex.
 
Right. But you asked about differences between i7 and Xeon, and the biggest one I can think of especially re: editing and post stuff is this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

which really makes a difference. There are lots of benchmarks/videos on youtube that show, for example, i7 iMacs beating 6-core nMP's (that use xeon) when it comes to FCP X exports.

So if your clients want a lot of quicktime movies/compressed formats as deliverables, you should look into i7
 
Quicksync is not implemented yet for the most part. No that is not a consideration. There are limited uses out there for it and most require beta installs. That is not something you base a workstation on especially since it wont help you for AE and Davinci. The use with Premiere is extremely limited just like Nvidia's NVENC. Maybe down the road a couple years you will finally start to see this take off but its not there yet or anytime soon.
 
aemilia scott said:
I'm building this setup with the idea of down the road, replacing the motherboard and buying a second CPU so that I can someday get the x99 excitement with a dual-CPU system, as some have mentioned that splitting cores across chips increases efficiency. However, I'm running up to a question I've had for a while -- what are the differences, benefits and drawbacks of i7 chips versus Xeon chips?
Click to expand...

I would advise against that future upgrade strategy, those plans never work out. They just don't. What would be your upgrade time frame? In less than 8 months, we will have updated Broadwell core i7 CPUs with a process shrink from 22nm to 15nm. We will gain cheaper, faster DDR4 memory. There will be entirely new 20nm process GPUs from both AMD and nVidia. Within 6 months of that, there will be Thunderbolt 3. You're much better off to build a good system now that better fits your needs and budget for right now.

I would recommend spending a bit more on the motherboard with one of the nicer X99 options. You don't have to spend upwards of $480 on the X99 Deluxe or X99-E WS boards. But $100 more will put you on the playing field. Then you can go with a much faster clocked 8-core i7. Yes, 4 fewer cores, but 1300MHz faster right out of the box with the ability to support faster memory and means of clocking it up faster if you want. That CPU is almost $600 cheaper than the Xeon you have priced out.

Not sure what your plan is for the 5400rpm WD Green drives....? And the two Black drives are fine, but why just two and what are your plans there?

The difference between the Xeon and the i7 CPUs is not all that much when it comes to the actual processor cores themselves and the cache designs are very similar too. The two biggest differences we see is that the i7 2600 series can operate in dual CPU arrangements and the Xeons can utilize registered memory with ECC (on-board error correction). There are some arguments for the ECC memory and some of the more robust features that can be had with the dedicated Xeon chipsets, but nothing that is going to help you with a single CPU system.

Anyway, you're much better off for now to spend less money on a faster CPU with fewer cores. The majority of software you're going to use will not benefit from those extra cores and will see more gains from the higher clock speeds. Even though Resolve and Premiere, along with most 3D rendering apps, can utilize additional cores to their advantage, the faster CPU and memory you can get to with an i7 setup right now will feed dual GPUs better. And going with a slower Xeon right now with the plans of adding another CPU later to use more cores isn't really a great plan. At that point you will need that other CPU plus a new motherboard and new RAM to make it happen. How much is that going to cost you vs. just selling this build in favor of a new one?

There are indeed tasks where I would recommend a dual-CPU setup. And in this industry we most certainly could use hardware like that. However, the software just isn't there to take advantage of such things. Not on the scale of what these latest systems can offer. Sometimes it's better to get a computer that can handle most things relatively well and save a bit of money to put toward other things. I would recommend the latest and greatest dual Xeon setup, probably 20 cores, to someone needing a dedicated Resolve system that will only use Resolve on that workstation 90% or more of the time. For Premiere, it's a toss-up... I think I would recommend the 8-core i7 or dual 6 or 8-core Xeons. Beyond that, you're just not going to see the return on investment of adding more cores. For just about everything else we do related to R3D workflows, general editing and encoding to popular video formats, more cores are not going to help you. It's all about GHz.
 
Okay, this is all incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. I've swapped out the EGVA motherboard for the Asus X99-e WS, and also now have a Core i7 5960x chip. If that isn't the fastest available in terms of clock speed, I'd be interested to hear what is. And, the WD Green drives were just nickel-and-diming myself, so I upgraded those to Blacks.

Regarding storage, what I have with my Mac Pro is this: 4 internal drives, a Caldigit RAID card and a Caldigit 4-bay RAID box, and a SAS HBA and a LTO-5 tape drive, just for my own backup. Now that I'm living in a world of 10 drive bays, what would you recommend for storage? How do people generally use the internal drives versus a external system? My thought was to also invest in some sort of larger SAS RAID system. In terms of usage: Right now I have my previous film at about 1.5 TB (which I'm not accessing as an edit but am still making renders for distribution) and my current film at about 1.6 TB (which I am regularly accessing in 4k and 2k from every direction). The raw footage from both shoots weighed in at about 6 TB each. And right now, I'm absolutely up to the gills with no extra storage room.
 
I would start with the Cineraid Areca enclosures and they have both SAS or Thunderbolt 2 with internal Areca SAS controllers as options. The 8 bay units should be more than enough for the storage req's you list. Beyond that it's just selecting the correct drives. Make sure their enterprise class regardless of the manufacturer.
 
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