Final Cut vs Adobe Premiere

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

Peter. How is W7 working for you.

Peter. How is W7 working for you.

I simply prefer maximum performance bang for the buck (ie overclocking - I run a 12-core Hackintosh running at 4.3Ghz, although these days I'm running Windows 7 99% of the time). Why pay 3x more for the same or worse performance?



Isn't it a bit silly that the cheapest "official" CS5 Mercury solution on the Mac costs 5x the PC solution?



That's a dubious claim.



Agreed, but I think it's good to realize that one doesn't have to pay the hefty "Apple tax". Take all the money you save and put into your work.



Thanks!



$4813 gets you a LOT of PC. With the above specs, the PC equivalent would cost ~$1600 to build. And I could make it run OS X like a champ. $4813 with no proper RAID array or SSD's or even a monitor and only two 1TB hard drives? :skep:

I did move to adobe a few months ago and let me tell you I like it. the best thing is how the apps work with each other oh and the main reason for me to move was because Blu-ray authoring... so now that I have moved to adobe I wonder if a purely workstation running w7 is stable enough to work on it without worries of crashes. if so I might build one test it, and complete the jump to PC for good. as is right now I run Adobe on a Mac Pro.
What do you guys think?

 

[Craig W. Bickerstaff]

I did move to adobe a few months ago and let me tell you I like it. the best thing is how the apps work with each other oh and the main reason for me to move was because Blu-ray authoring... so now that I have moved to adobe I wonder if a purely workstation running w7 is stable enough to work on it without worries of crashes. if so I might build one test it, and complete the jump to PC for good. as is right now I run Adobe on a Mac Pro.
What do you guys think?

Although I am a little curious as to why you would change your entire work flow to accommodate an authoring application I would say if the mac pro is working well and all your adobe apps are working just as well then stick with it and save yourself a few thousand dollars, maybe you can use it to upgrade to the next version of adobe software when that comes out.

 

[Peter Chang]

Please spec identical parts, it's not possible to build it for around 1600, and it's 3 1TB, including the base harddrive from the mac pro. And you can build some basic raids on a mac pro with out a raid card. And an SSD is easy to install into a mac pro, no reason to buy it from apple either.

Intel 980X $1000 (it's not a Xeon but OC's like butter with the unlocked multiplier and outranks the Westmere: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)
Mobo $200
RAM $200
Nvidia GTX 285 $140
Case $80
Power $80
3 1TB HDD $60 ea

Ok, so it's slightly more than $1600 but you can add an SSD, RAID card, and monitor and still come in well under half the cost of the Mac configuration you listed.

 

[Peter Chang]

Peter have you heard about this GTX 590 with 1024 CUDA cores? I think I am going to wait for that, then step up. I'm still on this GTX 285.

Tom, the GTX 590 is going to be insane. It's probably also going to be an insanely power hungry space heater. You should be fine though since I was conservative with the overclock when I built your machine, airflow was good and temps were low. The GTX 590 or SLI 580's should be able to handle Crysis 2 with max settings! :gun:

In the meantime, your GTX 285 should be fine for Dead Space 2! :laugh: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PccefpatLNg

 

[Peter Chang]

I did move to adobe a few months ago and let me tell you I like it. the best thing is how the apps work with each other oh and the main reason for me to move was because Blu-ray authoring... so now that I have moved to adobe I wonder if a purely workstation running w7 is stable enough to work on it without worries of crashes. if so I might build one test it, and complete the jump to PC for good. as is right now I run Adobe on a Mac Pro.
What do you guys think?

Windows 7 x64 is rock solid. What are your Mac Pro specs?

 

[Tom Lowe]

What about processor? It's been about 10 months since Gulftown dropped. I wonder how long before the next high-end processor, and what it might be?

 

[Peter Chang]

What about processor? It's been about 10 months since Gulftown dropped. I wonder how long before the next high-end processor, and what it might be?

Incremental this year: Gulftown 990X (+133Mhz vs the 980X) and 995X (+266Mhz). You should be good until 2012.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

What about processor? It's been about 10 months since Gulftown dropped. I wonder how long before the next high-end processor, and what it might be?

Sandy-Bridge, which is out, but it was just recalled due to a faulty SATA controller; which is only a problem if you want to use its on-board controller (which of course you wouldn't).

 

[Peter Chang]

Sandy-Bridge, which is out, but it was just recalled due to a faulty SATA controller; which is only a problem if you want to use its on-board controller (which of course you wouldn't).

The current Sandy Bridge is Socket LGA 1155 which replaces LGA 1156 (mainstream platform) and has fewer PCIe lanes than LGA 1366, which will remain the high end platform and king of the hill until end of this year. Wait for the X58/1366 replacement.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

What about processor? It's been about 10 months since Gulftown dropped. I wonder how long before the next high-end processor, and what it might be?

The next performance king is due to be AMD's 8-core Bulldozer (rumours suggest so anyway), in Q2 2011. Leaked benchmarks suggest something like twice the performance of Core i7 950 in "Rendering", which should be most relevant for us. Which will then be dethroned by Intel's LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-EN 8-core CPU, which should release in Q4 2011. That will be a total beast, with 4 memory channels and 20MB L3 cache.

Not sure if the recalls and cancellation of LGA1155 motherboards will affect that schedule.

In the short term, it is the incremental 990X of course.

Also, let's not forget the hypothetical GTX 590 is actually just 2 x way underclocked GTX 580 in SLI. I am not sure how well CUDA scales with SLI, if at all. If it doesn't GTX 580 will be faster.

 

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

Windows 7 x64 is rock solid. What are your Mac Pro specs?

8 core Mac Pro with 10GB of Ram. 4 TB of internal Storage. and external 10TB RAID5, external 4TB RAID 0, FCS, Adobe Master Suite, Etc. etc.

 

[Michael Millichamp]

8 core Mac Pro with 10GB of Ram. 4 TB of internal Storage. and external 10TB RAID5, external 4TB RAID 0, FCS, Adobe Master Suite, Etc. etc.

And how much did that set you back?

 

[Peter Chang]

Oh and about the monitors, I like these for the price/quality ratio: http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produ...65WB_VP2365wb_23_Widescreen_Professional.html

I'm curious what monitors you use.

I use 2x 30" Dell 3007WFP-HC + 2x 20" 2007FP for a 7520x1600 desktop.

Dell just came out with a new 30" the U3011: http://accessories.dell.com/sna/pro...etail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=224-9949

 

[Peter Chang]

8 core Mac Pro with 10GB of Ram. 4 TB of internal Storage. and external 10TB RAID5, external 4TB RAID 0, FCS, Adobe Master Suite, Etc. etc.

Do you find it lacking? What model year? How much could you sell it for? You might be able to build a killer PC and come out ahead. That was the case when I bought a tricked out G5 Quad years ago and sold it 6 months later due to frustrations with Apple's proprietary hardware ecosystem (Apple lagged badly in delivering up to date graphics cards, and people were so desperate that they were paying hackers a mint to bios flash PC cards... which at $500-600 were still less than the eventual $800-900 that Apple charged!! Of course, those PC cards were like $200 :001_rolleyes

What's the CPU clock speed? CPU speed makes all the difference for many apps. A measly $180 i7-920 overclocked to 3.7 GHz still crushes. Even the new i7-2600K Sandy Bridge requires massive overclocking to 4.7 Ghz to equal the i7-920 at 3.7 GHz (not to mention severely hampered by the platform). Also, OC'ing on Sandy Bridge is tricky and complicated.

 

[Liam Hall]

FCP is based on quicktime, and the rumor mill says Apple is actually planning to dumb it down in the future, targeting more people in the prosumer market.

Steve Jobs quashed that rumor months ago.

The latest rumor I know of is a release in March/April.

If you want to use Final Cut, the chances are you'll need Photoshop, so you may as well by the Adobe Production Premium and get After Effects, Premiere and all the rest.

 

[Steven Swigart]

I use 2x 30" Dell 3007WFP-HC + 2x 20" 2007FP for a 7520x1600 desktop.

Dell just came out with a new 30" the U3011: http://accessories.dell.com/sna/pro...etail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=224-9949

That's a great monitor set up.

 

[Michael Millichamp]

I use 2x 30" Dell 3007WFP-HC + 2x 20" 2007FP for a 7520x1600 desktop.

Dell just came out with a new 30" the U3011: http://accessories.dell.com/sna/pro...etail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=224-9949

That's a beautiful set up you've got there Peter. Any pics of your actual machine.

 

[Albert Astorga Zepeda]

Do you find it lacking? What model year? How much could you sell it for? You might be able to build a killer PC and come out ahead. That was the case when I bought a tricked out G5 Quad years ago and sold it 6 months later due to frustrations with Apple's proprietary hardware ecosystem (Apple lagged badly in delivering up to date graphics cards, and people were so desperate that they were paying hackers a mint to bios flash PC cards... which at $500-600 were still less than the eventual $800-900 that Apple charged!! Of course, those PC cards were like $200 :001_rolleyes

What's the CPU clock speed? CPU speed makes all the difference for many apps. A measly $180 i7-920 overclocked to 3.7 GHz still crushes. Even the new i7-2600K Sandy Bridge requires massive overclocking to 4.7 Ghz to equal the i7-920 at 3.7 GHz (not to mention severely hampered by the platform). Also, OC'ing on Sandy Bridge is tricky and complicated.

Some times it does lag. with uncompressed HD but I do not do much of that. What really bothers me is the lack of enough PCIe Slots to run a decent workstation. after all that is what Mac pros are right? I have to pull cards out to install the ones I need to finish a job. what an annoyance.
how do you guys running a RR, Davinci Resolve and a decent Raid, Fc Nic, plus A/V output borad do it? I want to know!!! Really. Can you dod that with a Hackintosh? I mean you have the Slots! !!. Peter can you shine in?

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Do you find it lacking? What model year? How much could you sell it for? You might be able to build a killer PC and come out ahead. That was the case when I bought a tricked out G5 Quad years ago and sold it 6 months later due to frustrations with Apple's proprietary hardware ecosystem (Apple lagged badly in delivering up to date graphics cards, and people were so desperate that they were paying hackers a mint to bios flash PC cards... which at $500-600 were still less than the eventual $800-900 that Apple charged!! Of course, those PC cards were like $200 :001_rolleyes

What's the CPU clock speed? CPU speed makes all the difference for many apps. A measly $180 i7-920 overclocked to 3.7 GHz still crushes. Even the new i7-2600K Sandy Bridge requires massive overclocking to 4.7 Ghz to equal the i7-920 at 3.7 GHz (not to mention severely hampered by the platform). Also, OC'ing on Sandy Bridge is tricky and complicated.

Do you have a source for this? Just about every review I have read says the complete opposite. Sandy Bridge OC is a piece of cake with a K series CPU and a P67. At 4.5 GHz I have seen 2600K competing with the i7 980X. Clock-for-clock, Sandy Bridge is ~10% faster than Nehalem. Add a 1 GHz clock speed boost (~30%) and I am completely baffled as to how you could claim an i7 920 @ 3.7 GHz equals a i7 2600K @ 4.7 GHz. Just about everyone else seems to suggest otherwise.

 

[Peter Chang]

Do you have a source for this? Just about every review I have read says the complete opposite. Sandy Bridge OC is a piece of cake with a K series CPU and a P67. At 4.5 GHz I have seen 2600K competing with the i7 980X. Clock-for-clock, Sandy Bridge is ~10% faster than Nehalem. Add a 1 GHz clock speed boost (~30%) and I am completely baffled as to how you could claim an i7 920 @ 3.7 GHz equals a i7 2600K @ 4.7 GHz. Just about everyone else seems to suggest otherwise.

See:
http://ppbm5.com/News.html
http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

Am I reading it wrong?