Help With new p.c ( gaming/gaming ahhh)

[jimbojams]

Hi there ,
i really need a new p.c ,, my Vegas is to much for this one , also my DAW is to much ,, i currently have AMD A8 8GB
i would like 16 to 32 gb ..prob 16 as only have £1000.00 to spend , been saving for year and half ,,
ok im not sure on laptop or a tower i dont mind ,,, i would like an i7 really but i guess i5 be ok .
Now im looking at p.c world and a few other sites ,, All i get is Gaming computers ,,, im not interested i playing games ,, as many cpu cores as poss ..
Any way thats it ,,, do i really need a gaming p.c ,, does anyone know anwhere else i can try ,, im uk by the way
Thankyou everso in advance if you can help ,,,, Jim

[johnmeyer]

I'm running Vegas on a PC I bought over ten years ago. It works just great. However, it was the best PC available back then and does have a fast i7 processor and 16 GB of RAM.

PCs haven't gotten that much faster for over a decade. The only place you can get improvement is storage (larger spinning hard drives for the video, and fast SSD drives for the programs & O/S), GPU, and CPU cores. Vegas is very particular about the GPU it can use, and you need to consult with Magix to find out what they currently support. When Sony owned Vegas, they did a terrible job helping customers figure out what card, and what card driver to use. Vegas user Nick Hope used to provide a support page to try to help people, but I haven't visited the Vegas forum since shortly after Magix took over, so I don't know if he has kept that current.

So, you might try to figure out what part of your current computer is causing things to run slowly. Is it slow on the timeline? Is is slow when rendering? Do you have any benchmarks or other information that gives you an idea of how much faster things will be with a new computer? You need to do these calculations because, with a limited budget, you might fail to get a computer that has the right processor (if that is what is causing the slowness); graphic card/GPU (if that is the problem); enough RAM; the right disk and disk subsystem; etc.

[jagabo]

ok im not sure on laptop or a tower i dont mind ,,, i would like an i7 really but i guess i5 be ok .

Keep in mind that a laptop i7 is about the equivalent of a low end desktop i5 or high end i3.

[sophisticles]

PCs haven't gotten that much faster for over a decade.

I wish I had some of what you're smoking. The fastest Intel processor sold in 2010 was the Gulftown i7-980X Extreme Edition 6C/12T with a max memory support of 24 GB and it cost over $1000.

For $160 you can buy an AMD R5 3600 that in well threaded workloads will be between 2-3 times as fast and the 3600 supports up to 128 GB of ram, meaning that if you have a workload that needs a lot of ram, the i7 won't even run it, think heavy rendering or a heavy encode with many filters, effects and layers.

[johnmeyer]

PCs haven't gotten that much faster for over a decade.

I wish I had some of what you're smoking. The fastest Intel processor sold in 2010 was the Gulftown i7-980X Extreme Edition 6C/12T with a max memory support of 24 GB and it cost over $1000.

For $160 you can buy an AMD R5 3600 that in well threaded workloads will be between 2-3 times as fast and the 3600 supports up to 128 GB of ram, meaning that if you have a workload that needs a lot of ram, the i7 won't even run it, think heavy rendering or a heavy encode with many filters, effects and layers.

Clock speeds have not increased for almost fifteen years:

https://smoothspan.files.wordpress.com/2007/09/clockspeeds.jpg

This is due to basic limitations of how quickly electricity can move over copper (or any other electrical conductor) pathways. We are stuck at around 4 GHz.

All gains since around 2005 have come from parallelism and changes in instruction sets. Not all programs can benefit from either of these things, so for some programs, nothing has gotten faster. Fortunately, video involves a tremendous number of repetitive operations, many of which can be done in parallel, especially during rendering. However, parallelism has limits because of the overhead involved in breaking apart an operation, sending each part to a separate processor or core, and then reassembling the results.

Unfortunately, programming practices continue to degrade, and there is very little efficient code being written anymore. (I started with paper tape, a few kilobytes of memory, processor speeds below 1 MHz, and writing in assembly language to get every last bit of computing power out of early minicomputers and, later, personal computers.) As a result of lousy code, whatever gains in speed we've gotten in the last fifteen years have often been significantly compromised because of the slow, bloated code. Adobe's software is a prime example of inefficient code, although some of their programs have amazing features.