I have a pair of purpose built Dell’s at work for video editing. They are identical and here are the specs:

Processor: Xeon Gold 6226
Ram: 128GB installed (in 8 slots, 4 more unused)
Local drives are SSD
GPU: Nvidia Quadra RTX 4000
Windows 10 Enterprise

Connected via fiber line to a Synology back-up system comprised of SSD’s entirely. It is possible to edit relatively seamlessly with the files stored on the networked Synology. The current project has about 6TB of source material (not all used, of course).

Anyway, sometimes I feel like the GPU is the pinch point in this system… for instance, when I resize the timeline in Adobe Premier it’ll take a few seconds for the wav forms to redraw… That gets annoying. Is that a GPU or CPU issue?

If I wanted to ask to have the GPU upgraded, what should I look at? Purpose is entirely media creation.

Benchmarks

This can give you a bit of a comparison between cards. I don't have any video editing experience to tell you if a faster GPU will help your gripe.

No direct answer, as it's been a year or two since I last refreshed hardware, but these guys would be the guys I would ask:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/

They have some hardware recommendations here, but I don't know how frequently this is updated:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/s...are-recommendations/

But, they appear to be nice people and I bet you could ask them directly.

quote:

Local drives are SSD

Which drives are you using?

M2, SATA ?

Sounds like the rest is pretty stout.

quote:

Originally posted by thumperfbc:
sometimes I feel like the GPU is the pinch point in this system

Might be worth confirming this is the bottleneck - chasing GPUs is pricey.

Have you looked at system utilization during the slow tasks? Task Manager has some tools that may be able to shed some light (Crtl-alt-del, then tab over to performance and the graphs should be able to tell you whether your GPU is slammed.)

Just went through this drill, although my needs are much less. I read that Premiere Pro does not make as much use of the GPU as Davinci Resolve does and Puget Systems data confirms it. So, if you really want significantly increased performance going to Davinci may do it with your existing system.

In my case with Premiere Pro going from a GTX 1070 to a RTX 3090 Ti did not make a dramatic difference in render times. However, my CPU upgrade did. If you are sticking with Premiere Pro a processor upgrade may offer the greatest improvement

Sounds like a RAM Speed issue.

what kind of fiber connection to what kind of Synology nas?

quote:

Originally posted by FenderBender:
Sounds like a RAM Speed issue.

Why do you assume that?

Seems like you have a pretty good system. Way better than my 12 year old desktop. I have always built my own desktops, but I need to upgrade and this will be the first time I have someone else do it. I have been out of the game of knowing computer details for too long.

My computer has become slow with very long startup. I plan to replace the motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, and put the operating system on a M2 SSD. I hope that should do it.

From what you have and are describing, I would think you need to upgrade your graphics card to get what you want. But again, I have been out of the game too long so it could be CPU.

Thats a lot of machine.

Have you considered if a server would suit your needs better? Or perhaps hosted solution over at AWS or the like.

quote:

Originally posted by Aeteocles:
https://www.pugetsystems.com/

Thank you, I did some reading there and have a few things to look at... for instance I think I set up the scratch disk to be one of the local drives on the computer but I can't remember for sure. It also seems that perhaps the dual Xeon processors weren't the best choice for the money... but the machine does render pretty quickly. I've never had a complaint on render speed, anyway.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

quote:

Local drives are SSD

Which drives are you using?

M2, SATA ?

Sounds like the rest is pretty stout.

I don't know... I'll check the Device Manager and see what it tells me next time I'm in the office.

quote:

Originally posted by joel9507:
[QUOTE]Originally posted by thumperfbc:
sometimes I feel like the GPU is the pinch point in this system

Might be worth confirming this is the bottleneck - chasing GPUs is pricey.

Have you looked at system utilization during the slow tasks? Task Manager has some tools that may be able to shed some light (Crtl-alt-del, then tab over to performance and the graphs should be able to tell you whether your GPU is slammed.)[/QUOTE

Good idea. I often have this up when I render out projects but didn't think about having it open when I am just working in the timeline. Maybe it'll shed some light on the situation.

quote:

Originally posted by Ranger41:
Just went through this drill, although my needs are much less. I read that Premiere Pro does not make as much use of the GPU as Davinci Resolve does and Puget Systems data confirms it. So, if you really want significantly increased performance going to Davinci may do it with your existing system.

In my case with Premiere Pro going from a GTX 1070 to a RTX 3090 Ti did not make a dramatic difference in render times. However, my CPU upgrade did. If you are sticking with Premiere Pro a processor upgrade may offer the greatest improvement

I'll have to start playing around with Davinci on some other projects... I haven't used it yet. Too far into my current project to change, but something else will come along that I can test it with.

quote:

Originally posted by FenderBender:
Sounds like a RAM Speed issue.

I don't know anything about the type of RAM off the top of my head. I can see if Windows will give me the specifics, though. I don't have Admin level access to this machine (a constant source of frustration for me) but I can see what I can find.

quote:

Originally posted by DonDraper:
what kind of fiber connection to what kind of Synology nas?

I don't really know... this is def outside my area of expertise. I believe the Synology system is some sort of dual-rack system and currently is maxed on physical space, full with relatively small SSD's. I only know that because Ive made kind of a stink about it because we filled it up (16Tb total) much faster than expected. I thought they (the IT department) were going to build it half SSD for active projects and half spinners for actual archival, but they built it all SSD. They are currently (so they say) working on getting the prices to convert it to how I originally wanted it, now that the old IT manager is gone and has been replaced.

As far as the fiber line... I don't really know. I don't know much about this networking stuff. I remember them saying it was a "10gig" connection and that they added a special network card to the desktops in order to make use of it? I do see full gig transfer speeds between the networked drives and my local drives, so I guess it is working?

quote:

Originally posted by StorminNormin:
Seems like you have a pretty good system. Way better than my 12 year old desktop. I have always built my own desktops, but I need to upgrade and this will be the first time I have someone else do it. I have been out of the game of knowing computer details for too long.

My computer has become slow with very long startup. I plan to replace the motherboard, CPU, graphics card, memory, and put the operating system on a M2 SSD. I hope that should do it.

From what you have and are describing, I would think you need to upgrade your graphics card to get what you want. But again, I have been out of the game too long so it could be CPU.

It does seem to be a very stout pair of PC's overall. I just always want more.

I too haven't been in the computer hardware game much... honestly not since the days of Win Xp, so I had to lean on the IT guys to spec out this builds. They also provided a pair of mobile workstations that are supposed to be pretty good machines too, but I honestly haven't used them for that at all.

One thing I find silly is that all of the part time kids that we use all insist on using their very non-special Mac laptops cause "apple is da best' and completely ignoring the vastly superior hardware that we spent significant money on.

Finally found the Puget Systems page I was looking for:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/l...reation-Review-2374/

Good comparison of the top new GPUs. My new RTX 3090 Ti compares well, but would be 77% faster were I running Davinci.

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

quote:

Local drives are SSD

Which drives are you using?

M2, SATA ?

Sounds like the rest is pretty stout.

Both local drives are nvme interface. I googled the part numbers and they seem to be basic oem units that Dell uses. The system drive is a 512GB and the other is a 2TB

This message has been edited. Last edited by: thumperfbc,