Advice for hi-end designer : Xeon vs i7 chip

Cliffsta · Sep 28, 2016

Hi folks,
I would much appreciate your buying advice

I am a designer who works in the Adobe Creative suite, including motion graphics, and some 3D studio Max. My heaviest type of work tends to be massive image files, 1gb in size, applying filters and post production. Not sure how photoshop utilises the cores, but I have come to the cliched question of what is best for my needs, given budget would be equal. In other words, if I had the same to spend on a chip - What suits me better? Xeon or top i7?

I have heard that Xeons are primarily for servers which require stability and long life and not really designed for peak performance. I have always worked on Xeons, and paid the premium to do so, and not sure I need to on my new machine.

Cliff

synphul · Sep 28, 2016

Depending on which filters you use, they may use hyper threading. Most actions and filters within photoshop don't so there's not a major difference between a quad core and octacore cpu. Cpu speed plays a role, xeon and i7 are a bit vague. Depends on which xeon and which i7. There are all different versions of both. An i5 or i7 will generally last you until you're ready to upgrade again, for that kind of workload and lifetime expectancy they aren't any less 'reliable'.

Servers generally mean something crunching numbers or processing data 24/7/365 year after year. It's not the same as a cpu occasionally applying a filter or effect in photoshop 8hrs a day. Xeons are also more 'durable' in terms of fault tolerance where there may very well be 30, 40, 100's of cpu's where an operational fault needs to be avoided at all cost. Same with the use of e.c.c. memory, something a server or server farm benefits from but the typical single user even using their pc as a workstation won't notice or benefit from.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-625/

As you can see, photoshop effects/filters rarely use more than 4 cores. In this next article it shows 3d studio max in a number of cases benefiting more from the faster 4c/8t 6700k than it does from the dual xeon setup with 48 physical cores.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-3ds-Max-2017-CPU-Performance-823/

13thmonkey · Sep 28, 2016

The real speed bump will come from whether your apps can use GPU acceleration, I know that lightroom can, and it makes a massive difference to 'developing' raw images. So what acceleration can your software use, either CUDA or openCL probably, then get an appropriate GPU.

Navje · Sep 28, 2016

Hey as a designer myself I have this answer for you.
If u are building multi cpu render machine, than chose xeon. If u are looking for single cpu than buy i7 6950x or i7 6900k.
Just one note if u are building multi cpu and if u will using Premier CC which does not support more than 32 cores/64 threads.

Cliffsta · Sep 28, 2016

synphul :

Depending on which filters you use, they may use hyper threading. Most actions and filters within photoshop don't so there's not a major difference between a quad core and octacore cpu. Cpu speed plays a role, xeon and i7 are a bit vague. Depends on which xeon and which i7. There are all different versions of both. An i5 or i7 will generally last you until you're ready to upgrade again, for that kind of workload and lifetime expectancy they aren't any less 'reliable'.

Servers generally mean something crunching numbers or processing data 24/7/365 year after year. It's not the same as a cpu occasionally applying a filter or effect in photoshop 8hrs a day. Xeons are also more 'durable' in terms of fault tolerance where there may very well be 30, 40, 100's of cpu's where an operational fault needs to be avoided at all cost. Same with the use of e.c.c. memory, something a server or server farm benefits from but the typical single user even using their pc as a workstation won't notice or benefit from.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Photoshop-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-625/

As you can see, photoshop effects/filters rarely use more than 4 cores. In this next article it shows 3d studio max in a number of cases benefiting more from the faster 4c/8t 6700k than it does from the dual xeon setup with 48 physical cores.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-3ds-Max-2017-CPU-Performance-823/

Thanks for your great advice and references

Cliffsta · Sep 28, 2016

Navje :

Aha - therefore Xeon is overkill. I only really do stuff myself, rather than rendering sequences etc.
Many thanks!

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Advice for hi-end designer : Xeon vs i7 chip

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