Review this system.... (top quality)

[Engineering]

Summary:

i7 (860)
ASUS P55 mobo
EVGA Gtx260
30GB SATA II MLC SDD
6GB DDR3 1600 (PC3 16000) w/ XMP
Rosewill Green Series 630W
Antec 1200 case

[johns0]

Good all around gaming/encoding/editing computer,long as you dont add a more powerful video card then its all good to go.

[redwudz]

You may find like me that a small SSD will be a major problem. I used a 60GB SSD for boot with Vista and W7 and it was a constant battle keeping enough free space on it. Every program and the OS wants to put stuff on it. A 120GB might be more useful. It was fast, but also easily corrupted. I use mine now for a scratch drive and use a 150GB Raptor for boot. Might take another second or two to load the OS, but lots easier to work with.

I had ended up needing to install most of my software, my page and temp files on a secondary drive, negating most of the advantages of the SSD for fast loading of programs. And one thing to be very aware of with a SSD, never, never defrag it or it will shorten it's lifetime considerably. It has it's own system to keep the SSD cleaned up. Also in my experience, a SSD needs about 50% freespace to enable it to move files around to prevent burnout of individual cells due to over use. That cuts its usable size in about half.

Also, just my opinion, but a Rosewill PS is about the bottom of the barrel for PS's for reputation. They make decent economy parts, but I wouldn't trust one with a expensive PC. If it fails, it could take the whole PC with it. I would stick to Antec, PC Power, Thermaltake, Corsair, or one of the more recognized brands.

You only list the one SSD drive. Most video setups need a couple of drives beside the boot. I use 500GB WD Black edit and archive drives and run most video data between them. But I assume you will add additonal drives.

Other than that, should be a good setup.

And welcome to our forums.

[Engineering]

You may find like me that a small SSD will be a major problem. I used a 60GB SSD for boot with Vista and W7 and it was a constant battle keeping enough free space on it. Every program and the OS wants to put stuff on it. A 120GB might be more useful. It was fast, but also easily corrupted. I use mine now for a scratch drive and use a 150GB Raptor for boot. Might take another second or two to load the OS, but lots easier to work with.

I had ended up needing to install most of my software, my page and temp files on a secondary drive, negating most of the advantages of the SSD for fast loading of programs. And one thing to be very aware of with a SSD, never, never defrag it or it will shorten it's lifetime considerably. It has it's own system to keep the SSD cleaned up. Also in my experience, a SSD needs about 50% freespace to enable it to move files around to prevent burnout of individual cells due to over use. That cuts its usable size in about half.

Also, just my opinion, but a Rosewill PS is about the bottom of the barrel for PS's for reputation. They make decent economy parts, but I wouldn't trust one with a expensive PC. If it fails, it could take the whole PC with it. I would stick to Antec, PC Power, Thermaltake, Corsair, or one of the more recognized brands.

You only list the one SSD drive. Most video setups need a couple of drives beside the boot. I use 500GB WD Black edit and archive drives and run most video data between them. But I assume you will add additonal drives.

Other than that, should be a good setup.

And welcome to our forums.

Outstanding feedback! Thank you very much. And glad to join the community ^^

So the 150GB Raptor for boot would be ideal for now over the SSD.... until the better high-end SSD become more affordable. hmm

And for PSU how about....

CORSAIR CMPSU-550VX 550W ATX12V V2.2 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139004

a better pick?

[johns0]

Get a 650w corsair or antec,gives you a little breathing room.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139005

[lordsmurf]

redwudz has a point. Adobe CS3 MC alone wants about 18GB of space. I think CS4 wants more.

[redwudz]

Yes, the Corsair is a much better choice. And you might look into modular power supplies. Much better than stuffing all the unused PS cables into some cranny in the case.

I've been happy with the Raptor. Some new OS's like Vista and W7 automatically defrag, so with a SSD, you have to turn that off for those drives or risk SSD burnout. The problem with SSD defragging is that the defrag puts the data back in the same place each time and SSD cells do wear out from overuse.

My understanding is the firmware in the SSD moves the data around automatically to balance out the wear. That's why they need a lot of free space. I loved the speed of the SSD, but I have a 60GB one, much too small for a boot drive with newer OS's like Vista or W7 with lots of added programs. And with my PC, the AHCI BIOS for my HDDs slows down the boot by several seconds, even with the SSD being used, so I gave up worrying about boot speed. The Raptors are fairly fast, though.

[Engineering]

redwudz has a point. Adobe CS3 MC alone wants about 18GB of space. I think CS4 wants more.

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right? Or would it stutter given SSD have high Sequential Access but so so writing speed? I wonder if anyone has tried a SSD setup and ran Premiere CS4 for a while.

[Constant Gardener]

My current favorite hard drive choice is a pair of single-platter 500 GB Seagates:
http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=36050&vpn=ST3500418AS&manufacture=Seagate&promoid=1065

fast, quiet, and very convenient for shuffling video around. Toss in a third drive, large and slow, for mass storage.

[rallynavvie]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right? Or would it stutter given SSD have high Sequential Access but so so writing speed? I wonder if anyone has tried a SSD setup and ran Premiere CS4 for a while.

Well, a good SSD can beat a rotational drive in both access speeds and sustained I/O but they're very pricey right now and there are some issues with how they work like redwudz mentioned. As to how well something like Premiere would run you have to keep in mind that once an application is launched and loaded it doesn't make that many calls to the drive it's installed to. In the case of Premiere it may make those calls when certain effects are used, but probably only once and then it's loaded into memory. You'd see some performance increase from keeping your source video on an SSD or the like since it would be able to scrub through video quicker but probably not enough to justify the cost.

Considering much of the rest of your build isn't the very pinnacle (read: most expensive) of the current offerings I don't think the SSD fits in with the rest of your build. Otherwise what you've got looks great for a quick desktop. Like redwudz mentioned one of the Raptors would be a nice boot drive (I like access speeds over sustained I/O for OS and applications) and then one of the bigger drives like the Samsung SpinPoints or Western Digital RE4s for your storage and project drives (ideally it would be nice to have two of these) since they have much better sustained I/O for working with large files.

[deadrats]

@Engineering

i consider that system to be a complete waste of money:

SSD - $130 for a 30 gig drive? really?!? ssd is one of those over-hyped technologies, much like that silly "killer gaming nic", a way to sucker people into paying big money for something that offers little in return. any new high density 7200 rpm hdd will offer more than enough read/write performance, and even the 5400 rpm 1.5tb drives i am currently using offer excellent performance as measured by hdtach. i can fill up a 30 gig boot drive within 20 minutes, i wouldn't even consider it.

i7-860 - another waste of money, intel is set to debut the clarkdales in the second week of january and there has been an announcement that intel will be releasing a driver shortly thereafter that allow the integrated on die gpu to accelerate video transcoding; anyone that knows how drivers work will tell you that unlike special instruction sets like SSE or api's like direct x compute or open cl, applications don't need to be coded to take advantage of it, the driver will just offload floating point operations to the gpu, thus the acceleration will be available for all apps.

gtx 260 - another waste considering ati already has dx11 cards available in the $130, namely the 5750, that can match the 260 for half the price and with update features.

oh, and $160 for a computer case that does nothing as far as performance is concerned, is the biggest waste of money.

[jagabo]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right?

Premiere might start up really fast but working won't be any faster unless you are using uncompressed video and hardly doing anything to it.

[Emello]

You don't say how you will be using this system. Do you intend to overclock? You're buying fast RAM and a very well cooled case. Both necessary if you're overclocking. Also, if you are going to overclock, or if you want your cpu to run extra cool, you might look into buying a heatsink/cooler, instead of using the stock Intel one. I agree with the others who suggested changing video card, SSD, and power supply. The new ATI video cards support Direct X 11, use little power at idle, and are faster than comparable Nvidea cards. With power supplies greater weight and price usually mean better. PC Power and Cooling, Corsair, Antec are all good. I use 3 Seagate 500 GB Barracuda 7200.12 hard drives, not as fast as Raptors, but not as hot, noisy, costly. Have fun with the build.

[ocgw]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right?

Premiere might start up really fast but working won't be any faster unless you are using uncompressed video and hardly doing anything to it.

I have heard you say that before, but it seems to me that low bit rate video would let the SSD zoom, not high bit rate uncompressed video

Not trying to start chit, just seems to me that uncompressed video would go slow on any cpu making the hdd speed not matter, but that low bit-rate video would remove the cpu as the bottleneck and let the SSD "take off"

ocgw

peace

[deadrats]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right?

Premiere might start up really fast but working won't be any faster unless you are using uncompressed video and hardly doing anything to it.

I have heard you say that before, but it seems to me that low bit rate video would let the SSD zoom, not high bit rate uncompressed video

Not trying to start chit, just seems to me that uncompressed video would go slow on any cpu making the hdd speed not matter, but that low bit-rate video would remove the cpu as the bottleneck and let the SSD "take off"

it's the exact opposite, the more compressed video is the more the cpu (or gpu, in the case of gpu accelerated apps) becomes the bottle neck, during both decompressing and compressing, uncompressed video taxes the cpu relatively little when you consider the bit rates it's using.

try it for yourself: take a 1080p video and compress it with h264 or vc-1 and try to edit it, play back, whatever test you want, then take the same video compressed at 25mb/s dv and do the same test, then use a lossless codec and repeat the tests and finally use no compression and rerun the tests.

[jagabo]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right?

Premiere might start up really fast but working won't be any faster unless you are using uncompressed video and hardly doing anything to it.

I have heard you say that before, but it seems to me that low bit rate video would let the SSD zoom, not high bit rate uncompressed video

Sure the SSD will zoom reading and writing the video data. But the CPU is the bottleneck if you're doing anything more than simply copying the file.

For example, going from an hour of DV to h.264 encoded video it might take five minutes to read the DV data off a hard drive, and half a minute to write the h.264 data to the drive. But it will take two hours to compress the video. And with any decent encoder those disk reads and writes will overlap with the encoding so the total encoding time will barely be over two hours. Even if the SSD could speed the disk writes up to infinitely fast you'll get virtually no improvement in conversion speed.

Fast drives only help when drive speed is the bottleneck.

[johns0]

gtx 260 - another waste considering ati already has dx11 cards available in the $130, namely the 5750, that can match the 260 for half the price and with update features.

I read a few different reviews and the 260gtx beat the 5750 in all the tests.

[redwudz]

When I had my SSD installed as a boot drive, Photoshop 3 would load from it in about half the time compared to a regular HDD. Big difference there, but I didn't really see any speed increase in regular PS operations. I did have the scratch drive allocated to a different HDD. I like the performance of SSDs, but I don't think they are a mainstream device for PCs just yet, IMO. Now if you had maybe three SSDs of a large capacity, you would likely have a fair performance improvement, but you'd also be broke.$$$

I've been happy with my Raptor and two 500GB HDDs. The i5 and i7 do offer some improvements in data processing throughput, so I agree they may be a good choice. For encoding, the faster the CPU, the faster the encode most times. Multithreaded applications do benefit from multiple cores, so that is also good.

Some newer video cards do offer some boost in encoding power, but the CPU is still doing most of the work.

The PC case you use is up to you. I have two Lian Li cases that I consider fairly expensive. But the fit and quality will outlast most other cases, so I figure them as an investment.

[ocgw]

If space wouldn't be an issue, Premiere would indeed fly running off a SDD drive right?

Premiere might start up really fast but working won't be any faster unless you are using uncompressed video and hardly doing anything to it.

I have heard you say that before, but it seems to me that low bit rate video would let the SSD zoom, not high bit rate uncompressed video

Sure the SSD will zoom reading and writing the video data. But the CPU is the bottleneck if you're doing anything more than simply copying the file.

For example, going from an hour of DV to h.264 encoded video it might take five minutes to read the DV data off a hard drive, and half a minute to write the h.264 data to the drive. But it will take two hours to compress the video. And with any decent encoder those disk reads and writes will overlap with the encoding so the total encoding time will barely be over two hours. Even if the SSD could speed the disk writes up to infinitely fast you'll get virtually no improvement in conversion speed.

Fast drives only help when drive speed is the bottleneck.

@ deadrats and jagaboo, thx for that explanation, I have never worked w/ uncompressed video, and it seems "counterintuitive" to me that higher bit rate is easier on the cpu, but it make sense, I understand now

ocgw

peace

[rallynavvie]

When I had my SSD installed as a boot drive, Photoshop 3 would load from it in about half the time compared to a regular HDD. Big difference there, but I didn't really see any speed increase in regular PS operations. I did have the scratch drive allocated to a different HDD.

The reverse of that situation where I really want to test a good SSD. I don't care how long it takes for programs to load as I usually leave them open throughout the work day/night but running the SSD as your scratch drive could really speed up some of those Adobe apps. Have you tried using the SSD as your scratch volume? Almost makes me want to go get a small, decently-priced one to find out.

Lian Li cases are really great, but they are not cheap. If you buy them from a retailer like NewEgg then there isn't as much markup and they're priced a lot closer to their worth instead of their name. I still have a 12 year old PC-60 that inherits the #3 workstation/server (the older DH800 right now) and all I've ever needed to do with it was replace the fans a couple times. My PC-V1010B will probably inherit my #1 system for a few years at least. While I love Lian Li cases I don't always recommend them because of their cost. For most folks a heavy, steel case with plastic bits is probably enough to last them the life of their system. I just can't stand the rattles and hums from some of those cheaper cases after several months of use

[deadrats]

gtx 260 - another waste considering ati already has dx11 cards available in the $130, namely the 5750, that can match the 260 for half the price and with update features.

I read a few different reviews and the 260gtx beat the 5750 in all the tests.

note that i said match, not beat. in all the reviews i have seen the 5750 at worst is about 10 fps behind and at best is tied with the gtx 260, when you're dealing with 80-90 fps the differences between the 2 are not that great. furthermore the gtx260 retails for about $225 while the 5750 retails for about $130. furthermore the 5750 is a dx11 part and in order for a gpu to be dx11 compliant it has to support dx compute, not to mention the 5750's superior video playback capabilities and it's integrated audio controller:

http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/ati-radeon-hd-5000/hd-5750/Pages/ati-r...fications.aspx

and when you factor in nvidia's current troubles: they have effectively abandoned the desktop market, they have given up on trying to get a license to make chipsets for the core i5/i7, they have repeatedly said that fermi's primary target is the hpc market were cuda can shine and be used as a marketing tool, and the fact that all current nvidia based cards are "old" technology (and this is coming from the owner of a 9600 gso who happens to think cuda has lots of potential), why would anyone buy any nvidia based card at the moment?

buying an nvidia based card right now is throwing your money down the toilet, for less than the $225 the gtx 260 costs you can buy a 5770 that will have it for lunch.

incidentally, for those wishing to expand their mind, find a good read or just read something interesting, google the number 5770, i can't tell you the significance of the number because of this forum's rules, but let's just say it ties in nicely with the season at hand, not to mention the most recent episode of "american dad".

[poisondeathray]

As much as I like ATI, the next generation Adobe Suite CS5 will be cuda enabled. It will have acceleration for AVCHD, h.264 etc... but only Nvidia, not Open CL. This may or may not be a factor in your decision. Adobe recently showed a demo editing multiple AVCHD streams in real time in Premiere with GPU acceleration on a CS5 beta build (this is impossible currently , even with dual socket i7 workstations and $5000 quadros)

I would rather have apps support Open CL , but Cuda has had an early start and a small foothold...

[isapc]

I have win 7 64 bit on a 32gig solid state
you might want to consider a raptor
win7 64 bit installs diferently on a SSD
it disables features like readyboost on instalation and users part of the SSD
for this fucntion.I also have a gtx 285 ,when using cuda based programs for video anything less than 8 gig my computer crashes .64 bit win 7 is a completely diferent game than on a SSD than a SATA drive

[deadrats]

As much as I like ATI, the next generation Adobe Suite CS5 will be cuda enabled. It will have acceleration for AVCHD, h.264 etc... but only Nvidia, not Open CL. This may or may not be a factor in your decision. Adobe recently showed a demo editing multiple AVCHD streams in real time in Premiere with GPU acceleration on a CS5 beta build (this is impossible currently , even with dual socket i7 workstations and $5000 quadros)

that certainly is impressive but we need to keep things in perspective: how much is that new suite going to cost? almost $1000? yes it will be cuda accelerated, so is the currently available "rapid hd" plug in but said plug in only works with top of the line quadro fx video cards that cost $2000. it does few people any good if the new suite is cuda enabled if in addition to the software you can only make use of it with an expensive fermi based quadro (as i'm willing to bet will be the case).

if the op waits just a few months, the clarkdales will be out, the video transcoding driver will be out and he will be able to enjoy gpu accelerated encoding with all video apps.

and by this time next year sandy bridge will be out and nvidia's cuda technology will be an interesting footnote in computing history, once the gpu gets fully integrated into the cpu all those gpgpu api's, stream, cuda, open cl, will all be still born.

[jagabo]

if the op waits just a few months, the clarkdales will be out, the video transcoding driver will be out and he will be able to enjoy gpu accelerated encoding with all video apps.

Clarkedale will underperform, give crappy encoding, be full of bugs, and will not work with all transcoding apps.

[poisondeathray]

that certainly is impressive but we need to keep things in perspective: how much is that new suite going to cost? almost $1000? yes it will be cuda accelerated, so is the currently available "rapid hd" plug in but said plug in only works with top of the line quadro fx video cards that cost $2000. it does few people any good if the new suite is cuda enabled if in addition to the software you can only make use of it with an expensive fermi based quadro (as i'm willing to bet will be the case).

You're mixing up encoding with decoding. The rapid hd plugin is primarily for gpu accelerated ENcoding. Editing in real time requires low latency DEcoding. Anyone here who has experience editing h.264 or AVCHD will know how big of a deal this is.

Yes it's expensive, but they haven't mentioned if it would work with the more affordable consumer editions e.g. premiere elements etc... but I would expect it to.

They have publically stated it will work with a gtx285, (quadro series not required). However, the cuda part for decoding is enabled by the VP2 engine, (not the shaders used for gaming ) which is exactly the same thing on your $50 card as it is on your $500 card or $5000 quadro. Now they could be "jerks" and limit access by driver tweaks (much like they do with quadro drivers)

if the op waits just a few months, the clarkdales will be out, the video transcoding driver will be out and he will be able to enjoy gpu accelerated encoding with all video apps.

Video ENcoding isn't the issue here. You can get GPU accelerated apps already. But we all know the quality leaves something to be desired. (max quality, or speed at a certain "quality" level). Hopefully they can bring farther improvements to the table.

and by this time next year sandy bridge will be out and nvidia's cuda technology will be an interesting footnote in computing history, once the gpu gets fully integrated into the cpu all those gpgpu api's, stream, cuda, open cl, will all be still born.

I hope so, but it requires a huge paradigm shift and massive programming efforts. I suspect it will take more than a year for the transition. And a few years at minimum until we get acceptable performance/quality. Have a look at cuda enabled apps which have been in development for a few years now - they still suck for ENcoding. The problem is the majority of ENcoding calculations are not amenable to massive parallelization. You will unlikey (well not until everything is rewritten from the ground up - not going to happen anytime soon) get quality as good as a CPU ENcode

[deadrats]

if the op waits just a few months, the clarkdales will be out, the video transcoding driver will be out and he will be able to enjoy gpu accelerated encoding with all video apps.

Clarkedale will underperform, give crappy encoding, be full of bugs, and will not work with all transcoding apps.

and you base this on what exactly?

the slowest clarkdale will come clocked at 2.93ghz, the fastest at 3.46ghz, it has turbo and hyperthreading, runs cool and consumes very low power and the gpu accelerated encoding will come courtesy of a driver that offloads fp ops to the integrated gpu, as such the encoding can't be "crappy" since it doesn't rely on a proprietary api and since all it's doing is ofloading floating point ops all transcoding apps will see a significant speed increase without the need to recompile or support a proprietary extension.

by definition, that's how drivers work.

[JimmyS]

gtx 260 - another waste considering ati already has dx11 cards available in the $130, namely the 5750, that can match the 260 for half the price and with update features.

According to this review:
http://hothardware.com/Articles/ATI-Radeon-HD-5770-and-5750-Mainstream-DX11-GPUs/

In their conclusion they said this:
"The new Radeon HD 5700 series cards don't quite dominate the competition, however. In fact, the GeForce GTX 260 Core 216 can be had for about the same price as the Radeon HD 5770, but the GeForce outpaced the Radeon in every test."

I've been an ATI user for many years, but I must give NVIDIA their credit when it is due.

As for the choice of an Antec 1200 case. While I haven't used the 1200, I have built several systems with its mid-tower sibling 900 case. I picked up a 900 case for myself over the black-friday sales weekend from NewEgg. It is an excellent case, with superb air flow. The 1200 has pretty much an identical design as the 900 case, but is extended to a full-tower size (more fans also). It will work great for this system, and will be able to handle any future upgrades you want to throw at it.

[deadrats]

You're mixing up encoding with decoding. The rapid hd plugin is primarily for gpu accelerated ENcoding. Editing in real time requires low latency DEcoding. Anyone here who has experience editing h.264 or AVCHD will know how big of a deal this is.

here's what you said:

It will have acceleration for AVCHD, h.264 etc... but only Nvidia, not Open CL.

i took that to mean encoding, i was under the impression that it already supported gpu accelerated decoding.

Video ENcoding isn't the issue here. You can get GPU accelerated apps already. But we all know the quality leaves something to be desired. (max quality, or speed at a certain "quality" level). Hopefully they can bring farther improvements to the table.

not to sound like a broken record but the gpu acceleration i have referred to a number of times isn't the same type of gpu acceleration currently available: currently it requires an application to have a code path that makes use of either an open source (open cl) or proprietary (cuda, stream) api and thus yes quality can vary. what intel is going to be releasing is a driver that offloads floating point operations from the cpu portion of clarkdale to the gpu portion of clarkdale for faster calculations. this will be seamless and transparent to the application, there is no difference in quality nor the need for the app to specifically be coded for it.

I hope so, but it requires a huge paradigm shift and massive programming efforts. I suspect it will take more than a year for the transition. And a few years at minimum until we get acceptable performance/quality. Have a look at cuda enabled apps which have been in development for a few years now - they still suck for ENcoding. The problem is the majority of ENcoding calculations are not amenable to massive parallelization. You will unlikey (well not until everything is rewritten from the ground up - not going to happen anytime soon) get quality as good as a CPU ENcode

there is no need for a "paradigm shift", nor does it require any "massive programming effort", again this isn't cuda. what sandy bridge will do is offload the floating point calculations from the hybrid fp/sse unit that is currently used to the integrated gpu, since gpu's are way faster at floating point math.

it doesn't matter if the app is multithreaded, can be multithreaded, it makes zero difference, at the low level what is going to happen is when the cpu sees an x87 instruction it will decode it and send it to the gpu for much faster processing.

think back to the days of the math co-processor, you didn't need to have on installed, if you didn't have one the cpu would handle the calculation itself, if you had one it would offload them to the co-processor for faster calculation, it was transparent to the app. eventually the co-processor was moved on to the cpu die (which is what clarkdale is doing with the gpu) and finally it was integrated into the cpu itself as a floating point unit (which is what sandy bridge is about).

forget what you knew about cuda, open cl or the like, it's over, curtains, done for, once clarkdale and it's descendants arrive they will slowly go the way of the dodo.

[poisondeathray]

forget what you knew about cuda, open cl or the like, it's over, curtains, done for, once clarkdale and it's descendants arrive they will slowly go the way of the dodo.

The app still has to be written and optimized for those calculations. It's still a integrated GPU part. Current software encoders do not have these optimizations. They have to be re-written to take full advantage.

Clarkdale, no, it's a dual core part aimed for the mainstream. Yes it will be faster than current dual cores for ENcoding, but certainly not a quad core.

It's descendants have great potential. There will be several SKUs of Sandy Bridge offered , not all of them will have integrated GPU. Integrated GPU actually impairs overclocking potential. Clockspeed still is king for all applications, while parallelization may not scale as linearly.

Adobe is "in bed" with Nvidia right now. You can even see evidence of this with Flash GPU accelerated beta. If you think Nvidia will disappear overnight you are mistaken. Further, if Intel's integrated GPU can't work properly with Adobe software , and cannot decode multiple streams for editing in real time, then a Nvidia discrete GPU is still a better choice right now or in the next few months for those who do editing with Adobe products.

6-9 months is the average product cycle for tech products like CPU/GPU. That's a long time in computer electronics terms. You should buy for your current needs, and update frequently.