Recommendation for Video Editing Machine

[LordHiler]

Budget (including currency): $3,000-4,000 ish

Country: USA

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Davinci Resolve and related  

Other details: This is for my Dad, who is doing video production. Primarily he is shooting with a Black Magic Designs Pocket 6k rig in raw and then working on it on his desktop. He needs a new desktop but does not know hardware. I told him he should probably go with a 5950x and an RTX 3090 (assuming we can get either of those this century). However, I don't do video production, is that a terrible plan? Recommendations for RAM, and fast internal storage? Also his hesitation with AMD is that he is recording to high speed SSDs and wants thunderbolt for ingesting footage - does he really need thunderbolt? My gut is tell me no. 

 

Final catch - he wants it to be as portable as possible. Ideally something like an MATX build. I don't even know if that's doable. 

 

Suggestions?

 

Thank you!

 

[emosun]

6 minutes ago, LordHiler said:

$3,000-4,000 ish

idk that we can even cram that much hardware into an ultra portable build. Or if you'd want something that costs 4k to be "droppable"

Is he doing any task that at all benefits from gpu rendering as gpu rendering only supports SOME aspects of editing and rendering while the cpu makes up for everything else.

if you're going with a 3090 , your case and power supply will have to be pretty big killing your portability. so for portability sake you might want to opt for something smaller that'll do a similar job

[LordHiler]

You make a fair point and we may have to sacrifice portability and go with an ATX build but I will check with him. He wants to be able to move it around because he spends a lot of time on location.

 

Davinci Resolve relies heavily on the GPU. They actually recommend a dual GPU system, to say nothing of a high end GPU, and specifically say without it performance could be hurt. In this case that's not possible without DUAL 3090s which is way outside the budget, so the idea is to give him the best I can in terms of vram and gpu performance in a single card. 

 

From the DaVinci website: "DaVinci Resolve offloads intensive image processing to the GPU. It also employs YRGB 32-bit floating point processing for exceptional color precision." So the GPU is very important.

 

I was more concerned that the 5950x wouldn't be enough either. I don't know much about how responsive DaVinci is to having more threads available, and whether quad channel RAM from, say, Threadripper, might be better than the dual channel on 3950x. Threadripper is a lot more expensive and comes with sacrifices to single-threaded or lightly multi-threaded performance so I just wasn't sure what was best. 

[LordHiler]

As a follow up, I can confidently tell you he will not be overclocking anything. He just doesn't have the skill or the time or interest to learn. Everything in the build will be run to spec and that's it. That may be an advantage for cooling and stability but also means it needs to perform its best as is. 

[LordHiler]

One more update after talking to my Dad: standard ATX is fine. He wants thunderbolt if he can get it, and he needs 10 gig networking. 

 

Anyone have thoughts/suggestions?