Maximum PC

I finally have some money to upgrade my PC. I am running a Intel Duo Core E Series Proc.
I want to finally upgrade my PC and not sure if I want the X79 or Z77 chipset. my budget is about $1500 for CPU (i7), MB, Power, Memory, SDD.
I dont know if I want Dedicated GPU yet because I dont game on my PC. Mostly video and photo editing (adobe suite).

Right now my MB choices are Asus Maximus V Formula or P9X79 Pro.

What do you guys think?

The only real benefit I see to going to the X79 platform is you can get more RAM, which is double that of the Z77 platform. But even with what you're going to use the computer for, I'm having a hard time believing you'll need more than 16GB of RAM.

asus sounds good to me. you could save some money going with an i53570k instead of the i7,

You don't need a 280$ Z77 Mobo, I don't care what you plan on doing with your computer. You should be able to get everything you need on a Z77 Mobo for under 200$, and I can't really justify spending more than 170$ on one.

As you can tell I dont upgrade often so im looking for something to last me another 5 years with some growth options. I know i could save here and there, but some parts I rather spend the money then not. So i was leaning to iBi7(k). (2) Samsung 830 or Intel SSD RAID 0. (1) HDD. Eventually i would like to get (2) IPS Monitors.
Still unsure if im going to go for a dedicated card or use the Intel HD4000 graphics.

The safest bet is to get a graphics card, as you'll have to mishmash between VGA/DVI/HDMI/DP on integrated.

On the flip side, you can use Lucid Virtu so the integrated graphics is free to do all the transcode work

If I do graphics card, I was thinking of AMD7950 series or Nvidia 660 series. I would like to try display port feature. I have been using DVI.

I had a herp-derp moment. The X79 platform and its processors don't have any IntelHD GPUs on them, meaning you're forced to buy a video card and you won't get any compute acceleration that could be used for media work. So I think for performance reasons, the Z77 platform would be better.

If you don't plan on gaming, you can settle for a $100 card even. Also be sure the display you're buying supports DP.

I love it when people just throw darts in the dark...

A couple of questions need to be asked before the question should be answered. Specifically, what is the source and quality of the video being edited? How much video editing is being done, i.e. a few a day, one or two a week, one or two every few months, etc... And what is the end use of the video's, i.e. saving to computer for local playback, uploading to youtube or similar, creating mobile video for tablets, smart phones, etc..., burning to DVD/Blu-Ray.

For a lot of people, a Z77 is fine, but X79 does have 6-core (& 8 core*) options to allow for faster encoding. AVCHD source content is notorius for needing a lot of CPU processing power.
*ASRock has enabled the use of all current LGA-2011 8-Core Xeon processors on their X79 motherboards, not that most people can afford a decent one....



If he's using Adobe it doesn't matter, they do not support transcoding on GPU's anyway, only a few in-program accelerations & 90% of those require an ATI or nVidia GPU. Adobe uses OpenCL(ATI) or CUDA(nVidia) to accelerate a few dozen in-program effects, transitions, previews & playbacks, neither of which are supported by Intel graphics. OpenGL which Intel does support is only used for a very tiny number of in-program transitions & in-program preview/playback.



We are the 1%.... just because we don't have to ask, doesn't mean that everyone knows.

Dammit now there is a Z87 chipset coming out that I will have to follow up. Im still using the P35 chipset.

I will be using Adobe CS6 and Premiere

LOL... there's always another chipset coming out...

Here's were things stand right now.
> Z77 / LGA-1155 is EOL - no new CPU's will be released for this chipset / socket

> X79 / LGA-2011 will be probably be EOL after Q1 2014 - Ivy-Bridge E will be released October 2013 - although Intel does not (officially) comment on unreleased products, IB-E should work on current X79 boards with a BIOS/UEFI update. IB-E may also include Intel's first 8-core non-Xeon desktop CPU... but I'm not holding my breath on that one. Should continue to be a CPU only platform, i.e. no integrated GPU.

> Z87 / LGA-1150 begins life next year & will be the platform of choice for mainstream use rocking the Haswell CPU's. Should bring noticeable performance advances on CPU side & may include significant performance advances on the GPU side, maybe even enough to wipe out AMD's performance advantage on their APU's...

> some are saying X89 may be released with IB-E, but I don't see that happening unless Intel decides to extend the LGA-2011 platform beyond IB-E.

LGA-2011 is designed more for an inexpensive 3D content creation system for the home user. Well inexpensive when compared to the multi-proc Xeon systems used by Pro's. It also has significant performance with current 6-core CPU's (12 threads) for Video editing / encoding work, especially when working with high-quality / lossless 1080p source & high-quality / lossless finished content. But unless you're doing a lot of it (i.e. daily), a Z77 system with a 3770K should be fine for most users.

Adobe CS6 does love multiple CPU threads & will push every bit of power it can out of any CPU you throw it's way. I setup a test with fresh video I shot, 44 seconds worth shot in 720p at an average bitrate of 32Mbps. Using Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to encode the video to h.264 Blu-Ray maximum quality took only 38.8 seconds on my LGA-2011 i7-3930K @ 4.4GHz. Benchmarks at stock speeds have shown the 3930K (3.2GHz) to be up to 20% faster than the 3770K (3.5GHz) in Premiere Pro CS5 / CS6, but the i7-3820 quad-core (cheapest LGA-2011 processor) to be about 5% slower than the 3770K.