[philbar71]

^ that i7 is the best price/performance ratio. if you want more GHZ then just overclock.

that board will support up to 16GB. the board will also do crossifre 4870's quite well. and it supports SLI as well.

[wafflehammer]

Originally Posted by philbar71

^ that i7 is the best price/performance ratio. if you want more GHZ then just overclock.

that board will support up to 16GB. the board will also do crossifre 4870's quite well. and it supports SLI as well.

wouldn't it be in intervals of 3 since it's triple channel?

[farinha]

No, the 1156 socket uses dual channel. The 1336 uses triple channel.

[wafflehammer]

Originally Posted by farinha

No, the 1156 socket uses dual channel. The 1336 uses triple channel.

bah i keep forgetting this bs :| i thought intel was making the 1366 i7 and the 1156 i5..but obviously i7 can be both :| my bad lol

[ni-cad]

Originally Posted by philbar71

Newegg.com - GIGABYTE GA-P55-UD4P LGA 1156 Intel P55 ATX Intel Motherboard - Intel Motherboards

^ that i7 is the best price/performance ratio. if you want more GHZ then just overclock.

that board will support up to 16GB. the board will also do crossifre 4870's quite well. and it supports SLI as well.

Well I'm going ahead with an i7 build as you've suggested but with an i7 950 3.03 Ghz processor as I'm a bit paranoid about overclocking, however I can't seem to find any way of fitting this board with 16 gig of DDR3 Ram, it would need 4x4GB sticks, but I can't find any

I really do need 16 gig, that's the minimum amount of Ram per core recommended by Adobe for After Effects (2 gig per core). Should I be looking for a different board, or Ram?

[vernong1992]

Originally Posted by ni-cad

Well I'm going ahead with an i7 build as you've suggested but with an i7 950 3.03 Ghz processor as I'm a bit paranoid about overclocking, however I can't seem to find any way of fitting this board with 16 gig of DDR3 Ram, it would need 4x4GB sticks, but I can't find any

I really do need 16 gig, that's the minimum amount of Ram per core recommended by Adobe for After Effects (2 gig per core). Should I be looking for a different board, or Ram?

There's really no point in stepping up to that i7 950, i7 860 CPU already destroys the q9650 as it is anyways. (don't compare the clock speed)

[ni-cad]

I've heard this aswell, not that I'm any expert but I'm facing a severe lack of Processing power at the moment for my video work, currently I'm running a core 2 duo 3Ghz (Ok it's only two cores) but, 11 seconds of 1080p footage with two effects applied in After Effects takes close to an hour just to preview (11 seconds)! I'm literally dead in the water at these kinds of operating speeds, it can take minuets before I even see a whole frame I'm worried that I'm going to find the same thing happens with an i7 and there are already users on the Adobe forums having problems.

I'm not pretending to be an expert on Processors or clock speeds etc but I really need the most processing power I can afford to get my hands on, a lot of these video apps (After Effects included) are terribly inefficient, After Effects isn't even 64 bit!! it's still limited to 4 gig of ram!! try working on a comp that's got 50 gig of footage, rendering times go up in to the day's/weeks!! Any last little bit of processing power I can utilize is going to be of real benefit.

Is an i7 950 such a bad idea? I really don't know anymore

[dirkpitt45]

Isn't After Affects CS4 64bit as well as 32bit?... Illustrator, photoshop, bridge, and I'm pretty sure all CS4 products come with a 64bit version and a 32bit. Might be time to upgrade your software as well as hardware.


I also think you are grossly over estimating the power required to run After Affects. I've looked around and it seems there are some problems with After Affects rendering times, but nothing on it when using an i7. The performance increase from core2 duo to i7 is probably a very large increase.

I'm not really sure how long video rendering would take, I just deal with images in photoshop and illustrator, the cs4 version of both. The only kind of video stuff I deal with is converting videos for my ipod Takes about 20-30min for a full avi-mp4 conversion on my phenom II 940. The i7 is a good deal more powerful then it as well.

IMO Get the i7 920, get 6gb 1600hz ram, a 60 or 80 gb SSD for OS and After Affects and go from there. Plop in your 4870's and you should be set. Also you shouldn't expect 1080p to render instantly, you'd need a powerful studio tower or something that is specifically made for that. Although those are probably crazy expensive and only worth it if you are going to make tons money off it, or have your work pay for some of it.

[ni-cad]

No such thing as 64 bit After Effects at the moment I'm afraid cs4 or otherwise, it's only just been announced that the next version of AE will be 64 bit see here > Future versions of After Effects will be 64-bit only - After Effects region of interest

6 gig of ram isn't even 1 gig per core on an i7, as I said Adobe recommend 2 gig per core minimum, 8 cores =16 gig, a lot of people are running AE with 32 gig of ram at the moment as when After effects renders it opens multiple instances of itself to speed up rendering one instance per processor core, each of these instances must be supplied with adequate memory or AE will choke.

The need I have for more processing is due in the most part to the types of compositions I create, mostly 3d and very FX intensive compositions at 1080p, After effects is not a true 3d app and very inefficient at working with it, this is where I've found processing power is needed the most, it's by no means impossible to create good comps using low amounts of processing power (even at HD resolution) that's just not where I'm going with my work.

I'll give you an example. this is one frame from one of my comps, it took 3 mins to render just this frame, it took a similar amount of time to build the frame in the comp, so 3 mins for one frame 29 frames per second means one second of this comp will take 89 mins to render and a similarly long time to preview (ie to process) within AE and I have 8 gig on this machine already at the moment,though it's not the footage size that's a problem, I could render this same shot with no visual effects in a fraction of a second but for the effect to be calculated takes a long long time, don't forget this is a moving image layer that is wrapped" around a shape that is also moving so there's a lot of processing involved. add to that the fact that in amongst this adjustments have to be made, a tweak here and a tweak there can take hours to be calculated and viewed.



This image is also only a single layer with no light sources or camera movements, most comps will have up to around 200 layers throughout the entire comp . . . now do you see what I'm up against, I may be underestimating how good these i7's are but I think your underestimating how much processing After effects can require. Obviously I'm hoping to see some improvement to this comp with a new rig but with the way my machine is at the moment I'm lucky to even be able to open it, it's utterly impossible to work with in any kind of creative capacity.