Recommended System Specs with the new CPU launches in mind?

TheEclipsedLock wrote on 10/22/2022, 9:51 AM

Now that the new Intel and AMD CPUs are out, I am highly curious to see what would be the recommended choice. Here are a couple of questions I have:

Is going all the way to the high-end (13900K or the 7950x) the best route? Can Vegas even utilize the full extent of either of the chips?

What about the newer PCI-e gen 4 or 5 interface? Can Vegas make full use of accessing data from SSDs (with the proper connection) and make timeline editing much more smoother?

Personally, to my memory, sometimes even a single .mp4 playback would sometimes cause playback stuttering/"lag", even on lower preview quality settings. (Currently with a 3900x on Vegas v18) Could a combination of a CPU upgrade and a SSD on a gen 4 or 5 link alleviate those issues? Probably upgrading to v20 wouldn't hurt either, if there is additional support for these.

All in all, I am curious if going all in on the latest tech would make working with Vegas a much smoother experience. Or would it not, even with all of that computational power? I'd like to see some feedback from the community.

Comments

RogerS wrote on 10/22/2022, 11:13 AM

The short answer is nobody knows. Look for TechGage's benchmarks when they come out.
Here's what we know for existing hardware with the user benchmark.

For Vegas higher clock speeds may benefit more than more cores. Of course the bottleneck may not be the CPU at all and may also depend on the media and how it is decoded in Vegas. You don't state your GPU or hard drive type.

Personally I'm unimpressed with the 13900K for its excessive power and heat generation for the performance it gives. I do want Intel for the iGPU as is used to good effect in Vegas (just moving from AMD to Intel could help you with stuttering as the issue may be how Vegas uses non-Intel GPU decoders). For that reason I plan to get the i5-13600K as it is close to the 12th generation i7 and even i9 in performance for many tasks, but needs less power.

For hard drive what media are you using? Gen 5 doesn't exist yet and is unlikely to be of much benefit during the lifespan of 13th generation. Try a disk speed test to determine adequacy. If you are shooting 8K raw, the heaviest versions of ProRes, or multiple streams at once that will necessitate good transfer speeds, but if not you'll never notice a difference. Any M2 SSD should be fine and a modern MB and CPU will make the most of whatever you buy.

hambonio wrote on 10/22/2022, 2:22 PM

I am compiling a post right now. I have a R9 7950x on Crosshair x670e that I built almost 2 weeks ago. Yes there was frustration getting this to play nice with VP20 and VP19 (I like to test limits and get myself into trouble). But I believe I have isolated these bugs and will share the super easy workaround that I found and now extremely happy with my purchase.

After seeing the 13900k benchmarks I was briefly having some buyers remorse but I went further with my CPU and started undervolting with impressive results. Besides those benchmarks you see everywhere in reality are so damn close and depending on where you look they trade blows. Either CPU will be a great choice.

I will demonstrate my troubleshooting - but lets just say I now have a very stable "undervolt" where I am drawing 138W max with max temps of 58.9C rendering with Voukoder.

The best part? Compared to stock rendering I actually GAINED about 1.5 seconds with this undervolting off of a render that took about 2 minutes. While at the same time my fans do not keep spinning at ludicrous speeds and PC stays quiet. At stock settings my cooling fans were LOUD. Mind you I keep this PC in a storage room on the other side of my office so regardless I really never hear it. But for those keeping the PC in the same room, it is much less annoying.

Oh and BTW I did score over 40000 on Cinebench with playing with the cure optimizer in the BIOS. No, that is not the settings I will be using long term, but I believe from the handful of videos I watched - and I cannot remember which one, but the only mainstream youtuber that cracked 40000 on Cinebench was using the 13900k.

Former user wrote on 10/22/2022, 3:54 PM
 

Personally I'm unimpressed with the 13900K for its excessive power and heat generation for the performance it gives. I do want Intel for the iGPU as is used to good effect in Vegas (just moving from AMD to Intel could help you with stuttering as the issue may be how Vegas uses non-Intel GPU decoders). For that reason I plan to get the i5-13600K as it is close to the 12th generation i7 and even i9 in performance for many tasks, but needs less power.

Out of the box using on defaults I also think 13600K is the only one tolerable for an air cooler. By now or in near future people will tame the 13700K with reducing power target/under volting, and see how much of a reduction in heat/wattage can be had with maybe a 5% reduction in performance. May be enough that it's power efficiency is greatly increased, and less embarrassing.

RogerS wrote on 11/7/2022, 3:30 AM

I just finished building a 13600K system that's air cooled (Fuma 2 rev B) and uploaded results to the Vegas benchmarking chart. Despite being mated to a 2080 Super it's within a second of the fastest time for GPU encodes in UHD.

I didn't do anything particular with the cores in bios nor overclocking (except for the ram which is using a XMP profile to get to its advertised 5200 rating).

Updated results here.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 11/7/2022, 11:48 AM

@RogerS The uhd cpu encode time is mighty impressive. Significantly faster than a 9900k with same gpu and a 12700h with a 3060. I would guess your really fast ram plays a big part. What motherboard?

RogerS wrote on 11/7/2022, 4:21 PM

Thanks Howard. I couldn't really know how much ram helps so took a leap of faith with 2 sticks of DDR5.

The motherboard is a MSI Tomahawk Wifi z690 so plenty of power for the CPU and a high airflow case and fans that let it run at high clock speeds..