Xocomil wrote:Sorry guys. I wasn't clear in my post. I'm looking for a DESKTOP, not a laptop.
I'm leaning towards PC as I got frustrated with Apple after my 3rd macbook pro died years ago.
A number of the PC's I've seen (2nd hand, I might add), have Gigabyte / EVGA cards (2060, etc).
Does Resolve treat these the same as a NVIDIA branded card? I presume yes, but just wanted to check before I lay out my cash.
Thanks!
In my humble, personal, subjective and highly biased opinion, I'd choose the desktop setup for DVRS editing, not a laptop.
While we don't have any modern (M1 Max based?) desktop offers from Apple as of now, the PC way looks like the only viable option.
All video cards equipped with NVidia chips will be treated as NVidia GPUs no matter what brand they are labelled with.
For the CPU, I'd probably go for i7-11900
K because of its higher per-single-core peak frequency. Also, look for Intel 750 iGPU (bundled with CPU), it may be useful for Resolve Studio because of hardware decoding of some 4:2:2 and 10bit codecs.
32GB RAM is, hmm, Okay I think (though there is no such thing as "too much RAM").
For the GPU, I think any sufficiently modern NVidia GPU (2070, 2080, 3070, 3080 etc.) will be Ok given the card has at least 8GB VRAM (more is better, say 10GB or 12GB VRAM).
A silent cooling system for both CPU and GPU is welcome, too; big slow air fans, or maybe liquid cooling. Keep both your CPU and GPU as cool as possible.
Disks performance is critical; so a pair of NVME M.2 fast SSDs of (at least) 1TB each are welcome to play the role of scratch disks. Also, some 2TB or even 4TB SATA SSD is good for the generic storage of your projects. Mechanical HDDs are Ok for archiving but no good for editing anything larger than FullHD.
AMD CPUs? Okay, they are definitely worth being considered, too; but the idea of fewer cores with higher per-single-core frequency still applies. BTW AMD CPUs are known to operate at a much lower temperature than Intels given the similar performance level. But the GPU still needs to be kept cool, anyway.
Also, there is one interesting hint. I am not sure about AMD, but for Intel CPUs both Windows and Linux have
Meltdown/Spectre mitigations inside the OS kernel active by default. Given the fact that there aren't any pieces of evidence on vulnerability exploitation in the wild, I use the Linux kernel command line parameter to disable the mitigations as a whole. This releases the artificially introduced "brakes" and allows CPU performance to rise from 10% up to 30% (under certain software and workloads). I'm using it at my own risk, and I am careful to avoid using any software from unknown (untrusted) sources.
I don't know if disabling mitigations is available on Windows or not.