Thu Jan 02, 2020 4:04 pm
OS on an SSD is convenient for program and system launch but won't affect Fusion or Resolve's performance. Cache drive should certainly be an SSD, and the faster your media access is the better, but that may be limited by network infrastructure. If your media is going to live on the PC, then an SSD is the way to go for speed, but the tradeoff is less capacity. Best possible speed is probably going to be something like an eSATA RAID 0 backed up to a second RAID 5 or 6 (RAID 0 is very fast, but also dangerous, as a single drive failure in the array destroys all the data. RAID 5 can lose a drive without destroying data, but you'll still want a second, and maybe third, backup solution—online and/or tape.)
On the GPU side, if you have a choice between a faster clock speed and more VRAM, get the VRAM. The bottleneck there is likely going to be transfer in and out of the GPU's memory, not the processing speed of the card.
Same with CPU vs RAM. More and faster memory is usually going to benefit you more than a faster clock. I usually buy the best processor underneath the sudden price jump—you'll usually find that CPU prices increase in $20 - $40 steps to a certain point, then jump in price by a couple hundred dollars.
At your budget, I wouldn't go the dual Xeon route. A good single proc is probably a better value, with more money devoted to RAM and storage solutions. I haven't tried 2x GPUs on Resolve 16, so I don't know how much of a difference that makes. I barely noticed a difference dropping from 2 down to 1 Titan X in Fusion 9, but v16 makes much more use of the GPU than 9 does.
Bryan Ray
http://www.bryanray.name
http://www.sidefx.com