Question / Help Dedicated recording build - xeon?

[AkimboBananas]

At first I wanted to get a dedicated recording build with a 6900k, but it's not that cheap. After looking around I found that I could find decently priced xeon processors with a lot of cores (second hand, on ebay, ect.).

Which one would you recommend for recroding 1080p60 lossless or even uncompressed at times?

ps: the cpu should fit a mobo which has a usb 3.0 for the razer ripsaw

Any help would be much appreciated, and sorry I don't know a lot about xeons

 

[C-Dude]

Generally Xeons are designed for servers/24 hour operation. And have a few more features.

i5/i7 are designed for PC and gaming/content creation/general desktop use.

You will seldom find a xeon with higher performance to price than an i7. This is mainly because Intel can charge more money for people that need the extra features. Xeons and i7s sometimes are not cross compatible with motherboards even if they use the same socket. (make sure your motherboard says it supports whatever chip you go with). And also many xeon motherboards are server motherboards which have a weird bios/don't support windows be careful of that.

Also keep in mind Number of cores does not mean better. If you have 8 cores but they are really slow, a 4 core processor might outperform it if its cores are a lot faster.

Generally video encoding can use tons of cores, but most applications and games work better on fewer faster cores. So you might want to note this if you are using other programs on your PC. To my knowledge OBS uses as many cores as possible but I am not 100% certain of OBS efficiency with tons of cores. My advice is don't go with more than 8.

Also the clock speed doesn't always equate to the speed. [Clock*Cores=Speed] is not always 100% the case. What you should do is look up multiple benchmarks of these CPUs before deciding and see which one is faster overall since just 1 benchmark might not scale across all programs. One great site is https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html which does use multiple benchmarks but is not 100% with the placing. (its hard to say exactly how fast CPUs are compared to each other since some CPUs are better at certain tests and others are better at others)

Long story short: You might be able to get a good xeon but generally i7s would be much better for people like you. Also more cores doesn't always equal better, and look for benchmarks.

 

[AkimboBananas]

Generally Xeons are designed for servers/24 hour operation. And have a few more features.

i5/i7 are designed for PC and gaming/content creation/general desktop use.

You will seldom find a xeon with higher performance to price than an i7. This is mainly because Intel can charge more money for people that need the extra features. Xeons and i7s sometimes are not cross compatible with motherboards even if they use the same socket. (make sure your motherboard says it supports whatever chip you go with). And also many xeon motherboards are server motherboards which have a weird bios/don't support windows be careful of that.

Also keep in mind Number of cores does not mean better. If you have 8 cores but they are really slow, a 4 core processor might outperform it if its cores are a lot faster.

Generally video encoding can use tons of cores, but most applications and games work better on fewer faster cores. So you might want to note this if you are using other programs on your PC. To my knowledge OBS uses as many cores as possible but I am not 100% certain of OBS efficiency with tons of cores. My advice is don't go with more than 8.

Also the clock speed doesn't always equate to the speed. [Clock*Cores=Speed] is not always 100% the case. What you should do is look up multiple benchmarks of these CPUs before deciding and see which one is faster overall since just 1 benchmark might not scale across all programs. One great site is https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html which does use multiple benchmarks but is not 100% with the placing. (its hard to say exactly how fast CPUs are compared to each other since some CPUs are better at certain tests and others are better at others)

Long story short: You might be able to get a good xeon but generally i7s would be much better for people like you. Also more cores doesn't always equal better, and look for benchmarks.

Thanks for the reply. That site is really helpful and I didn't know about the windows thing but I think that pcpartpicker will have my back. As for your last paragraph goes, I'm leaning towards a xeon build because there are quite a few of them on ebay which I can pick up for maybe 1/2 price (not as a whole but by parts) of what a new skylake/broadwell e build would cost me, but then again, if my main rig were to fail me, the xeon rig would not be an option to game on.

Worst case scenario is that the xeon will not be powerfull enough (which I doubt) and that it will be used as a dedicated server rig instead.

Feel free to add anything if I missed something and thanks again for the insightful reply!

 

[AkimboBananas]

Would ddr3 ram hurt me if I were to record 1080p60 lossless or even uncompressed for testing purposes (given that my drives would be sufficient)?

 

[C-Dude]

No not at all, really there isn't much of a difference between DDR3 and DDR4 RAM other than their compatibility. The type of RAM and the Speed don't really make much of a difference.

Check out these videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utWnjA4NzSA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-TWQ0rS-SI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWgzA2C61z4

What matters most is the amount of RAM, you probably don't need more than 8 gb for what your doing, in fact you probably would be fine with just 4 gb.

Also, for just local recordings, you don't need a separate build. If you record to low compression then it will barely use any performance (especially while using NVENC). What takes up a lot of processing power is compression. Which keeps quality at a much smaller file size, but this is pointless if you are doing local recordings since you probably are going reencode the video again which would completely redo all the compression. You are probably better off spending your money upgrading your current PC and buying a dedicated recording drive.

If you are streaming on the other hand there is much more of a point to this since you need to heavily compress the stream since it is at such a low bitrate.

There is really no point in recording to lossless nowadays since there is virtual no quality difference but there is a much larger file size. And low compatibility with media players, editors, and pretty much everything. If you want insane quality, just record to CRF (CQP) of around 8 and I promise you won't be able to tell the difference between that and uncompressed.

If you are building a recording PC because you want to lose 0 frames in game (or are getting the problem where you have to limit your fps because otherwise OBS gets lag) then you really don't need anything powerful, just a crummy i5 with a gtx 1050ti (for NVENC) would encode at probably even 4k60p fine.