Blackmagic Forum

Hey there.

Just starting out with DR and was considering this PC. Aside from maybe bumping up to 32GB of RAM, what do you think of this setup for a beginner?

CPU AMD Ryzen 7-3700X 3.6GHz
RAM 16GB DDR4 3600 MHz
SSD 1TB NVME SSD
GPU NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
OS Windows 10 Home

only a few thoughts
1- yea, up the sys ram, i've seen Resolve using 100+ gig at times, but 32 seems reasonable without much fusion in play (my smallest system at home has 64g, at the studio the machines have 128g)
2 - need need need a seperate drive for each of media and system, don't put media or caches on your sys drive never ever
3 - PSU and cooling need to be up to the task, renders can push GPU and CPU to 100%, for hours, not like games that hit peaks for short times
4- windoze creators edition is the basic requirment for Resolve
5- on a realted subject, use the Nvidia studio driver, not the gameing drivers
6- if you have not bought the 3070 yet consider a 3060/12g as too little vram will stop you in you tracks, less cuda cores slow you down, but will not stop you (really only applicable if you use temporal effects in a UHD/4k or larger timeline)
7- have fun!

Question from someone considering a very similar setup: is it a sensible investment to go for the Ryzen 3900x instead? Or is that just waisted money considering that DR does most of its processing in the GPU?

Dermot Shane wrote:only a few thoughts
1- yea, up the sys ram, i've seen Resolve using 100+ gig at times, but 32 seems reasonable without much fusion in play (my smallest system at home has 64g, at the studio the machines have 128g)
2 - need need need a seperate drive for each of media and system, don't put media or caches on your sys drive never ever
3 - PSU and cooling need to be up to the task, renders can push GPU and CPU to 100%, for hours, not like games that hit peaks for short times
4- windoze creators edition is the basic requirment for Resolve
5- on a realted subject, use the Nvidia studio driver, not the gameing drivers
6- if you have not bought the 3070 yet consider a 3060/12g as too little vram will stop you in you tracks, less cuda cores slow you down, but will not stop you (really only applicable if you use temporal effects in a UHD/4k or larger timeline)
7- have fun!

Slightly off-topic, but I wanted to comment/ask questions on your comment ...

4: I am running Windows 10 Home, and Resolve works fine on it? Is Windows Creators Edition is a paid upgrade from Home?

5: I actually had problems with the Studio driver on my laptop and went back to the Game-Ready drivers, and it cleared up my issues.

Other than that, you nailed it for the OP... basically up the RAM as far as possible [within budget] and separate OS/Apps drive from Render Cache / Render / Footage drives... this makes huge improvements to the performance of Resolve.

-John

4? - not sure about what creators costs relitive to a home edition, i was running 10Pro on all machines before creator's arrived, was a no charge update for me -but it's listed as the only supported windoze OS, if home works in a given use case, all good.. if something breaks one might want to have the creators version handy

5? - dev's recomend studio drivers, there was one recently that was garbage, and rolling back to a previous studio driver was the recomended approach

i do this for a living and haveing supported machines underneath me is a needed starting point for my workflow, i totaly get that if you are not billing someone $xxx every day, and not seeing much ROI then cutting out "supported" works well enough and lets one re-focus resources into some tools that help get you through the day