Editing 4K with 8750h and 16GB RAM? Custom Build Advice requested!

[Hellbent]

I looked for an active video editing forum and failed to find one. I love Doomworld so I'm posting my question here:

 

I am attempting to edit 4K video on an MSI GS65 Stealth laptop with 6 core 8750h 2.2ghz processor and 16gb ram but the program I'm using Filmora is choking hard.

 

Seems to me I should be able to edit 4K with this laptop, no? I'm using Filmora and it is too slow to edit 4k video, much to my disappointment. It even offers to create a proxy clip that is lower res while editing and yet the program is still too laggy to do any editing. I recently bought a WD_BLACK gaming external drive (not for gaming, but for storage) and am editing from that drive, but even when I move the video file back to my laptop's main SSD it still is too laggy / slow to edit directly from the SSD. I realize this is sort of the bare minimum hardware for editing 4K but I thought it did at least meet the requirement.

 

Anyone else edit 4K video successfully with similar hardware or have any insight on this topic? If so, if you could share your experience that would be so helpful! :D

Edited August 9, 2020 by Hellbent

[Mr. Freeze]

Have you checked your RAM usage? Something tells me 16GB is too low. 

[Graf Zahl]

Looks to me like the specs are too low. Video editing is an extremely resource consuming task. You not only need lots of RAM but also a good CPU.

I don't think that a low end laptop CPU, even with 6 cores, is ever going to cut it.

 

[seed]

4K you say... what video card BTW?

 

These specs are definitely not enough for the task, as the others said. Video editing, especially at such a resolution, is an extremely hardware demanding task. You'd want at least 32gb of RAM for that, not to mention a rocket CPU and GPU. That hardware is simply not going to pull it off, so you may want to upgrade or manage your expectations.

[Hellbent]

Thanks everyone for the input!

 

The graphics card is an nVidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max Q. I'm not sure how much ram the gfx card has. Hopefully I can find the info I need on my RAM in the BIOS to see if I can just buy another 16GB stick and put it in. Any recommendation on what processor I should upgrade with?

[HavoX]

40 minutes ago, Hellbent said:

The graphics card is an nVidia GeForce GTX 1070 Max Q. I'm not sure how much ram the gfx card has.

8 GB, according to TechPowerUp.

 

I can also confirm that 4K is a no-go with that card.

[Hellbent]

It won't be enough to upgrade the ram and CPU? I'll need a new GPU, too?

[HavoX]

Well, that card was made for gaming, not video-editing, so...

[seed]

11 hours ago, HavoX said:

Well, that card was made for gaming, not video-editing, so...

 

^ .

 

And yes, for 4K rendering it isn't enough, despite it technically being a high-end card. You may want a RTX 2080 or a Titan card for the task.

[Hellbent]

Thanks everyone! I'm currently on www.newegg.com putting together a custom "moderate" high end build for editing 4K (been literally decades since I built a computer but I think I'm up for the challenge). I'm currently trying to figure out what motherboard to get. It's a bit tricky, because I'm going hog on the processor (apparently that's the most important thing for editing 4K) and just read that the Ryzen 3900x (the 12 core CPU I'm going with) supports ultra fast NVMe 4.0 SSDs. The motherboard that has piqued my interest is GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE AM4 AMD B550 ATX Motherboard with Dual M.2, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2, 2.5 GbE LAN, PCIe 4.0 due to its price point and generous support for PCIe 4.0.

 

One of the reviewers for the motherboard said some things that sounded intelligent that I might want to pay attention to, but wondering what his comment means in terms of the 4.0 SSD I am choosing. I have no plans to do SATA drive at this point (but that may change I suppose if I want to use a SATA as a back up drive or for extra storage).

 

Quote

The two extra NVMe 4.0 slots necessarily come from splitting the x16 GPU slot into x8x4x4 and each PCIe host controller has independent clock, different speeds for each slice shouldn't be an issue. For boards that don't rob lanes from x16, an extra NVMe x4 slot would eat four out of 10 possible chipset PCIe lanes and four of those are shared with SATA, doesn't leave much PCIe budget for PCIe slots on an ATX-size board. I would have liked B550 to have two extra flex IO lanes so having a 3rd SATA device didn't mean having to give up on an x4 secondary NVMe or PCIe slot.

 

If someone can let me know if the above quote will affect my build (without SATA) I'd appreciate it. My build so far:

 

• GIGABYTE B550 AORUS ELITE AM4 AMD B550 ATX Motherboard with Dual M.2, SATA 6Gb/s, USB 3.2 Gen 2, 2.5 GbE LAN, PCIe 4.0 $159.99
• MSI GeForce GTX 1660 DirectX 12 GTX 1660 VENTUS XS 6G OC 6GB 192-Bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card $219.95
• 2X CORSAIR Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) Desktop Memory Model CMK32GX4M2B3200C16 (64GB total) $239.98
• AMD RYZEN 9 3900X 12-Core 3.8 GHz (4.6 GHz Max Boost) Socket AM4 105W 100-100000023BOX Desktop Processor $429.99
• Sabrent 1TB Rocket Nvme PCIe 4.0 M.2 2280 Internal SSD Maximum Performance Solid State Drive (SB-ROCKET-NVMe4-1TB) $199.99
   

Current subtotal: $1249.90

 

Any recommendations for case and power supply given the hardware I've listed? Will a "midtower" case be spacious enough? Thanks!

 

Some of the sources informing my choices for my build:

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/gigabyte-b550-aorus-master-motherboard-pcie-4#xenforo-comments-3606757

https://www.cgdirector.com/best-memory-ram-amd-ryzen-cpus-3600-3700x-3900x/

 

 

 

Edited August 9, 2020 by Hellbent

[Vorpal]

I'm no computer scientist so this could all be misunderstood, but my gut feelings:

 

slowness during EDITING is insufficient ram capacity/speed, and some percentage due to disk speed (dunno if your laptop is ssd or hdd though), as most? video editing software allows you to start editing even though the file(s) isnt fully loaded into memory. then if memory fills up, windows starts writing to the temp swap file on the disk which further compounds the slowness.

 

slowness during ENCODING is wholly dependent on cpu, especially core count, and while a fancy top-tier multicore ryzen is going to shave a lot of time off of encoding, you're still likely going to be leaving the system crunching away overnight regardless if it's a budget tier or upper-consumer-tier cpu. Unless we're talking short <10 min length videos...

 

edit: er so what I am getting at is $1300 is probably not going to be noticeably better than a $600 build, if your goal is "I want to get compile times shorter than an overnight session"

Edited August 11, 2020 by Vorpal

[Hellbent]

My goal is to have the editor not be jerky while I'm making edits. The 4K video isn't editable because the actual program while making edits is so jerky and halting; you know, the same kind of experience as playing Doom on a 386 25 SX machine with 4MB ram back in the day and the game barely runs with super jerky framerate.

[Vorpal]

Yeah I imagine that is mostly due to the amount of disk reading -> loading into memory being done. I'm a cheapskate so for your task I'd probably only dish out the money for fancy memory and ssd, and then budget tier card and cpu. I dunno about 64GB though, but then again I've only edited up to 1440p (never had jerkiness with a ryzen 5 and 16GB of 3200)