Keep an eye on the third gen Ryzens set to launch this summer. 16 cores for cheap, even cheaper 8 core outpaces the 9900K.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/ryzen-3000-release-date-ryzen-3rd-gen-specs-performance-price

@bitman

Then there is the Intel PCI-e lanes 'issue' of not having enough PCI-e lanes on their mainstream processors. Well, first you are never going to run out of PCI-e lanes, even with the i7 9900K. You may however have a theoretical bottleneck due to the DMI link (about 4 PCI-e lanes) between the CPU and chipset if you are sharing bandwith with NVMe-SSD's, USB, sound, network and other HD drives. Not sure this will show in a real life scenario. After all, all PCI-e lanes are 3.0 and 985MB/s each...

And THAT, right there above, is why I wont be building my own! Your knowledge and stamina hacking through this Jungle has left me in awe and a little inept. I shall pass on your feedback to the PC Builders for their consideration too. Thank you.

@fr0sty - Yes, will do! Thank you too.

And THAT, right there above, is why I wont be building my own!

...

I shall pass on your feedback to the PC Builders for their consideration too.

And hope that they understand what @bitman meant (as many even will not try to understand that). Ha-ha :)

P.S. "If you want something done, do it yourself." (c) Zorg from "The Fifth Element"

@fifonik - Thank you for your feedback, both here and your Private Messages to me. I will use your comments to inform and instruct the PC Builders. As to your Fifth Element analogy, a great Film, the Producers and Director would have relied heavily on others to operate all the technologies that make for that outcome. Regarding the PC Builders, this will be the third box the chaps have made for me; their policy of return-to-base I’ve used on more than two occasions; helps me to understand how I go about upgrading and installing hardware; they’ve both rectified software issues I’ve had either over the phone or directly by At-Distance adjustments over the INTERNET and ALL this has been covered by their modest extended cover Policy.

Over the decades I've come to recognise my own limitations and other’s expanding horizons; which individuals can lend their expertise and knowledge to my projects and who do so with care and understanding.

I'm going to have to recommend you avoid the Radeon GPUs... as good as the performance is in Vegas, the drivers and overall build quality are far too shoddy. There are certain things I can do that just make the card shut down completely, reliably, every time. For instance, I have a cinema 4d animation I have been toying with that has 3 trees in it, but I was experimenting with putting luminance textures on the leaves containing video clips of visuals I have on my computer, making patterns dance across the leaves and illuminating the scene around it. Every single time I change the texture type to cubic, the mouse pointer will freeze, and the video card will shut down, the screen goes black, and i have to physically reboot to get it back. Then, when it get it back, my TVs are overscanning badly, and I have to change settings within them to get it fixed again. It then complains of having to reset settings due to a system failure, which drops all my GPU settings I'd set up. I've even tried undervolting it to try to keep things running cooler, but nothing.

I've done some digging on this, and apparently AMD used cheap materials when building the heat sync, and it doesn't lay flush up against the GPU's processor. AMD attempted to sidestep this flaw by putting a piece of graphite between them, but it doesn't work. One guy said he had to take his GPU apart and sand it down to make it lay flush in order to get rid of the issues... which judging by your comments is far too hands on a thing for you to be interested in doing.

Go with the tried and true pros, Nvidia is where it's at. I can't say I've had issues with the card yet while using Vegas, but that doesn't mean that is always going to be the case. Anything that puts it under heavy load is subject to cause one of these screen black out crashes. Sometimes it's just the secondary monitor that goes out, others the entire GPU.

I'm in the process of upgrading all (3) of my Xeon workstations over the next 2 years now that I'm done spending money on camera gear for a while... For the first I chose a 9900K on an Asus Z390 WS because the Asus has a PLX chip to manage the CPU's limited PCIe lanes. The 9900K is not very upgradeable, but I only spent $1350 for the 9900K, Asus Z390 WS, Vega 64 Liquid-cooled, H150i cpu cooler, & 32gb DDR4. It performs the Red Car test in 14s which is the same as a Threadripper 1950X/2950x system costing more...

4K multi-cam projects are smooth now but I imagine 8K would still tax this system... E3 is just a month away & AMD will likely reveal more Zen2 release date info... Regardless, I'm waiting on PCIe 4.0 (64GT/s bandwidth) or 5.0 (128GT/s bandwidth) before I spend more on the next build... PCIe 3.0 32GT/s bandwidth is from 2010 whereas PCIe 5.0 is supposed to be as fast as DDR3 memory. 8K multi-cam without proxies will benefit from M.2 RAID drives utilizing PCIe 4/5 bandwidth...

@fr0sty This might also be manufacturer or exact device issue. I used to have ATI/AMD GPU once (do not remember the exact model, it was Asus or GigaByte) and it behaved badly. It was not overheating issue as it worked just fine in FurMark (load 100%, temperature stable and within specs). However, it was crashed (GPU, not PC. Like disabling output or heavy texture glitches) in some games with no reason. Replaced to GPU with the same chipset from another manufacturer (MSI that time) and every issue gone. I have not tried to update or tweak GPU BIOS (this might help) as it was brand new GPU. This does not mean that I banned Asus and GigaByte. I still use them. Just that time the exact GPU was not good (they might fix it in newer revision).

@fifonik I have the opposite experience and have settled a long time ago on ASUS exclusively for GPU and MB. Never had an issue with their MB or GPU. The only think I can say is the AMD GPUs are difficult to OC and there is little gain in it hence I don’t do it. I had my GTX580 watercooled and oc to get a bit more out of it and that worked fine until I switched to AMD R9 290. My whole system is custom watercooled with an oversized radiator and big fans to reduce noise. Like you, I am waiting for a higher PCIe class.

Another note - 10G networking is becoming more affordable...
I recently found a 10G network switch for $160 USD here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07HYKQFWD
(MikroTik 5-Port Desktop Switch)
Paired with $30 Mellanox PCIe cards found here: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B016OYD0D4
You can connect several workstations & a NAS in a small studio environment
For short runs use this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U8BL09Q
($10 - $20 10G SFP+ DAC Cable)
I have a QNAP NAS mounted in a server rack in a back room.
To go the distance get these: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00U8Q7946
($21 10 Gigabit SFP+ LC Multi-mode Transceivers)
And this https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07DP766QG
($20-$40 10Gb 50/125 Multimode Duplex Fiber Optic Patch Cable)

I routinely get 500-600 Mb/s transfer speeds between workstations, mainly because that is the fastest speed of my RAID10 drives... I will also post this as its own topic so that it helps others...

@fifonik I have the opposite experience and have settled a long time ago on ASUS exclusively for GPU and MB. Never had an issue with their MB or GPU. The only think I can say is the AMD GPUs are difficult to OC and there is little gain in it hence I don’t do it. I had my GTX580 watercooled and oc to get a bit more out of it and that worked fine until I switched to AMD R9 290. My whole system is custom watercooled with an oversized radiator and big fans to reduce noise. Like you, I am waiting for a higher PCIe class.

Unfortunately, it looks like I can either RMA my card and get back another defective unit (one guy said he's already RMA'd 3 cards and all 3 are still defective), or I can spend hundreds more on a water cooling setup to keep the card cool. I suppose I need to do that anyway to keep things quiet, but I kinda like it when my gear works out of the box. This is the ASUS variant of the Radeon 7.

My main 3 issues are: If I do certain tasks in Cinema 4D. it will crash. (for you CG geeks out there, I'm taking a model of 3 trees I downloaded and applying a video texture to their leaves in the luminance channel, so the video casts light on the scene around it. If I turn ProRender preview on so I get a ray traced preview of what I'm doing, then set the texture projection/wrapping mode to "cubic", one tree holds up ok, but the second one will completely crash the GPU requiring a hard reset, AMD driver complains of a system failure afterwards and needing to reset wattman settings, which were already stock)

If I turn on a secondary monitor while the first is already running, half the time I won't get an image, or I'll get flickering static. This won't resolve unless I change a resolution setting to that monitor, then revert back to the original.

My monitors are always overscanning, requiring me to change internal TV settings to fix it. My GTX 970 never did this.

Other than that, this thing screams, especially in Vegas, but I'm scared to deploy it on one of my video projection mapping gigs, where a GPU crash can cost me a LOT of money when I have to refund the client when they come up asking me why their stage is dark during the performance because I can't get a signal to my projectors.

@OldSmoke As individuals we cannot get statistically representative results (it is another story if you are PC builder). I have had some kind of issues with most manufacturers that I used much. I have not banned Asus for that fail (I banned some manufacturers not because of such "single" product fail but because some product design or support issues). I'm still having Asus MB and GPU in some home PCs. However, it is not on the very top of my preferences for other reasons.

P.S Despite the fact the I have the most percentage of fails with G'Skill's RAM this is my top preference. They are resolving issues fast & easy, offer "lifetime warranty" and not overpriced.

@fifonik I also have great experience with G.Skill. I bought my RAM modules one or two steps faster and call their support for better timings. I run 2133 at 1600 on my current X79 board at much better timings and that works really great; the 3930K memory controller is only certified up to 1600.

Had some substantial feedback from the PC Builders. 4K machine has a 2070 and the 8K machine has a 2080TI. I welcome your feedback:

2080Ti is a beast. That card should last you a good 5-6 years into the future before you even need to consider upgrades, and being Nvidia, it should be quite stable. The OpenCL performance on those cards is improved as well, so they complete more closely with AMD as far as Vegas goes. Honestly, I'm wishing I had spent the few extra bucks on that card instead of this Radeon 7, though the 16GB VRAM on my Radeon does help with Cinema 4D, whenever it isn't crashing and completely shutting video output to all screens down because I flipped on a setting it didn't like.

2070 isn't bad either, at all.

According to this website: https://techgage.com/article/exploring-magix-vegas-pro-16-gpu-performance/
in Vegas, the $1200+ USD 2080i does not perform any better than a $400 VEGA 64...
Unless you are using another app heavily that benefits from the 1080TI, IMO, you are better-off investing that $800 into a faster CPU or even saving it to upgrade a 2nd workstation...
I found the Vega64 drivers 18.7.1 and onboard Intel 25.20.100.6373 are working well together. BIG project all last week with no crashes... Now I am testing out the latest VEGA 64 driver 19.5.2 just released on 5-22-2019...

Computex is just ONE WEEK away, so many new advances will be revealed... According to this website: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd-ryzen-3000-single-core-cpu-performance-pc-gaming
the new $500 range Ryzen 3000 is 2X as fast as a 9900K on Cinebench multicore, closer to $1400 Intel i9-7960X speeds for a LOT less. 7nm means lower heat & lower watts. Bios updates are already allowing some Zen2 ready motherboards to support Ryzen's 4.0 PCIe specs... IMO the LAST thing anyone should do this month is drop a load of cash into a high-end Intel or high-end Nvidia... IMO just wait a couple weeks for the new stuff to be officially benchmarked & then make a decision. Things will not change this much again until prices drop around Thanksgiving...

According to this website: https://techgage.com/article/exploring-magix-vegas-pro-16-gpu-performance/
in Vegas, the $1200+ USD 2080i does not perform any better than a $400 VEGA 64...
Unless you are using another app heavily that benefits from the 1080TI, IMO, you are better-off investing that $800 into a faster CPU or even saving it to upgrade a 2nd workstation...
I found the Vega64 drivers 18.7.1 and onboard Intel 25.20.100.6373 are working well together. BIG project all last week with no crashes... Now I am testing out the latest VEGA 64 driver 19.5.2 just released on 5-22-2019... When I get a combo that works, I make a backup image of my OS drive... I also PREVENT windows from making any automated driver updates...

If you are NOT editing 8K now & don't have the money to invest in 8K gear anytime soon, I suggest building a more affordable workstation that handles 4K now & then with the money saved build another 8K workstation, for much cheaper, a year from now. This is what I am doing. Money saved is money earned and 2 fast systems are better than one slightly faster system...

+1!

> Computex is just ONE WEEK away

- The performance per dollar improvement would be measured in "percents", not "times" compared to current generation

- The new CPU will not be readily available for purchase straight away and will be overpriced at the beginning because of the limited availability

- They might have some glitches and require micro-code updates or even new stepping

- To support new features (like better RAM timings) they will require MB with new chipsets so everything above applied for MB as well

I would not recommend to buy new bleeding end computer stuff straight after release to anyone who do not build/upgrade PC by himself. May be in a 6 months time...

I would not recommend to buy new bleeding end computer stuff straight after release .....

@fifonik - Really? Gave me a giggle. But yes, your advice to this non-Builder is well met.

Update...Update . .. Update.

Your feedback on the following PC is most welcome:

1] 650W Corsair RMx Fully Modular RM650X ATX PSU/Power Supply

2] Corsair Hydro Series H100x 240mm Radiator, Dual 120mm PWM Fans, Liquid CPU Coo

3] Intel Core i9 9820X s2066, 16.5 MB CACHE, 10Core/20Thread, 4.1GHz

4] Samsung 860 PRO 512GB 2.5” SATA SSD/Solid State Drive

5] Corsair 64GB Vengeance LPX DDR4 2666MHz RAM/Memory Kit 4x 16GB

6] ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB TURBO EVO Turing Graphics Card

6] ASUS NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070 8GB TURBO EVO Turing Graphics Card

It's well known that AMD GPU are performing better with Vegas.

Any reason you stick with Nvidia?

It's well known that AMD GPU are performing better with Vegas. Any reason you stick with Nvidia?

@GJeffrey - Thanks for that. Have you got figures for that? I’ve been reading it’s a close call.

It's well known that AMD GPU are performing better with Vegas.

I have no complaints with my NVidia 1050(i) and for my next desktop I choose the 1660 Ti thanks to my experiences with that 1050 using for acceleration and NVENC encoder options for Vegas and OBS and..... and....
No need of the GTX 2070 while I think it has for me no need with my FHD 50p and sometimes 4K 50p projects and renders.