• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

What is the very best cpu for gaming and media encoding

JasonKnights

JasonKnights

JasonKnights

Associate
Joined
25 Feb 2011
Posts
476
Location
Manchester, UK
Whats the very best CPU you can buy? Is it the I7 990x?
how does the tripple channel memory help and would a 1336 setup with a 990x be a lot faster than my 2600k at 4.5ghz?
 
Depends how much you can overclock the i7-990X. Probably wouldn't make it as far as the i7-2600K but you obviously get 50% more cores so the 990X would be faster at highly threaded stuff like video encoding. If cost isn't an object, the 990X is probably faster but the i7-2600K is far better value for money.
 
Even if it is wait for Ivybridge due towards the end of the year if your thinking of upgrading from a 2600k... or maybe even bulldozer... with its eight cores it might be an option but until numbers are revealed its anyone's guess!

Edit / Is your 2600k even overclocked? If not invest in some good cooler and get clocking!
 
Wait for Ivybridge next year. The 2600K is already a very powerful chip for encoding, I bought one myself and it's a massive improvement compared to my old PII 965 :D.
 
Time is money! The less time it takes to do something the more money gained.

Extremely rough example;

If you are doing 8 hours of compressing/3DS/Photoshop you may save half an hour a day(for example) over a 2600k.

So if person X gets paid £30 per hour then they'd be saving £15 per day.

On average there are 223 working days in a year which equates to £3345 saved minus the cost of the 990x.

And that's just compared to the 2600k

Makes sense.
 
Hazkirby said:
Time is money! The less time it takes to do something the more money gained.

Extremely rough example;

If you are doing 8 hours of compressing/3DS/Photoshop you may save half an hour a day(for example) over a 2600k.

So if person X gets paid £30 per hour then they'd be saving £15 per day.

On average there are 223 working days in a year which equates to £3345 saved minus the cost of the 990x.

And that's just compared to the 2600k

Makes sense.
Click to expand...

If you are charging by the hour in that industry you are doing something wrong, plus rendering time is time not sat at your computer, that is what nights are for.
 
From what i understand the benefits of Tri-channal ram is minimal, not worth worrying too much about.

For Gaming, most modern games make use of 2 cores, SOME make use of 4, but I am not aware of any games making use of more than that. Anything past 4 is really for number crunching stuff like encoding.
 
For gaming - there really is no difference. Only in cases where you have a super-rig and loads of graphics cards and the game is CPU limited - then the 2600K would offer better performance due to much faster maximum clockspeeds (when overclocked) and more instructions per clock compared to the Gulftown (since pretty much no games make the full use out out a hex core).

In terms of encoding, most of the reviews show the comparsion with the i7 980X (since that was the current exteme-edition gulftown chip available at the time). This is exactly the same chip as the i7 990X, just with a slightly higher stock multiplier. Hence the benchmark results for a 990X would be the 980X results plus ~ 4% (due to the higher stock clockspeed), the maximum overclock is pretty much the same as the 980X, since it's the same core and stepping.

This review compares stock and overclocks i7 2600K and i7 980X in a video encoding test. This review compares the i7 2600K and i7 980X in a range of video encoding situation (however, there are no overclocked results).

Please bear in mind that the AMD bulldozer octo-cores are expected in a couple of months - and these are expected to be very good for encoding applications (due to much improved AMD architecture and many cores). Also, Sandy Bridge-E is arriving at then end of the year - which will offer hex core sandy bridge CPUs and some feature packed board (though expect some extreme-edition level prices).
 
Last edited:
Trouble is, we dont have anything yet that really maxs 4 cores for encoding yet let alone more cores.

Handbrake is the only app I know that will max 4 cores.
 
KelDG said:
If you are charging by the hour in that industry you are doing something wrong, plus rendering time is time not sat at your computer, that is what nights are for.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I want this £30/hour job which consists of sitting in front of a PC reading a book while it encodes for 8 hours.
 
I have a friend who is a coder for a US animation house, and they have things called render farms. Which are specifically tasked to encode the animations that she and the others do. And with the software that they use, I do not recall the name of the applications, the hex cores are the only way to go. These guys do not overclock their systems. They can not afford to. Their primary concern is stability and output. And those two terms are not mutually exclusive I might add. To that end they are only using stock systems in their different render farms.

Now that being said I do not think the OP is in the same kind of environment. A gaming righ and a render rig are two very different beasties. And I would guess the render/encode side of things is not on the same scale as Pixar. Go 2600K and overclock the CPU to +- 4.5GHz 4.8GHz range. You will not be disappointed.
 
I am rather uninformed about anything media-related, but isn't Quick Sync meant to improve transcode speeds by quite a lot? If so, and you're using apps that can make use of this, wouldn't a Z68 + 2600K be the way to go? (At least until AMD's octocores and Sandy Bridge E)
Or am I just talking nonsense (probably)?
 
voorhees1979 said:
Trouble is, we dont have anything yet that really maxs 4 cores for encoding yet let alone more cores.

Handbrake is the only app I know that will max 4 cores.
Click to expand...
video A is 90minutes long.

divde 90 minutes by how many cores you have and each core does its own chunk.

video transcoding is predictable so its easy to do it on multiple cores, other things arent predictable and they are calculated on the fly its not so simple to split the task up thats why games generally use 1-2 cores
 
Encoding .... Gulftown at the moment, but I suspect that 8 core Bulldozer may well supecede it. Definitely not Sandy, definitely not Phenom.

Gaming - generally Sandy for the moment. Multi-threaded stuff Gulftown owns everything at the moment .... but we'll see about Bulldozer.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom