Looking for PCIe 4.0 advice (When is it worth it)?

[Robin_Code]

Hello,

 

So I'm using this build mainly for Adobe video editing / Back-end Software dev (rendering large 1440p files), and some (low demanding GPU games such as WoW and LoL). 

 

Specs I aim for:

Motherboard: ? 

Ryzen 3700x

2060 Super

16GB RAM 3200Ghz

960 EVO 1TB

650w Gold PSU (didn't decide yet)

 

Should I buy a cheaper 3.0 PCIe motherboard and invest the money elsewhere? 

 

Another question:

Do you recommend I'd stick to a less impressive motherboard and spend the money in a 9900K instead of a 3700X?

[KodiakWithAK]

Alright.

 

Would a 9900K perform better than a 3700X? Yes,  but marginally. 

 

Would the performance of a better graphics card be better than a higher bandwidth? Yes, quite noticeably.

 

I'd take your money and invest in a better GPU, not CPU or MB. You'll see more performance this way.

[Robin_Code]

4 minutes ago, KodiakWithAK said:

Alright.

 

Would a 9900K perform better than a 3700X? Yes,  but marginally. 

 

Would the performance of a better graphics card be better than a higher bandwidth? Yes, quite noticeably.

 

I'd take your money and invest in a better GPU, not CPU or MB. You'll see more performance this way.

Condering that I do not game much, how will the GPU be beneficial to me?

[Epimetheus]

Ok. Both the options have their merits. The i9 9900k would be better than the 3700x in adobe applications especially due to intel's features that are massively used by adobe; however, with the 9900k being a hot and power hungry mess, you'll need to spend much more on cooling and a premium motherboard to support it properly. With the 3700x though you can get away with a x570 Prime-P from asus and get pcie gen 4, without the need to spend so much on cooling. If you think it's worth it to spend more to get some performance gains it's up to you, you might want to do some research on how these two processors stack up in adobe applications before buying

[KodiakWithAK]

6 minutes ago, Robin_Code said:

Condering that I do not game much, how will the GPU be beneficial to me?

Would Adobe applications not benefit from GPU Hardware acceleration?

[Zando_]

Just now, KodiakWithAK said:

Would Adobe applications not benefit from GPU Hardware acceleration?

Not close to as much as they do with Intel's QuickSync and a decent GPU. They're much more CPU intensive with an advantage from QuickSync AFAIK. 

As for PCIe 4.0, no GPUs we have can push past the bandwidth of PCIe 3.0 x16 (not even the 2080 Ti does it IIRC), it's mostly useful for even more blindingly, inhumanly fast NVMe SSDs for any sort of Editing stuff that uses big files, where NVMe gives a massive speed boost. But again, you'll probably see more of a noticeable perf increase from a 9900K with a 970 Evo Plus than you will with a 3700X and PCIe 4.0 SSD. Don't get the 9900KF though, that doesn't have an iGPU so it can't use quicksync and would be pointless for this use case. 

Basically Adobe still really, really likes Intel CPUs with an iGPU, apparently the 9900K can beat Intel's own HEDT chips in some workloads due to quicksync. 

[Princess Luna]

25 minutes ago, Robin_Code said:

Do you recommend I'd stick to a less impressive motherboard and spend the money in a 9900K instead of a 3700X?

If you intend to use Adobe to any meaningful extend the 9900K will outperform even the 3900X.

 

All adobe editing tools are 100% single threaded and needs Intel's Ring Bus to function on their prime (most snappy fast etc), the 9900K's 16 threads is enough for multi-tasking on these environments and when you need to export, render and so on just turn on iGPU QuickSync Hardware Acceleration and you'll have the performance of a TR 2950X

 

Basically everything @Zando Bob wrote is accurate, the key here is that QuickSync will be a lot more worthy to you than PCI-e 4.0... in fact I'd argue that moving your money from the Samsung Evo 860 1TB to an Intel 660p 2TB is a better plan... you will need fast storage yeah but more storage than fast per se.

 

CUDA Acceleration is important too but like a GTX 1660 should already be enough, there is only so much scaling you can get on Premiere Pro.

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, Princess Luna said:

in fact I'd argue that moving your money from the Samsung Evo 860 1TB to an Intel 660p 2TB is a better plan... you will need fast storage yeah but more storage than fast per se.

My main concern with that would be SSD endurance. The 660p is likely a lot lower than the 860 Evo due to being lower quality flash, for something like video editing where you move big files around a lot, you'll probably get a lot less life out of the 660p than a higher quality drive. 

OP, what's the full budget? I'm a bit of a fan of Samsung's NVMe drives due to them being really damn good, WD's Black NVMe drives are also very good competitors though. But for video editing I'd try and get a high quality drive just due to the amount of writes you'll be doing when shuffling around projects. Unless you can afford to go balls to the wall and slap 2 2TB 970 Evo Pluses or something in your rig, chances are you'll constantly need to offload projects to a backup drive. Even then those will still fill up pretty quickly. Doing editing on a MacBook Pro with a 1TB drive, we constantly had to offload stuff due to the drive filling up, editing software usually dumps files into an uncompressed format so they take up gobs of space. Usually you delete all those and save just the important stuff to an archive drive (the guy I worked for still does all his editing off that MBP, uses cheap Seagate slim portable 1TB/2TB drives to archive stuff, they're some of the best bang for the buck ones out there), then when you make a new project it's gonna write a shit ton more stuff to that drive. IIRC writing is what puts the wear on SSDs, not reading. So under gaming load which is mostly reads and a few writes for save files, a 660p will be fine. For editing where you do a shit ton of writing, you defo want a higher endurance drive.