Budget CPU and config - FX-8350 vs i5-3570

#1

First of all, my humble excuses for sheer length of this post and, maybe a bit bizarre request.

I need a config for NLE and some compositing (so, PP and some AE).

This is start-up business (NLE for wedding photographers and some corporate profiles and similar stuff) in a small and recession-stricken economy (Croatia) so my budget is very limited and I need to squeeze maximum bang for a buck.

Basically, I will do usual stuff - 3 hdd’s, minimum 2GB RAM/core, CUDA GPU.
At the moment I’m looking to buy following stuff (local European prices with shedload of VAT) :

GPU: Gigabyte GTX650 OC 2048MB GDDR5, GV-N650OC-2GI, 128 bit - 196 USD.
(not really sure, just 128 bit, cheapest 2GB GDDR5 card, according to this, does quite well.
RAM: 4 X DDR3 8GB (1x8GB) Kingston, HyperX Blue, 1600MHz, CL10 - 345*4 - 247 USD
PSU: 650W - 60 USD

(I already have 24’ 1920x1200 IPS screen, HDD’s, chassis etc.)
That’s roughly 500 USD before CPU and MB.

CPU and MB
So, this is where I feel a bit dumb.
I mean, I money wasn’t an object, I wouldn’t hesitate a moment and would go for 6-core i7 3930K with socket 2011 MB (roughly 1.100 USD) and everyone’s happy.
Since money IS an object, my choices are more or less like this:

1.) AMD FX-8350 (8 cores@4GHZ) + Gigabyte 970A-DS3, AM3+ - 377 USD
2.) Intel Core i5-3570K+ Asrock Z77 PRO4-M - 450 USD

Intel i7’s are out of reach at the moment (i.e.i7-3770K costs 456 USD plus another 150 USD for MB).

Now, reviews (FX-8350 vs. Intel’s) are plentiful but most of them share one thing in common - ridiculously low RAM. From 2GB (wtf.?!), 4GB, most often 8 and I found just one with 16GB.

Adobe recommends at least 2GB per core plus at least another 2GB for OS and other progs.
If I’m right, that’s minimum 18GB for FX-8350 with it’s 8 cores.
For i5-3570K with 4 cores it’s 10 GB RAM-a.

Therefore most reviews are biased in Intel’s favor with less but faster cores.

Here are some tests:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-fx-8350_7.html#sect0
Here i5 and FX-8350 are practically identical at PP-u (i7 is way ahead with it’s HT) and when encoding x264 video, 2nd pass, FX is even faster than i7-3770K.
On the other hand FX fails with Photoshop (shouldn’t photo and video editing require similar processing?).
They’ve tested with 8 gigs.

Things are pretty similar with Anandtech with somewhat less difference in Photoshop.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6396/the-vishera-review-amd-fx8350-fx8320-fx6300-and-fx4300-tested/3
Also 8 gigs.

Tom’s Hardware with 16 GB is only comparison I found that used more than 8 gigs.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/fx-8350-vishera-review,3328-9.html

Similar results, however, here FX is fastest (?!) in Photoshop test for non-CUDA stuff (FX was paired with ATI Radeon). In Premiere FX is second only to i7 but in AE it’s behind i5 but not much.

Well, taking everything into account, it AMD seems like logical choice. Actually, according to this tests it seems like viable choice for almost ANY budget outside 6 or more core Intel rigs.

However, still, 9 out of 10 people on various forums say - INTEL!

Whole story is missing so much decent test with 32 GB RAM. I wonder who profits more here, Intel ili AMD.

So far I used only Intel CPU’s (currently E8400@3,6GHz) but gut feeling says FX-8350.

Any help is appreciated.

P.S. Sorry for my English.

#2

Go for 8350 w/I6-32GB of RAM and TURN OFF page file if you have 32GB of ram
:slight_smile:
goahead, have a lucky… :wink:

#3

I think you should absolutely go with the i7 3570k

The AMD 8350 will be around 20% faster at mulithreaded tasks, but the 3570 will be about 50% faster at single-threaded tasks which are much more common and have a drastically greater impact on your work …and the 3570k overclocks extremely well if you wanted to make the chip as fast or faster than the 8350

more cores isn’t better when the cores are so much slower and your programs mainly uses 1 core when you’re working.

#4

Never turn off the page file, in any modern OS. The page file will only be used if it is particularly needed. If you ever get into a situation where the 32 gigs gets used up, say goodbye to your machine; it will back itself into a corner and wont be able to recover.

To the OP: the amount of ram in the machine will make no real difference to benchmark tests, so they dont tend to bother with large amounts. Cinebench requires 420 megs to run its test. Encoding a h264 video takes 400-500 megs for the encoder to run. Game benchmarks will never need more than 2 gigs to run as they all have to fit within a 32bit machines memory footprint and are usually ported from consoles which have only a gig of ram.

Ram typically does not speed up a machine (unless you had an absurdly low amount before) it only allows you to have more complicated projects and run more software at the same time.

#5

:slight_smile:
I work with NO pagefile, for almost few months, and guess what? :slight_smile:
It did never happen!!! And it will not ofcourse…why?
well, one instance of MAX/Maya etc…rarley can has more than 15-20GB or RAM.
The critical moment when it goes above 32GB is alsmost impossible to happen…and even
that, it is only about 10-20mins of autosave? isnt it?
…
conclusion:
For myself, with more of 32GB you can savely turn off PF, and feel the real power of new HW :))))))
I do work in production, and nothing critical happend for last few months.
Best R
Bare

#6

Mash is right on the money, turning the page file off has no noticable effect and will give you serious trouble if you run out of physical memory. Moder operating systems are optimized to work with a PF.
Zdravko: It’s nice that it does work for you so far, but please don’t recommend something you have only limited experience with. Btw, that autosafe won’t help you if the oom error happens during saving, in that case all currently open files can be corrupted. You will need to use auto incremental saving to be on the safe side.

#7

Yea, leave the PF on. If your running a SSD, its not really that bad. I’ve only got 8GB on my system, and it overflows every once in a while.

As far as the original topic, you should go with the Intel quad core. AE and most editing programs aren’t very threaded, and you’ll only be using a single thread most of the time.

That GPU might be overkill for your needs as well. I would recommend you downgrade the GPU, and invest in a pair of SSD, a pair of HDD, and a cheap raid card. You could use your HDD array for long term storage, and use your SSD array for whatever project your working on. The SSD will make a big difference when your loading and saving large videos or RAW photos.

-AJ

#8

Why would you turn it off in first place?
The page file being there for when and if it will be used makes ABSOLUTELY no difference in real performance, there is no reason not to have it available.

As for 32GB being impossible to fill, well, yeah, right… that’s why a lot of nodes on our farm have 64, because we like to waste 40GB that will never get used on every blade we use…

For a single instance of an app it might (depending on what you do) be hard to hit that limit (it’s actually not, the right fluid sim will hit the high 20s in a snap and the early 30s easily), but if you run a couple different apps and a virtual machine or two (something some of usdo even at home) it’s actually very easy to blast memory very quickly, not to swapping levels, but to levels where paging will occur… well, that happens all the time.

#9

you can savely turn off PF, and feel the real power of new HW :))))))

Nice to know the placebo effect is still going strong. Want to buy some homoeopathic remedies whilst you’re here?

#10

I am amazed how much people speak out of there rear end these days, passing knowledge based on there perception or assumption on how things work. And the ones they teach will pass that bs on and on and on… the world is growing ignorant and stupid.

The fact is that a Pagefile is not Ram, and Ram is not a pagefile, nor can neither of them replace each other. The more Ram you have the bigger the pagefile needs to be, in order to swap memory from active to inactive state. By disabling the PF, you also disable windows read and write cashing, slowing down process of saving a document. also windows 7’s SuperFetch which makes win7 much snappier then its ancestors, gets disabled.

Leave the pagefile in the hands of your OS, and if you have allot of memory to spare, increase the windows-file-system-cash.

#11

While I agree there was some arsetalk, I don’t think anybody was implying that the page file is RAM. It is, however, as close as non sequential access storage will ever get to ram since the pages are usually both syncronous and contiguous, and dirtyness is managed based on app’s matching content to page.

It’s also true that, in theory, if you had enough ram you’d never need paging, as the entire session including the backlog would be kept in RAM, but in practice that’s impossible for anything except minor office use against workstation levels amounts of RAM, and by not having a page file you do force the system to purge unnecessarily often (without mentioning how disastrous things could get if you had two apps active that could comfortably live with minor paging having to actually extend swap instead).

All in all, the suggestion of forgoing paging was, and remains, silly, that much I think everybody agrees on :slight_smile:

#12

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