Gadgetory

welcome back to Hard Rock's today's viewers bug is probably not the usual sort of content we put up on the channel you know with loads of benchmarks and that sort of thing I'm just going to have a chat with you guys about my thread Ripper editing rig a bit of an update to the build video I did nearly a month ago to give you a bit more info on how the system is doing a few other upgrades I needed to make and just our general thoughts on where we've seen benefits to upgrading hardware in our workstations so far thread Ripper has been an enormous update to my workflow I think we've mentioned a few times in the past but both Steve and I use Adobe Premiere for editing together these videos and the difference in performance between the thread Ripper 2950 X and the Rison 7 1700 X I was using previously is massive but before we get into that this video has been sponsored by Vikings war of clans a very addictive MMO iOS and Android devices inspired by PC strategy games from the 90s like Age of Empires one of my personal favorites in fact our soldiers might remember when Age of Empires was included in Kellogg's cereal boxes but I guess that might be a story for another time anyway Vikings were of clans is similar to those lots of games and it has amazing graphics for a mobile title allows you to choose your own play style and you can join in the fun with more than 20 million online players fighting over resources forging alliances and competing in life events support Hardware own box by downloading Vikings for free only from the links in the description box below and get a special bonus of 200 gold coins and a protective shield now let's get back to talking about thread Ripper obviously the big one is rendering performance when we set a video to encode with 2950 X is at least twice as fast the big game graphics settings comparison videos you've seen before those were taking between two and a half to three hours to render on the Rison 7 1,700 X when you ask premier to spit out I guess 4k 60fps h.264 and a hundred megabits per second using a to parsing code with a bunch of GPU accelerated effects an 8 core CPU is going to struggle with the 2950 X though those encodes now taking roughly 50 minutes or so to complete so I guess that's more than a 2x improvement but it's really more than just rendering performance the 1,700 X was absolutely choked up to maxximum when rendering those videos and that made using my pc if anything else pretty painful we're talking of loading chrome tabs editing some Excel spreadsheets or creating our YouTube thumbnail in Photoshop none of those tasks were responsive when the 1700 X was told to render to my surprise the 2950 X is pretty different in that regard even when the CPU is spending most of the time encoding there's still a bit of headroom to allow me to say create that YouTube thumbnail while the encode is happening doing that sort of simultaneous task isn't as fast as if the CPU have been you know weren't being used but at least other apps are actually usable now during the rendering process which is a godsend for productivity especially when you're previously the encodes would take nearly three hours that's three hours I couldn't really use my PC for anything else I've also heard a few reports suggesting Intel CPUs are faster at the actual editing process I'm talking about scrubbing through the timeline applying effects playing the video moving through the you know the premiere interface that sort of thing I did notice a few delays pauses slowdowns and the like with my 1700 X but the 2950 X again to my surprise has actually been a noticeable upgrade to premieres responsiveness things like scrubbing a faster and smoother with more frames rendered during the scrub and skipping along the timeline then hitting play is no instant rather than say a half second delay before the footage starts I did a bit of experimenting with similar types of actions on my 8700 K test rig and I couldn't make out a significant difference in responsiveness compared to the 2950 X it's certainly not something I'd normally notice while editing previously the 8700 K was noticeably more responsive than 17-hundred X so very happy with how the 2950 X has improved things of course the 8700 K was always inferior to both the 1700 x and thread Ripper for encoding which is why I didn't consider it for my editing rig in the past I also mentioned previously that I used my editing room for gaming again so no real change to performance between the 2950 X and the 1700 X as expected in fact if anything the 2950 X is a bit faster in CPU demanding games nothing I'm usually CPU bottleneck even with the RT X 28 G I'm almost always GPU bottlenecked at 34 40 by 1440 and yes I've used an ultra-wide mana for gaming it's the acer Predator X 34 in case you're wondering one of the comments I did see a fair bit on the thread with build year was in relation to the CPU cooler they're Corsair h 150 i pro doesn't have full tr4 HS coverage however this actually isn't a big deal I'm not seeing any hotspots and under full load temperatures are sitting around the 65 degrees Celsius mark yes I guess it probably would be cooler had I used a cooler with full IHS coverage but it's not actually necessary to get decent cooling performance and for us to make the video it was actually a lot easier to work with Corsair to get the bulk of the components sometimes with these sorts of things you know the logistics of actually making a video wins out over getting absolute top of line components which in this case I didn't really need anyway that said I haven't spent a lot of time overclocking and I probably won't I'd have to go all out to get better performance than xfr and precision Brewster already providing and I don't want to risk stability when I'm working on tone you know time-sensitive projects it's with overclocking that you'd normally want a cooler with full HS coverage began for my rigs not really necessary also if I was seeing very high temperatures I probably want that larger cold plate but yeah that wasn't the case either but there were some things I needed to upgrade and I'll talk you through those now the big one is memory capacity 32 gigabytes is simply not enough for editing our 4k videos without running into capacity bottlenecks with my 1700 X I was mostly CPU bottleneck throughout the editing and encoding process but with fred.ropp I was running into nasty Ram capacity bottlenecks which were preventing the 2950 X domination it's full performance especially when overlaying you know multiple 4k videos at once my RAM usage would be pegged to the maximum basically all the time so it's clear that I needed more RAM and thankfully team group were able to help out they provided 64 gigabytes of their T force nighthawk RGB ddr4 we've got two kits here I've used this stuff before and it looks I reckon especially awesome in my third Ripper build you can see it in there at the moment because you have dims on both sides of the CPU so that RGB lighting flanks the RGB cooler visuals don't really matter for an editing input so it's nice to have a system that looks good as well as being practical anyway it's not the RGB lighting that matters it's the specific modules team group provided I specifically wanted for 16 gigabytes ticks rather than eight eight gigabyte sticks just in case I need to go up to 128 gigabytes in the future there's really no other advantage to four times sixteen gig over eight times eight gig for this setup since IMC does performed better with fewer dims but that's largely negated when using jewel ranked 16 gig modules in any case team group provided to 32 gig kits at 3200 CL 16 speeds they were pretty similar to this this is actually a three thousand kit but similar enough this is Samsung bead iron memory so it's the good stuff and before you ask I guess I haven't played around with timings yet so to see if I could tighten those up any further I suspect I can and my 2950 axe has no trouble with 3200 CL 16 in a 4 x 16 gigabyte configuration as expected with 16 gig rather than 32 gig installed a lot of my performance problems I was running into have been solved entirely especially when trying to play back parts of those graphics comparison videos whether you know like five pieces of 4k footage overlaid with 32 gig of ram that section would be played back at like 1 to 2 FPS with 64 gig premiere blows up to about 50 gig of ram and playback is much smoother it's also decreased render times by a small amount for those graphics comparison videos and this sort of application we're having 64 gig of ram could be the difference between decent performance and poor performance as we've mentioned many times in the past you really don't need more than 16 gig for gaming and modern titles or any sort of basic productivity up is when you going crazy in Premiere or working with large datasets the pushing up to near 32 gigs 64 gig and even 128 gig can make a difference unless you're doing something like that or a heavily multi tasking we really don't recommend spending big on Ram capacity in fact before I switch to 64 gig 32 gig was more than enough for basically everything else I use my PC for even working with more basic projects in premiere with 4k footage 32 gig was fine so if I was recommending a system for a Content credit still go with 32 key to begin with 16 gig won't be enough but for a lot of people you probably won't see the benefits from upping that to 64 gig so that should give you guys a bit of a basic rundown of when we've seen the benefits from higher memory capacities in our workflow I guess 16 gig is the sweet spot for gamers 32 gig is what you want as a content creator with those higher capacities only necessary for niche or specialist tasks the other thing I added in was a one terabyte Samsung and 970 Evo SSD and this was to use as a scratch disk for Prem yeah previously I had just a 500 gig PCIe storage drive in there and that was cutting a bit fine if I was working on you know multiple projects we tend to make you know hundreds of gigabytes for each of our individual videos that we're uploading the 970 Evo provides a handy random access performance boost as well which is helped with editing performance I was tossing up between the 970 Pro and the 970 Eero the Pro is a bit faster but the Evo's have better bang for your buck by that's why I went with it for this one while PCIe nvme SSDs are nice I actually think a lot of people wouldn't be able to tell the difference between PCIe and SATA SSDs for general things like app loading windows booting system responsiveness productivity tasks you know and even game loading in performance having recently built a few systems that use SATA drives or sizes their boot drives there's honestly there isn't a big difference when you bump those up to an nvme dry perhaps not as large as the cost difference would suggest in a lot of cases I think buyers would be happier with a larger capacity sided drive than a smaller capacity nvme drive for general sort of things where PCIe nvme drives become really handy in these sorts of demanding workloads where storage is constantly being accessed you're having those blazing fast sequential speeds backed up with great random performance does hunk noticeably for premiere time line performance at those times when you're asking the drive for data and needing to load stuff into RAM but for a lot of other tasks they don't benefit significantly from faster storage usually there are bottlenecks elsewhere like CPU performance so before you buy an nvme drive it's always worth looking at your workloads and seeing whether faster storage would benefit you compared to what you get with a solid drive I guess I said for this video just going over some updates with the thread Ripper build and a bit more insight into what we use at Hardware box as content credits the hardware we need to do our jobs and I guess as well where we've seen upgrades impact our work for the most there so if you like these sorts of videos because I find it interesting when other creators talk about how what you know what they use to create videos and how they go about it so hopefully a few of you have found this video interesting next up for me will probably be sorting out a better system for archiving storage on hard drives currently it's a bit of a mess of hand here with drive everywhere definitely a better solution to that what else I guess you can subscribe for more Hardware box ten consider supporting us on patreon to get access to our exclusive disco chair and behind-the-scenes videos now I'll catch you in the next one you