Please convert me back to X99 instead of Z170 for video editing

Hardware Hub CPU
1

So I need to find a new PC for my brothers video production company. He wanted the PC to operate on windows 7 and be an Intel CPU PC.

So I started doing my research into X99. The general gist of what I found is that X99 supports Intel LGA 2011-v3 CPU's that can 6 - 8 core and that for video editing the more cores you have the better. I was dead set buying PC's that were X99 but then I started looking into this whole Z170 stuff and I got to thinking, how long is X99 CPU's going to be supported. Is not the Z170 chip-set the wave of the future washing ashore up in the skylakes? We need this computer to last us a 10 years.

I guess my main concern is how much longer is the X99 platform going to be thing, is Z170 really going eventually replace X99?

Also because Z170 is so new will it even run on Win 7 does Intel make drivers for skylake CPU's for WIN 7.

Please help, I hope I made since.

2

X79 is still fairly capable, so just look to that for your answer.

Short answer is, just go X99, price difference isn't too much from the 6700K, and the extra cores help in some workstation tasks more so than faster per core performance, plus bonus cache

6700Ks would be for much more specific applications that really need per core performance.

3

What video editing software does he use? Why can't he use gpu acceleration?

4

http://www.techeye.net/chips/microsoft-will-not-support-skylake-in-windows-7-and-8

http://www.techradar.com/au/news/computing/new-cpus-will-only-be-compatible-with-windows-10-says-microsoft-1313255#

Right now there is support for Skylake, but that will end in July 2018 (the original deadline of July 17th 2017 has been extended by a year).
That doesn't mean that the CPU or the OS will stop working after that deadline, but that any improvements will only be in Win10.

If you want Win7, I'd say that X99 / Haswell-E is about as good as it's going to get.

5

Well he is going to be using the adobe cc suite (Adobe Premiere) I know that certain applications can use GPU acceleration but this the next thing I was going to look into. I am hoping that the new GTX 1060-1080 series graphics cards will help in GPU acceleration but I will need to do more research in this area.

6

Thanks for this. I really wish windows 10 was something I could just dive head fist into and hope that Microsoft won't be evil with updates and use their new OS. But as it stands right now we don't want to build our new system on the new uncharted waters of win 10 at least not for his company.

7

I definitely would. If you get the right combo it works great. You may want to see if he has any experience with it first though because it can be a bit buggy in earlier versions of premiere. He may want to just avoid it if he has bad experiences with it.

8

Thanks for your response Streetguru

9

Well he has experience with premiere he is aware of the bugs and stuff but he thinks it will be okay. He used to use final cut pro on mac but he thought it was time to switch over to PC, he didn't want to buy MAC trash can machine.

10

I meant of using gpu accel specifically.

Also, I would start with AP forums to find out which cards work well with it.

Also, I would like to add that for a video editing rig, RAM is more important that cpu. You want as many channels as you can afford and as many GIGs too. DDR4 is going to benefit you too since most of the memory reads/writes will be long contiguous blocks.

11

Ah okay.

Good idea I'll check the AP forums.

Yep more ram is better I as looking at 32 gigs DDR4 of ram at the minimum.

12

Is he going to play any games? Is he going to use CUDA or OpenCL acceleration?

1080p or 4k? Is it using a ton of effects and auto filters for color/noise? What kind of acceleration do they use?

Things can get pretty specific

13

Yes he want's to play games and do 3D modeling with Blender and 3DSMAX. So I think CUDA will be okay.

14

Depending on how you're cutting the budget, the 480 is a decent contender being the cheapest 8gb card, what is the budget anyways?

It's also a pain to find benchmarks for workstation stuff

15

Thanks street guru for your help. Our budget is around $2400.00 we are already familiar with Nvidia for our graphics cards and he likes to use Nvidia IRAY for 3D rendering so I don't we would use the 480 just yet. I think the GTX 1060 or 1070 will do.

16

more cores will be better.

theirs been some bench marks posted by youtubers on the 6800k vs 6700k. I suggest you look into theem, hardware canucks and awesomesauce network I think.