Mac Pro --> Threadripper or Intel E5

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John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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I'm a creative professional, currently on a mac pro dual x5670 system.

It's still quite respectable in terms of cpu speeds (around 25000 on geekbench 4). But the GPU (nivida) driver support is lacking and the cause of a very unstable system.

Hence I'm looking to jump ship to windows 10 since I only spend time in applications I don't really care about the OS.

It seems the E5 platform from V1-V3 doesn't really improve CPU performance that drastically. So if I would stick with intel I would need to invest in a V4 system.

However:

Intel seems to be way overpriced to me.
If I get 2x E5-2640V4 with supermicro X10DAI I'm paying:
cpu €2300
board: 400,00 €
total: €2700
geekbench single:4234 multi:49950

Amd seems a lot more interesting in terms of price.
Thread ripper 1950X + average board
cpu: €900
board: €350
total: €1250
geekbench single:5014 multi:52585

However, since I only worked with workstation grade hardware like supermicro and the mac pro. I'm a bit worried about the motherboards out there. Are they stable enough? Because they all seem to be gaming boards.

If supermicro would release a threadripper board the choice would be easy. But they only have Epyc boards and epyc does not seem to be workstation oriented because of the low clock speeds.

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!
John.
 

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i386

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Mar 18, 2016
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Stay away from asus tr4 mainboards if you don't want to spend hours on figuring out how to make the chassis fans quieter* :D

*The fans run at 50% with low cpu load and spin up very fast. Not a problem if you're using <1,200 rpm fans, but with faster fans it's loud and annoying.
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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What software are you using? What will you be using this build for? I have found certain renderers max at 64 threads, would effect dual v4 cpu choice, or dual epyc for that matter.
 
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Patrick

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Dec 21, 2010
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I wonder what import duties would be? I still have my E5 workstation barebones and CPUs using the X10DAC and I would not expect to get €2700 for it or anywhere close.
 

John M.

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Mainly film editing in premiere pro. And looking for stability as I can't have things reboot or hang in front of clients as it happens now. Somewhat embarrassing...
 

John M.

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I wonder what import duties would be? I still have my E5 workstation barebones and CPUs using the X10DAC and I would not expect to get €2700 for it or anywhere close.
In Europe we basically pay extra for 2 years mandatory warranty. Also, did quote prices for new parts.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

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Feb 12, 2015
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And looking for stability as I can't have things reboot or hang in front of clients as it happens now. Somewhat embarrassing...
<inset mandatory post about windows 10 being a reboot-happy nightmare unless you spend a lot of time/money on getting it to behave like a proper workstation OS>

As much as I'd also love to recommend the AMD kit, as a mega-expensive pile of business-centric software goes, Premiere is likely highly optimised for intel as opposed to AMD - so as good as the TR chips are, you might not realise all of that power in Premiere. Am sure someone's benched it somewhere... in fact just found this video so make of it what you will.

Two E5-2640 v4's would cost you a hair under £1800 in the UK so reckon the € price shouldn't be too far off that.
 
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Patrick

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Ah makes sense. My E5 was rock solid. TR has had a few more hiccups.
 

Aluminum

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Sep 7, 2012
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The teething is out of TR. Just buy the right ram; shop smart, shop samsung (chips).

I beat the shit out of my asrock board its been great, stuffed dual vega FE awhile back, swapped one for a titan V recently. Thrown just about everything at it from mining, compute, "AI" and gaming on the side, booting a couple different windows and linux builds. Migrating my ZFS san/transcoder/etc to another TR system right now.

TR will generally shit on E5v4 due to much higher clocks on poorly-threaded stuff. AVX is about the only place it doesn't, and broadwell isn't all that strong there anyways. My 22 core one clocks in the toilet on AVX even though it hits ~3.6 on 2 cores with most other code. Did I mention the lanes? The sweet glorious lanes.

I also would not build a dual e5 and suffer all the annoying dual socket considerations only a pair of 10 cores. The clocks are only slightly above the 18/20/22 models and you are going to have way more of a numa impact* with two sockets. Given minimum sane ram channel population cost (4/8 dimms vs 8/16), power, case, cooling, etc and depending on how you get your cpu, a single high core count can be cheaper. Card configuration for max performance can suck more on dual socket too, mostly because E5 just isn't enough damn lanes. If you're going to deal with two sockets, go up to at least 16 per.

*although the big E5 cores are all numa-ish anyways, as is TR, but still a smaller leap than crossing sockets.
 
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John M.

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<inset mandatory post about windows 10 being a reboot-happy nightmare unless you spend a lot of time/money on getting it to behave like a proper workstation OS>

As much as I'd also love to recommend the AMD kit, as a mega-expensive pile of business-centric software goes, Premiere is likely highly optimised for intel as opposed to AMD - so as good as the TR chips are, you might not realise all of that power in Premiere. Am sure someone's benched it somewhere... in fact just found this video so make of it what you will.

Two E5-2640 v4's would cost you a hair under £1800 in the UK so reckon the € price shouldn't be too far off that.
Benchmarking Premiere is a hard thing to do as a lot of it depends on codecs. Most youtube tech channels base themselves on improper workflows where they edit h264 natively etc... something that rarely happens as most pro editors work with intermediate codecs.

These intermediate codecs like prores and DNxHD are optimised for multi threaded workloads and scale very well.

Red playback also falls back on the CPU if the GPU can't handle it anymore and is also multi threaded.

My ancient dual X5670 maxes out under prores, dnxhd and redraw.

But interesting point, I will do more research on the performance in terms of these codecs!
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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Benchmarking Premiere is a hard thing to do as a lot of it depends on codecs. Most youtube tech channels base themselves on improper workflows where they edit h264 natively etc... something that rarely happens as most pro editors work with intermediate codecs.
Aye, after watching the vid the "don't use TR!" looked a little histrionic - the more complex and obviously well-multithreaded codecs seemed to scale pretty well (although TR still performed poorly compared to how it usually does in most workloads IMHO). As you say, evidently it needs some more digging.

That said I've got no real experience with Premiere and I've never scaled to 2P, all my heavy lifting gets done in ffmpeg. Which, incidentally, scales brilliantly across cores for my workloads. But I didn't want to risk recommending something that might potentially be a lemon with your toolset.
 

Patriot

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Apr 18, 2011
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Aye, after watching the vid the "don't use TR!" looked a little histrionic - the more complex and obviously well-multithreaded codecs seemed to scale pretty well (although TR still performed poorly compared to how it usually does in most workloads IMHO). As you say, evidently it needs some more digging.

That said I've got no real experience with Premiere and I've never scaled to 2P, all my heavy lifting gets done in ffmpeg. Which, incidentally, scales brilliantly across cores for my workloads. But I didn't want to risk recommending something that might potentially be a lemon with your toolset.
Was terribly unimpressed by that channel, not sure what he did wrong to make a r7 1700 outperform TR 1950x...
 

John M.

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Mar 7, 2016
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There seems to be little to no data out there on TR performance when it comes to professional codecs.

Did find the oddball horror story on the adobe forums but it seems rather the exception.

However did stumble on E5-2680 v2 on eBay which have nice multi threaded performance for about €150-200 a piece.

I could pair those with a used HP Z620 workstation and call it a day (note, not all z620 support V2 chips).

But then I don't have those sweet lanes, USB 3.1 and M.2...

Anyone experience with chips coming from China?

K.