i7-970 for video editing?

[rtangwai]

A friend of mine who runs a music/greenscreen studio has been offered a used i7-970 system w/12GB RAM and a few other things (including a GTX 670 and a 1200W PSU) for $600 CDN (roughly $480 US). He is seriously looking at it because:

1). He's cheap.
2). He has been using a pair of i3-550's w/4GB RAM to do his video work (mostly Premiere Pro/AfterEffects CS6) and he claims he can grow a beard waiting for scenes to render.

The question is this: is the price worth it, or does it make more sense to spend more money on a much newer computer with faster single-thread performance, Quicksync, SATA 6Gb, and USB 3.0?

If I've ready the math right a Haswell CPU has about a 40% performance improvement per core over a Lynnfield core at the same speed. That concerns me because if he uses something that is light on threads a Haswell 4770 should be able to trounce the i7 970 despite having 2 less cores. Am I reading that right or did I miss something?



Thanks in advance!

 

[drescherjm]

I think the IPC difference is closer to 25% than 40%.

 

[cyclone3d]

The 970 will be way faster than what he has now.. but an even newer setup will trounce the 970 in video editing.

And for RAM intensive stuff, you want the fastest RAM the system will take.

If it were me, I would be looking at a x79 or even better, a x99 based system.

The increased work efficiency will pay for itself withing a month or two, maybe sooner.

It always pains me to see people trying to get by with the cheapest crap available when something that doesn't cost much more will increase their work output and pay for itself in no time.

 

[kniaugaudiskis]

...but an even newer setup will trounce the 970 in video editing.

I have to partly disagree on this. Haswell offers around 25% better IPC compared to the Gulftown/Westmere-based processors given the same clock speed, so in case of a heavy multithreaded load, say, both i7 4770 and i7 970 processors will produce nearly similar results. And the X79-based platform won't be that much faster, either, however, X99 will.

 

[iamwhoiamtoday]

He'll see a big performance boost with that system. That said, if his living is earned from this system, there is no reason to not do it right. 2P motherboard, nice fast raid array, metric fucktons of memory, and a highend video card. Plus two 4k monitors. naturally.

If it's for work, do it right. I understand budgets and all.... but when the POS at your desk gets in the way of you getting the job done, don't get something that sucks less. Get something that rocks.

 

[atp1916]

That's a horrible deal.

He could very easily go 2P with 2x x5650s (<$150) and get 12c/24HT @ somewhat decent clock rates for easily the same amount spent on the 970 or less. 2P LGA1356 boards these days are dirt cheap (think <$100) as well as the ram. He could spend $480 or less and double his thread count.

Then again, video editing isn't as parallelized as some would think. It ain't the same as rendering, so at some point he'll taper off from the benefit of the extra cores whereas a higher speed / IPC chip like a Haswell would begin to catch up. This is why a Haswell option is also extremely viable here, especially X99.

 

[Trimlock]

Over priced for old hardware, but a serious upgrade over what he already has.

To be honest he should put that money towards a newer system.

 

[rtangwai]

My friend is always broke, I'm not even sure where he's going to find the money for this system.

He is not doing 3D rendering or a lot of post-processing of greenscreen stuff, otherwise the i3's would have melted down by now.

He isn't even supposed to be using the i3's for video work in the first place - they were built to handle ProTools 10 (he has a bazillion plugins, all 32-bit so he won't go to 11 which is 64-bit). He stuck the CS software on them because his G5 Macs (PowerPC) were struggling with Final Cut - he discovered why Apple went Intel.

He needs a video editor computer because he's actually choosing whether to do video or audio jobs. He's been relying on 2 older Pro Tools 10 boxes that the i3's were supposed to replace. The primary is a Pentium4 Prescott 3.2GHz, 3GB RAM but it is having issues with certain plugins because it is a single core, not to mention the fact that it is so old keeping it working is a struggle. The other Pro Tools box is even older, a Pentium III 800Mhz w/1.5GB of SDRAM.

An i7 970 sounds old to most of us but compared to his crap it's like comparing an abacus to the HAL9000.

I'm still concerned about the lower IPC of the i7 970 (even if the difference is 25% and not 40%) so I'll probably tell him to save up and buy a Haswell. He'll probably disagree and get it anyway but at least I won't get blamed if it turns out to be less than his dream machine.


Thanks everyone!

 

[cyclone3d]

I have to partly disagree on this. Haswell offers around 25% better IPC compared to the Gulftown/Westmere-based processors given the same clock speed, so in case of a heavy multithreaded load, say, both i7 4770 and i7 970 processors will produce nearly similar results. And the X79-based platform won't be that much faster, either, however, X99 will.

IPC isn't everything.

X79 RAM throughput is a lot higher than X58. For RAM intensive stuff, there is quite a large difference in performance. SB-E may not be that much higher IPC than the 970, but IB-E is what you would want with X79 anyway.

X79 just walks all over X58. I have both setups, and have for quite a while.

Of course X99 would be even better, but it is also a more expensive due to it being so new.

 

[Brian_B]

I agree with the general sentiment - it would be an upgrade, but at that price not exactly worth it.

I don't have any concrete data, nor am I terribly familiar with the workflow that your friend uses, but generally in video work - it's very core count intensive (not necessarily IPC-centric - it may actually be a case where an AMD FX8xxx is on par with a consumer Intel chip - at least according to Tom's ), very disk I/O intensive, and in that same vein, can use all the RAM you could throw at it.

That being said, a lot of i7 Nahalem's were overclocking beasts - that cuts both ways. It could be that he gets a nice 4+Ghz overclocker, and it turns out to be fairly decent, or it could be that he is buying what used to be a nice 4+Ghz overclocker and was rode hard and put away wet, and it's on it's last legs.

Personally, I would shy away from it and on a steep budget put that $600 towards an FX83x0 with some fast disk access and as much RAM as I could afford.

I don't know that USB3 would matter a lot - you aren't going to use it for live encoding (I would hope), it may be nice for archival purposes, but that's apart from encoding. TO the best of my research, I didn't see any evidence that Premiere Pro even supported QuickSync acceleration, so I don't know that a newer-gen Intel chip would help out that much - at least compared to what additional core count could get you performance wise(and TDP on the die not having to share with an on-die GPU).

Apparently there is CUDA acceleration on nVidia GPU cards, I couldn't find any concrete data of real-world benchmarks (I admittedly didn't dig very deep on that). that may be worth looking into, but data like this suggests that a mid-tier consumer card is all you really need to get as much benefit as your really going to get out of it.