Blackmagic Forum

Hello, I hope I'm posting in the right place. I wonder if anyone can give me some advice... I'm building an editing computer to make a short film with a lot of greenscreen on 4K Braw, probably Q0. I'm a little uncertain about the requirements for DaVinci Resolve and Fusion for my particular situation.

I'll be using the paid version of Resolve. I'll need to edit, do reasonable grading, green screen for many or most shots (presumably in the Delta keyer in Fusion), and probably some other VFX, also in Fusion.

I don't need the system to be incredibly fast or efficient, only to manage the job I've described reliably, without crashing.

Here's what I'm thinking of getting:

AMD Ryzen 7 3700x 8 core 3.6GHz processor?
MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus Motherboard
64 GB of Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB RAM
Samsung 970 Evo Plus 500GB drive
Western Digital My Passport drives and others for storage, haven't decided everything yet
EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 TI 8GB XC graphics card, when it becomes available
EVGA Supernova 650 GA 650W 80+ Gold power supply

My main question is about the processor. Would the 3700x do all right, or would it be smarter to get a 12 core Ryzen 9 3900x instead? But I'd also appreciate any suggestions about anything else... thanks very much...

My choice would be the Intel i9 10900X.

Harry Steen wrote:I don't need the system to be incredibly fast or efficient, only to manage the job I've described reliably, without crashing...


...My main question is about the processor. Would the 3700x do all right, or would it be smarter to get a 12 core Ryzen 9 3900x instead? But I'd also appreciate any suggestions about anything else... thanks very much...

I don't know if my reply will help you, but many things in Resolve rely heavily on GPU.

It all comes to the features you will use, but unfortunatelly, I don't know if they depend much on CPU or not. Maybe some expert can comment on that.

About the "without crashing" part, you are expected to work without crashes with CPUs you mentioned.
Crashes will mostly happen due to shortage of resources, like GPU memory, instead of CPU speed.

Jim Simon wrote:My choice would be the Intel i9 10900X.

Thanks, I'll look into that.

alb3530 wrote:I don't know if my reply will help you, but many things in Resolve rely heavily on GPU.

It all comes to the features you will use, but unfortunatelly, I don't know if they depend much on CPU or not. Maybe some expert can comment on that.

About the "without crashing" part, you are expected to work without crashes with CPUs you mentioned.
Crashes will mostly happen due to shortage of resources, like GPU memory, instead of CPU speed.

That is really helpful, thank you... my impression is that Fusion in particular can be pretty intensive, so I was worried that if I used more nodes and effects than expected, it could stop working, especially given the 4K Raw and green screen in what I'll be doing. But what you say about crashes being more about resources than speed is encouraging...

From what I've read, Resolve relies heavily on the GPU, while Fusion relies more on the CPU, though apparently that's changing with newer versions taking more advantage of the graphics card.

I also heard that it relies more on the speed of the CPU than a large number of cores. But this is all just theoretical to me, I have no actual experience with this stuff.

Can anyone else comment on this, whether or not I'm on the right track?