i7-8700K Cheap 4k edit solution??

Intel 8700K Video Editing BEAST! Premiere Pro & Davinci Resolve

This 5GHz shows what difference does high clock make.

Al, I think this a great chip. The one thing that would give me a bit of pause is the number of PCIe lanes, which I believe is 16 total. That means one card operating at x16, two operating at x8, or one x8 and two x4.

Now I've heard that with PCIe 3.0, even the most powerful graphics cards are not going to overload PCIe x8. But I honestly don't know if that's true. And if you include an external monitor does that further tax the PCIe lanes, even if the monitor is connected with something like Thunderbolt.

Which comes to my next "issue" with the 8700, there is only one z370 motherboard that has an external Thunderbolt port, and that's an ASUS with the ITX form factor. Many of the others do have a Thunderbolt header on the mobo, but you need a PCIe add-in card to connect to that header. Now if that card actually uses PCIe bandwidth or it just provides power, I have no idea.

Being that I would probably want to use a UltraStudio Mini Monitor for monitoring, I'd probably wait to see if another mobo shows up with a built-in Thunderbolt rear panel connection.

Thanks Peter
Agreed - it's a budget build. My planned 8700K config is an Asus Prime Z370-A (with Thunderbolt), 32GB DDR4 3200Ghz, M.2 SSD (PCIe) for Win10 and Apps, 960 EVO SSD for edit projects, 4TB HDDs for storage and a GTX1070. (CPU water cooled) - external backup is currently USB3 portable HDDs - may add Thunderbolt storage later.
Planned workflow is 4K AVC/HEVC DJI, GoPros, and GH5 - 6K & 8K beyond my budget.
Resolve has apparently added Intel iGPU support (???) so will have one 24" HD monitor connected to the 8700K 630 iGPU and another to the Nvidia card x16.
Hope I have enough PCIe lanes and the 64GB memory limitation won't be a problem. Plan to use Fusion as well for compositing.
Any thoughts/suggestions appreciated.
Thanks

This could have changed with iGPU, but I thought starting with 14 that using one GPU for screen display is considered to be not a good idea. (And always dual GPUs for compute have to be of similar memory and power.)

Also, you will need a Thunderbolt add-in card to use Thunderbolt. https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboard-Acc ... rboltEX-3/

I don't know if using that will drop your video card down to x8 bandwidth. And if dropping to x8 would even matter.

Lastly, I'd consider the 1070ti or the straight 1080.

Al, I just built a modest editing machine with the 8700k (no OC yet) and Asus Prime Z370-A machine last weekend, it works fine. With an RX580 8gb, it handles 4k UHD clips very comfortably, though as your work gets more complex caching is a must. Also, I haven't been able to get the iGPU to run resolve yet, so don't count on that for now. Since I'm not trying to get clickbait views for a video, I won't call it a BEAST, but I'm very pleased with the performance so far.

As far as PCIE lanes go, the motherboard supplies additional lanes, so there's a decent amount of bandwidth, but you will probably run out if you try to use thunderbolt 3, multiple GPUs, a PCI RAID, and a decklink or something.

So yeah, I think the 8700k is more than a great budget build, it's a very solid build that will probably last a while for most home/independent editors. Other options involve more money and/or waiting on the next generation of CPUs & chipsets.

This could have changed with iGPU, but I thought starting with 14 that using one GPU for screen display is considered to be not a good idea.

You mean 1 GPU for GUI and Compute?
Why "starting with 14"?
I'm confused
Can you elaborate, please
Thanks in advance

What I've read is that the practice of using an underpowered GPU for GUI only and a more powerful GPU for image processing does not help in Resolve 14. Apparently the combination of Resolve's improved playback engine and the power of new video cards makes designating two GPU's for different tasks unhelpful.

Ok, thanks for this info
Much appreciated

Thanks Peter - Will get the 1070TI
Not Sure if or how I will use Thunderbolt so will reserve the card for later. Building a full tower so have space for my 860 IDE SSD plus 5 HDDs - starting with two 4TB 7200rpm HDDs. Backup to external HDDs should be fast enough with USB 3.1.

Peter, Spencer, Olivier - It appears BMD has added support for the Intel iGPU and QuickSync Video (QSV) but I don't know the details. See these threads:
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=67851
https://forum.blackmagicdesign.com/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=67842

A contact at Intel says he has been helping them with it. On a two display system some NLEs require one monitor connected to each GPU to make them visible to the app software. They also claim it takes some of the load off the discrete GPU card. Lastly, the 8700K 630 iGPU has some powerful media capabilities for 4K AVC/HEVC decoding/encoding including 4K HEVC timeline decoding and realtime 4K HEVC 30p encoding as I mentioned in links above.

This could have changed with iGPU, but I thought starting with 14 that using one GPU for screen display is considered to be not a good idea.

You mean 1 GPU for GUI and Compute?
Why "starting with 14"?
I'm confused
Can you elaborate, please
Thanks in advance

I'm not sure how they have implemented it or if it's available on Studio (paid) version only like Nvidia AVC support ?

Al, I just built a modest editing machine with the 8700k (no OC yet) and Asus Prime Z370-A machine last weekend, it works fine. With an RX580 8gb, it handles 4k UHD clips very comfortably, though as your work gets more complex caching is a must. Also, I haven't been able to get the iGPU to run resolve yet, so don't count on that for now. Since I'm not trying to get clickbait views for a video, I won't call it a BEAST, but I'm very pleased with the performance so far.

As far as PCIE lanes go, the motherboard supplies additional lanes, so there's a decent amount of bandwidth, but you will probably run out if you try to use thunderbolt 3, multiple GPUs, a PCI RAID, and a decklink or something.

So yeah, I think the 8700k is more than a great budget build, it's a very solid build that will probably last a while for most home/independent editors. Other options involve more money and/or waiting on the next generation of CPUs & chipsets.

Thanks Spencer - Encouraging news - why did you choose the RX480 vs Nvidia? Are you using the free or paid 14?

Al, I just built a modest editing machine with the 8700k (no OC yet) and Asus Prime Z370-A machine last weekend
Other options involve more money and/or waiting on the next generation of CPUs & chipsets.

Spencer - assuming you have a decent cooler Asus "5-Way Optimization One-click overclock and cooling" will safely overclock your CPU. In the video above the real performance benefits come from the faster clock speeds.
Next Gen Intel 10Nm CPUs look like focus is on lower power/ longer battery life for mobile and not much for HEDT consumer CPUs for at least a year - so the 8700K looks like my best bet (I'm not an AMD fan)

Hi.

It depend on how you define next generation. Old Intel roadmaps show a Z390 chipset some time in 2018. All expect it to support 8 core 16 threads CPU's.

I like the YouTube video, but I don't think the comparison is fair. How can he compare a water cooled Intel to an air cooled AMD.
The rigth way to do it must be to Compare to a water cooled AMD?
It can eather be a 6 core or 8 core Ryzen or may be even a Thereadripper.

Regards Carsten.

Carsten
I haven't found any Resolve 14 benchmarks but here is a Premiere comparison of Coffee Lake with no overclocking. 8700k holds it's own against 8 core Ryzens and I have yet to see a 5Ghz O/C Ryzen CPU.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2017-1-2-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1047/

As far as comparisons go I think the only reasonable way to compare is using price. After all, we typically have a limit to how much we're willing to spend on a CPU+motherboard, because if we didn't we'd all be getting top of the line Intel CPUs all day.

As far as comparing an 8700k to a 1700x goes it's really not the correct comparison. It's $405 for the 8700k at Newegg, $380 at Microcenter. But the 1700x is $300/$240. So if the question is bang for buck, and using Newegg prices just to make it easier, then the 8700k should perform 30% faster in order to be on par.

I think the better way to think of the 8700k is that it now occupies an interesting spot where AMD doesn't have a response (yet).

Hi Al Spaeth.

First thanks for your link. But I am missing the AMD Threadripper.

If you are considering Intel 8700K is this the CPU I will look at and the current prices in Germany:

AMD Ryzen 7 1800X 359 EUR
Intel Core i7-8700K 372 EUR
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1900X 435 EUR

But AMD will already in Q1 2018 come with the next generation of CPU'er produced in the
12nm process. Smaller die will give higher clocks.

Regards Carsten.

Thanks Mattias & Carsten
I am a bit biased even though AMD have slashed prices by $100 I'm still not an AMD fan as I said above so if I consider 8 core CPUs I will stick with Intel and add Skylake X. Thanks to AMD for reducing Intel prices.
Amazon prices are:
i7-8700K $404 plus Asus Prime M/B Z370-A $194 = $598
i7-7820X $500 plus Asus Prime M/B X299-A $260 = $760
Ryzen 1900X $450 plus " " " X399-A $332 = $782
Ryzen 1800X $350 " " " X370-A $128 = $478
According to UserBenchmark the 1900X is only 3% faster than the 1800X. The i7-7820X is 15% faster than the 1900X and slightly cheaper with motherboard. The 1800X is 5% faster than the 1700X but only 1% when overclocked. In the video above the i7-8700K outperforms the 1700X by a clear margin due to 5Ghz clock speed and seems to offer good value and performance for 4K editing. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

...
Planned workflow is 4K AVC/HEVC DJI, GoPros, and GH5
...

I just noticed your signature. I do have to say that you should strongly consider the Studio version of Resolve. The H.264 playback performance improvement is impressive/very noticable. And I thought (but don't know for sure) that you need the Studio version to play H.265 on Windows.

Carsten
I haven't found any Resolve 14 benchmarks but here is a Premiere comparison of Coffee Lake with no overclocking. 8700k holds it's own against 8 core Ryzens and I have yet to see a 5Ghz O/C Ryzen CPU.
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CC-2017-1-2-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1047/

Premiere is heavily dependent on cpu frequency, namely because like so many other Adobe products development over the last several years has been about marketing bs and buzzwords, and not real improvements.

Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Hi.

No, you are not wrong. You make a very good comparison.

But there is one thing I can't see you your comparison. That is the number of PCIe lanes.

The AMD Threadripper has 60 PCIe lanes, the Intel i7-7820X only 28.
I am not in a position to tell how important that is. May be we can ask the experts?

Regards Carsten.

Thanks Mattias & Carsten
I am a bit biased even though AMD have slashed prices by $100 I'm still not an AMD fan as I said above so if I consider 8 core CPUs I will stick with Intel and add Skylake X. Thanks to AMD for reducing Intel prices.
Amazon prices are:
i7-8700K $404 plus Asus Prime M/B Z370-A $194 = $598
i7-7820X $500 plus Asus Prime M/B X299-A $260 = $760
Ryzen 1900X $450 plus " " " X399-A $332 = $782
Ryzen 1800X $350 " " " X370-A $128 = $478
According to UserBenchmark the 1900X is only 3% faster than the 1800X. The i7-7820X is 15% faster than the 1900X and slightly cheaper with motherboard. The 1800X is 5% faster than the 1700X but only 1% when overclocked. In the video above the i7-8700K outperforms the 1700X by a clear margin due to 5Ghz clock speed and seems to offer good value and performance for 4K editing. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think it's just a matter of deciding how to evaluate options. To me it doesn't make complete sense to compare CPUs with an equal core count. I buy CPUs based on how they perform, and I don't care about how many cores they have with the exception of what performance that leads to. And if we then hypothetically say that the CPUs and platforms are on par, and only look at the cost of a CPU+motherboard, then the next question is how much you're willing to spend.

It basically makes as much sense to compare a $475 setup with a $600 setup, as it does a $780 setup with a $985 setup. Why? Because the price difference is the same fraction. And currently the price difference here in the US for Threadripper is close to 'proportional' between cores / price. So 50% more cores = 50% more money. $450 1900x means roughly $675 1920x (12cores). Add the motherboard and you're looking at about $1k. So that's another comparison you can make if money is no object. But at that point, you'll probably start looking at the highest end Intel CPUs as well.

So really what it boils down to is a) what features do you need, and b) how much do you want to spend. If you need Thunderbolt then no AMD, unless you want to gamble and hope the Gigabyte Designare will provide it next year with an update. If you need a bunch of lanes then several Intel options are out of the question. And then once that's figured out just put a price cap on it and see what holds the most value.

The 8700 has a high value not because of its performance, but because of its price versus performance. I also object to the comparison in the video because if the selling point is "bang-for-buck" then I just don't see it at that price point. Surely a 1700, stock cooler and overclocked will be a better value?

Thanks Carsten,
We get caught up in marketing hype so, at the risk of boredom let's go back to basics.
Unfortunately we are reaching the end limits of silicone technology. CPUs followed Moore's law for 40 years (doubled in power every two years) and then stalled around 5-6 years ago around 4-5 Ghz. Just to double CPU power in 6 years we should now have 8-10Ghz CPUs and that's probably not going to happen until we replace silicon.

Here is a 3 part 2011 article explaining why:
https://www.edn.com/design/systems-design/4368705/The-future-of-computers--Part-1-Multicore-and-the-Memory-Wall

I know users with 2nd Gen i7-2600K which came out in Jan 2011 at $300 overclocked to 4.7Ghz. As of Intel Gen 7 they could still see no reason to upgrade - and I recently saw a gaming benchmark where the old i7-2600K beat a Ryzen 1800X - both were overclocked. In reality, most apps can't use more than 2-3 cores so adding more often doesn't help and can even degrade performance so clock speed is important. I doubt that we will see CPUs faster than 4-5Ghz for a few years so waiting for new CPU tech is not an option for me.

Still confused about PCIe - can't imagine how to use 60 lanes or what the motherboard would look like - maybe for large servers etc. Next gen PCIe 4.0 looks promising for next year doubling bandwidth and 5.0 (2019) will double it again. New GPUs are powerful but expensive and bus architecture seems old. We have to take an entire task and send it to the GPU for processing (hence the large GPU memory) and the back via the bus route. Seems having a GPU on the motherboard coupled to the CPU makes more sense and the socket might still be smaller than Threadripper! Intel is trying with an AMD GPU chip but looks like its geared toward portable devices. May open the door to more powerful/multiple GPUs on the motherboard.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3235934 ... phics.html

Thanks Mattias & Carsten
I am a bit biased even though AMD have slashed prices by $100 I'm still not an AMD fan as I said above so if I consider 8 core CPUs I will stick with Intel and add Skylake X. Thanks to AMD for reducing Intel prices.
Amazon prices are:
i7-8700K $404 plus Asus Prime M/B Z370-A $194 = $598
i7-7820X $500 plus Asus Prime M/B X299-A $260 = $760
Ryzen 1900X $450 plus " " " X399-A $332 = $782
Ryzen 1800X $350 " " " X370-A $128 = $478
According to UserBenchmark the 1900X is only 3% faster than the 1800X. The i7-7820X is 15% faster than the 1900X and slightly cheaper with motherboard. The 1800X is 5% faster than the 1700X but only 1% when overclocked. In the video above the i7-8700K outperforms the 1700X by a clear margin due to 5Ghz clock speed and seems to offer good value and performance for 4K editing. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

I think it's just a matter of deciding how to evaluate options. To me it doesn't make complete sense to compare CPUs with an equal core count. I buy CPUs based on how they perform, and I don't care about how many cores they have with the exception of what performance that leads to. And if we then hypothetically say that the CPUs and platforms are on par, and only look at the cost of a CPU+motherboard, then the next question is how much you're willing to spend.

It basically makes as much sense to compare a $475 setup with a $600 setup, as it does a $780 setup with a $985 setup. Why? Because the price difference is the same fraction. And currently the price difference here in the US for Threadripper is close to 'proportional' between cores / price. So 50% more cores = 50% more money. $450 1900x means roughly $675 1920x (12cores). Add the motherboard and you're looking at about $1k. So that's another comparison you can make if money is no object. But at that point, you'll probably start looking at the highest end Intel CPUs as well.

So really what it boils down to is a) what features do you need, and b) how much do you want to spend. If you need Thunderbolt then no AMD, unless you want to gamble and hope the Gigabyte Designare will provide it next year with an update. If you need a bunch of lanes then several Intel options are out of the question. And then once that's figured out just put a price cap on it and see what holds the most value.

The 8700 has a high value not because of its performance, but because of its price versus performance. I also object to the comparison in the video because if the selling point is "bang-for-buck" then I just don't see it at that price point. Surely a 1700, stock cooler and overclocked will be a better value?

Rightly or wrongly I based the comparison on three things
1) The video seems to indicate the 8700K is adequate for 4k editing which is what I need. Spencer confirmed he was happy with his without overclocking and I plan to overclock as in the video.
2) Even though I stated that I'm not an AMD fan others suggested Ryzen Threadripper should be considered so I added 8 cores to the mix showing there is a small price gap between the 1900X (due to the more expensive Threadripper motherboards) and the i7-7820X implying that if I go for 8 cores my choice would be Intel at virtually the same price and better benchmark performance.
3) I don't know if the 8 core 7820X will significantly outperform the 6 core 8700K (CPU benchmarks show little difference) or how much 12 or 16 cores at slower clock speeds will help or how many PCIe lanes are needed. Re the 1700 - I'm not looking for the cheapest option but rather the best value. I have asked Puget Systems for similar benchmarks using Resolve 14.
Thanks for your thoughts.

Hi,
can you give some feedback when you get your 8700, please?
I am considering a small upgrade from 6700 to 8700 (with the MB) but keeping mu 1070 gpu.
I've also been looking at Ryzen but AMD has not restored my full confidence (yet) to move away from Intel. 1920x and 1950x look very compelling but I don't think I need it that much. Maybe the 8 core i7's are a good way to go as you guys stated.

I would maybe hold off until we get a reality check on this Kernel Memory issue.

viewtopic.php?f=21&t=68529

Re Memory Issue
"Microsoft is expected to patch the problem during its Patch Tuesday updates on January 9"
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3245606/security/intel-x86-cpu-kernel-bug-faq-how-it-affects-pc-mac.html

Yes, I suspect that in real world use for programs like Resolve the fixes will have minimal impact on performance.

"The Core i7-8700K saw a massive performance decrease in FS-Mark 3.3 and Compile Bench, a pair of synthetic I/O benchmarks. PostgreSQL and Redis suffered a loss, but to a far lesser degree. Finally, H.264 video encoding, timed Linux kernel compilation, and FFmpeg video conversion tasks didn’t lose anything."

I can pin Resolve w/o having any obvious bottleneck, i.e. disk, GPU and CPU are all at considerably less than 100%. So I don't think the speed at which memory is read is going to be a limiting factor. But this is clearly out of my area of expertise, lol.

I soooo wanted to see the overclocked 5.2GHz gaming benchmarks. Not trying to nitpick Steve you know I love you like a wet dog in a lightning storm.