Processor Upgrade

[dani72]

I bought a custom PC through PC Specialist in 2017. It has an overclocked i7-800k Intel processor. I can upgrade to a i9-900k through PCS at a cost of €570. I mostly use the PC for video editing through Magic. I sometimes create longer videos (60-75 mins) that can take a while export.

What I'm wondering is if Magic would benefit from the faster processor and HperThreading. I don't want to upgrade if it's not going to make much of a difference.

Any advice on the above would be appreciated.

[Magic]

Very hard to say. Magic's exporting speed is dependent on a combination of the GPU, the CPU, and the hard drive. If you already have a very fast GPU and hard drive, you might notice a speed increase if the CPU is the bottleneck, because exporting can be very CPU intensive, depending on the codec. But, there's really no way to know without testing. I can't make you any guarantees.

[dani72]

Very hard to say. Magic's exporting speed is dependent on a combination of the GPU, the CPU, and the hard drive. If you already have a very fast GPU and hard drive, you might notice a speed increase if the CPU is the bottleneck, because exporting can be very CPU intensive, depending on the codec. But, there's really no way to know without testing. I can't make you any guarantees.

Does the hard drive really make much of a difference? I have a 2TB Seagate Barracuda Pro 3.5" (7200 RPM 128MB Cache) drive for storing all my files and a 512GB Samsung 960 Pro M.2, PCIe NVMe drive, which I have windows installed on. I tried exporting two videos (one graphically intense 6 minute video & one more basic 71 minute one) to both drives and it took almost exactly the same length of time. I would have expected the M.2 drive export to be quicker.

[Magic]

If the exports you did are representative of the work you usually do, then obviously your hard drives are both fast enough and aren’t the limiting factor in the export speed.

[dani72]

If the exports you did are representative of the work you usually do, then obviously your hard drives are both fast enough and aren’t the limiting factor in the export speed.

Ah OK. That makes sense. Thanks for all your help.

[Terry Payman]

That's a very expensive upgrade! I suspect it would only give a relatively small performance increase, and might prove very poor value for money.

I suggest trying to see what the CPU usage is during your long exports. Windows Resource Monitor can show you CPU usage for each virtual CPU core.
A quick experiment on a (feeble) laptop rather surprised me - only 1 of the 8 virtual cores was heavily used during .mp4 export. For .png image sequence export 7 out of 8 cores were heavily used. If your usage is similar, I wouldn't expect extra cores to help at all unless you are exporting image sequences. Faster cores could help a little. Looking at benchmark results for the two processors could give a guide as to the relative speed.

I also looked at GPU usage during exports. On my old laptop GPU usage was very low for all exports, but my old laptop has such an old and feeble GPU that I suspect it was only being used to draw the display.

It would be good to have some Magic benchmark projects. Users could then quantify and compare performance between different system hardware. It would be interesting to know how the latest GTX 2080 generation of NVIDIA cards compares to the previous GTX 1080 generation for rendering and for exporting Magic projects, as well as the impact of different processor choices.

[dani72]

That's a very expensive upgrade! I suspect it would only give a relatively small performance increase, and might prove very poor value for money.

I suggest trying to see what the CPU usage is during your long exports. Windows Resource Monitor can show you CPU usage for each virtual CPU core.
A quick experiment on a (feeble) laptop rather surprised me - only 1 of the 8 virtual cores was heavily used during .mp4 export. For .png image sequence export 7 out of 8 cores were heavily used. If your usage is similar, I wouldn't expect extra cores to help at all unless you are exporting image sequences. Faster cores could help a little. Looking at benchmark results for the two processors could give a guide as to the relative speed.

You're right that it is an expensive upgrade, especially for a processor that's almost two years old. I don't think I'm going to bother with it. Videos aren't exactly slow to export as it is.