AMD for editing and gaming

[abbottoklus]

Hey folks, hoping to find some input from people with real-world experience using a 3600, 3700x, and 3900x.

 

I work primarily in Premiere every day, with a couple hours a week of AE thrown in. Gaming some nights and weekends, both flat and VR. Editing is priority one, but I still like a good cranked-settings gaming experience. Tons of render benchmarks out there, and faster render speeds are nice but actual real time use is much more important, and not really something that can be benchmarked. I did find this on Puget which is a bit more helpful, but still benching real-time playback is not the same as shuttling around back and forth on a timeline, dragging in assets, adjusting effects, etc.

 

I'm for sure going with either a 3600, 3700x, or 3900x. I'm getting an x570 board, and plan to upgrade to a zen 3 chip down the road, maybe 2 or 3 years depending how performance holds up. I'm not super concerned about the cost, but am leaning towards going a bit cheaper on the CPU now and putting a bit extra into a good mobo and RAM so I only have to drop in a new chip later.

 

But I'd still really like to get a sense of how differently these chips perform in day-to-day video use. Right now I can get them for about $280, $450, or $675 CAD. I've averaged a bunch of productivity benchmarks from Gamers Nexus etc. and it's about a 30% performance increase with each upgrade. Not terrible value for a 60% and 50% cost increase with each respective chip. But again, those are benchmarks. What's the real-world cost-performance value of each upgrade? Would there be a truly meaningful improvement going with a 3900 over a 3600? I know this is also a weird time to be asking since Adobe literally just added h264/5 hardware acceleration, and the new Intel chips are probably gonna cause AMD price drops soon, but what can you do.

 

For the record, I primarily work with ProRes 1080 24p footage, sometimes with 4K h265 60p or BRAW mixed in, sometimes 4K ProRes. My current system is also such a huge bottleneck that I don't even want to tell you what it is, I could upgrade to first gen Ryzen and see a massive improvement so yea..not a good point of reference.

[Statik]

For starters, the Ryzen 4000 chips coming out late this year will be the last chips compatible with the X570 chipset, so if you upgrade in a few years, you'll need a new board anyways.

 

1 hour ago, abbottoklus said:

Would there be a truly meaningful improvement going with a 3900 over a 3600

Absolutely. It's like comparing a reliable 4 door sedan to a 2 door coupe sports car. One will get you there perfectly fine, the other will get you there way faster, with a little bulge in your pants on the way. The 3900x will destroy the 3600 in your line of work. Double the cores/threads.

 

 

 

To me, it sounds like the 3900x is perfect for your needs, but if you wanted to save money, a 3700x would fit the bill fine. But I feel the 3900x was designed for people in your shoes.

 

 

[GDRRiley]

1080p footage is a joke. that 4k h265 at 60 and Braw are going to be the much heavier lift

here is the higher end r7 and r9 compared

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Premiere-Pro-CPU-performance-Intel-Core-10th-Gen-vs-AMD-Ryzen-3rd-Gen-1763/

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/After-Effects-CPU-performance-Intel-Core-10th-Gen-vs-AMD-Ryzen-3rd-Gen-1762/

some of the points made for exporting are mute for h264 and h265 as hardware encoding on GPUs is coming in the next update.

[abbottoklus]

On 5/23/2020 at 8:13 PM, Statik said:

For starters, the Ryzen 4000 chips coming out late this year will be the last chips compatible with the X570 chipset, so if you upgrade in a few years, you'll need a new board anyways.

Right, well my thinking is that I would hold off for the first year and wait for their prices to drop when the next lineup comes out, and also the 3000s were a significant improvement over the 2000s so if the 4000s follow suit it would be worth a single generation upgrade. Also now that the B550s are coming out that might change things up but we'll see.

 

Anyway thanks guys. Took the 3600 off the table, leaning towards the 3700. Seems like it's only a ~15% performance increase for the 3900 in Premiere based on Puget's tests. I think I'd rather put that couple hundred bucks elsewhere.