Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Hello,

I am trying to decide if moving from an X58 system with an i7-920 up to an Ivy Bridge system with a 3770k (along with an overclock!) will be "worth it" or see noticeable gains in performance and rendering?

I am an Edius user along with a CS5 dabble from time to time.

Going back and forth between waiting for Haswell or upgrading now. Seems like the PC community is not overly excited about Haswell from a CPU performance point of view.

z77 seems like the best value to me compared to an X79 setup. Quicksync, lack of Thunderbolt along with cost are a deciding factor.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Tim, I use the i7-920 chip with an Asus P6T deluxe board and Edius 5.51 works optimally. Edius just dosen't need a lot of horsepower. I thought about going to the Ivy-bridge to be more energy efficient and run cooler but in the end can't see any benefit. I try to follow the motto "if it isn't broke then don't fix it."

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

I agree with the idea that if it works for you now, it makes sense to not upgrade.
Time will work in your favor in terms of more processing power for less money down the road.
Here's a link comparing cpu performance:
PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Thanks for the replies & link. It looks like the 3770k just about doubled the PASS score compared to the i7-920.

For simple jobs my current system is fine. When I am editing multicamera shoots, using PIPs and looking at encoding times is when I come across some performance shortfalls I would like to overcome.

My main goal is to have a system that can handle pretty much anything I throw at it. Basically edit HD like SD back in the day. Just want to see what I might expect if anybody else has has done the same upgrade.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Don't expect the same performance gain as you would with editing in the hqavi format on your current system, I have a I7 950 and hqavi is like cutting through butter in edius 6.5, silky smooth with blazing fast exports to the same format. Even on the fastest available system today you won't get he same performance when dealing with heavily compressed formats like avchd, you will not be able to scroll that fast through the time line without any stutter like hqavi can do. You will however be able to handle more streams in a multicam and/or effects that depend on the cpu will run in realtime and ofcourse your rendering times to especially h264 or other formats will be substantially faster.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

I'm holding off until native 8 cores on LGA2011 comes to the i7 lineup. It already exists on the Xeon lineup, but I'm holding off until it propagates down.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Can't speak for Edius but I'll say there's a definite improvement. Maybe you've seen this already: Harm's Benchmark Results for the CS5.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

So i am caught in this struggle between an Ivy Bridge 3770k system with Quicksync vs a Sandy-E 3930 system with six cores. The six core system would have more horsepower but the Ivy system would make .mp4 encoding a real asset.

Any ideas?

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Tim,

Have you seen Reflections - Page 3

Was it worth it? Yes and no. It was a huge amount of money. It did offer substantial performance benefits, but with a 3770K I think the benefits would be marginal at most. The best 3770K even OC'ed to 4.4 comes out at rank # 70, where my old 920 ranks at # 38, more than two times faster than the best 3770K.

If you want to upgrade from a i7-920 I think the only sensible step is a 3930K hexa core. Nothing less. Ivy Bridge is a station passed and will be discontinued shortly. No sense in wasting money on that. As for octo core CPU's on the 2011 platform, hold your breadth. Intel is not going lenient on the power usage, so for the next year I don't expect any octo core to come out.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

If you use Edius or TMPGenc to encode h264 then Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge has a big performance gain using QuickSync over pure software encode. With either of these programs a Bluray file encode takes about half realtime. I have a Sandy Bridge i7 2600k that happily edits 5 track multicam native AVCHD files in Edius 6.07 realtime.

Since you are Edius user then it would be worth the upgrade for the encode in my mind. IF you don't use AVCHD or encode for Bluray then it may not be worth it for you. Gigabyte has a Thunderbolt Z77 board if you are interested in that approach.

Ron Evans

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

IMHO, there is absolutely no cost-effective upgrade whatsoever from that old platform: You would have either spent several hundred dollars to get a system that has practically no upgrade future (as far as CPUs are concerned), or you would have spent nearly $1,000 (if not more) just to achieve a relatively moderate improvement in performance. And we budget-conscious consumers are stuck in no-man's land.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

For me the real advantage is encode using Quick Sync if this is of no interest stay with the system you have now. However for about $550 you could get an upgrade to a Gigabyte Dual Thunderbolt Z77 board , i7 3770, 16G DDR3 RAM and use the rest of your present system. You would get a performance improvement over your present system and a very big improvement encoding for Bluray. I did the same when I moved from my Q9450 to my Sandy Bridge i7 2600k 2 years ago. For then, about $700, also moved to Win7.

Ron Evans

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Thanks for your input Harm, Ron & Randall.

As you can see, this has turned out to be a difficult and confusing decision. The rise of overclocking in all circles makes it hard to know what performance benefits on can really expect from these systems. Right now I have the i7-920 @ 3 GHz. A pretty mild overclock. I tried to get a hgher number but failed. Many on the web say it is easy, but I could not get past 3 GHz.

Harm, it is confusing to hear that a four year old processor would beat a current model given they are both at the same pricepoint. Could you explain this a bit more as many folks say the move to a 3770 chip offered great improvement over their 920 chips. Thanks.

Ron, I have been thinking the same but it seems whenever I decide to make a move I read how it would be spinning wheels from other users. $550 is fine for a three year upgrade but I want to make sure I am gaining :)

Right now, my system will do pretty much everything I need but it does bog down if I have a lot of multicam tracks (this is without filters turned on in multicam) I would like to get over that hump and speed up encoding as we all do.

Randall, your input is not incorrect but I do not see any path to upgrade for quite a few years in that scenario! I do not mind purchasing a new chipset with each upgrade as it seems I have never just upgraded a processor anyway.

The hex core upgrade would be around $800 compared to $550 for the 3770k. Pretty close. If I could see that the hex core could produce good mp4 encode times without quicksync I might be swayed. Because to be honest, .mp4 encoding in Edius or TMPENC on my system now is very slow. So slow that it is not on the table. Handbrake is fine, but otherwise I do not use mp4 very often.

Thanks for listening to computer my babble! It is important to have these discussions with video folks as we have certain things that are important to us.

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

This test http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/551?vs=47 the i7 3770 to be almost twice as fast as the i7 920 for software encoding to h264 using Quick Sync it would be blazingly faster. This one PassMark Intel vs AMD CPU Benchmarks - High End also shows about the same relationship. The i7 3770 is a lot faster for almost every test than the i7 920.

My previous sytem used a Q9450 and you can see the comparison to the i7 920 here AnandTech - Bench - CPU. I saw a very big increase in performance when I moved to my i7 2600k. I think you would see the same moving to an i7 3770 from the i7 920.

Using the Q9450 a h264 encode of a 2 hour show would take almost 12 hours !!! So I didn't do that !!!! Using Quick Sync with the i7 2600k it takes about an 1 hour 15 mins !!! That is worth a lot to me. Using Edius the Q9450 would not let me multicam more than 2 tracks of AVCHD and then it stuttered. With the i7 2600k I can do 4 or 5 tracks native at full frame rate.

As I said before if you do not encode to h264 or edit AVCHD then you may not see a difference but if you do either of these things you will see a big difference.

I changed my motherboard, CPU and memory ( also upgraded to WIN7 ) but used the same case hard drives etc. I always build my own systems so upgrade was easy and quick.

Ron Evans

Re: Move from i7-920 to Ivy Bridge 3770k Worth it?
 

Thanks for those links Ron. They really do show a clear difference between the 920 & the 3770 without quicksync. I put the 3930k up against the 3770k and they are pretty close outside of some gains for heavy multi-threaded applications. The power consumption is almost half with the 3770k though.

Looks like a $550 upgrade now would be a decent value and would be a long lived system as I do not forsee editing any higher resolutions for the immediate future. Hoping I can put my board, CPU & memory on Ebay and get a little for it as well.

Thanks for helping me make a decision here and on the Edius boards. Sometimes it is worth it to just go buy the stuff and get out of tech-land to get back to more creative pursuits!

It will be a few weeks but I will report back with my comparisons of the new build.