Computer Advice needed, please.

Sandtree

Norman-B said:

Sandtree, not too sure this is a help. I'm doubtful this will be in my £400-£500 budget.

I already gave my helpful advice hence saying the MBA seems an odd recommendation for you and if you did want to explore the Mac options (and could increase budget slightly) then look at the Mac Mini but I would hold off until Gen2 comes later this year.

This however is a discussion forum; @arciere commented that all Macs are overpriced and offered to find numerous faster/cheaper options for any given computer... not helpful for you but would be helpful for me if they are able to do this as an equivalent workstation from Dell is a fair bit more.

jamesd

For video editing you first need minimally sufficient RAM, then hardware encoding (compression) for the version you want to use, software that supports your hardware and then more RAM.

Your current CPU has no useful hardware encoding support so it isn't going to be fast at video work. A table showing hardware support us available here:


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Quick_Sync_Video

HEVC and VP9 are current state of the art and AV1 is the new one likely to dominate next. Intel CPU generations are the digit or two after the i3, i5 or whatever, so:

i5-11something

I7-9something

The i something is raw CPU speed, while the chip generation tells you about hardware supported encoding and decoding. Generations include:

11 Rocket Lake 

10 Caskade Lake, Comet Lake, Ice Lake, Amber Lake

9 Skylake, Coffee Lake

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core

An i9-9something CPU might be much faster than an i3-11somethong CPU in CPUbench score but much, much slower if you're going to use VP9 encoding because the -11 has hardware for VP9 encoding and decoding while the -9 doesn't have any hardware for it. Using the bit older HEVC codec the -9 has hardware support for basic colour depth encoding so wouldn't suffer as badly.


If time isn't critical there is quite a good chance that the Intel CPUs due this autumn will have AV1 hardware encoding, but they might not.

If you don't want to wait for that, try for a -11 Rocket Lake CPU to get normal quality VP9 encoding and AV1 decoding in high quality.

Failing that, -10 Ice Lake for base VP9 encoding and decoding.

The two Dells mentioned earlier were

£569 10th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-10400 processor(6-Core 12M Cache 2.9GHz to 4.3GHz) in a compact desktop.

£569 11th Generation Intel® Core™ i3-1115G4 Processor (6MB Cache, up to 4.1 GHz) in an all in one including a monitor. 2 cores, 4 threads.

For video the i3-11 is likely to be better than the i5-10 if you're going to be doing high quality VP9 encoding or want hardware AV1 decoding (and you should want at least AV1 decoding if you can). Yet the 10th generation i5 has many more cores so would be better if VP1 isn't needed.

But both look like fairly odd choices for you. Compact PCs carry a price premium for compactness that you may not need, so non-compact could be a better compromise . All in one include a new monitor and future difficulties upgrading, a waste of money if you don't need a new monitor.


I'm not greatly impressed by Dell's selection but maybe:

£799 XPS tower 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-11400 processor (6-Core, 12M Cache, 2.6GHz to 4.4GHz) and NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1650 SUPER™ 4GB GDDR6.

All of those come with 256G SSD and 8G RAM.

Leaving Dell, perhaps start with

 
£629 Mesh Home/Office/Gaming PC - Intel core i5-11400 6 Core 2.6GHz , 16GB memory, 1TB HDD + 256GB SSD, Windows 10 Pro https://www.meshcomputers.com/professional-desktop-pcs/home-office-pcs/mesh-elite-11400/

That doubles the RAM to 16G and adds a 1TB spinning drive while otherwise similar to the all in one, with 11th generation CPU. Changing to a cheaper case saves £6, adding WiFi adds £12.


Or

£569 Mesh  Midi Case, Asus PRIME H510M Motherboard, Intel i5-11400 Processor, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD + 1TB HDD ,Windows 10 Pro https://www.meshcomputers.com/professional-desktop-pcs/ready-to-ship-pcs/mesh-business-11th-rts/

Same doubling of RAM and extra disk but cheaper base components and WiFi standard. Seems like a clearly better buy than the Dell compact or desktop because of the RAM.

Cheaper? How about

£409.98 Xenta MT Core i5 11th Gen 8GB RAM 240GB SSD GT 710 No OS Desktop i5-11400F CPU PC https://www.ebuyer.com/1257711-xenta-mt-core-i5-11th-gen-8gb-ram-240gb-ssd-gt-710-xr-d5262

But no: that's the F model CPU without built in graphics card and the Intel hardware encoding and decoding. Yet that implies that something similar non-F might be around for £50 or so more. Windows licenses that are legitimately transferrable are cheap on eBay, but so are illegitimate ones at the same sort of price. You'll need a thumb drive to download Windows onto so you can install it then enter the licence info 

You can do more searching. I've stuck to 11th generation and only a quite limited search.

It doesn't matter for your current hardware but as of December 2019 Videopad didn't support hardware encoding and decoding, which they planned to change: https://nch.invisionzone.com/topic/29610-gpu-support-for-videopad-intel-quick-sync-cuda-and-etc/


Whatever else you do, try to keep your original source videos. Each encode/decide cycle loses detail and codecs keep getting better. Or maybe try lossless options in VP9 or AV1 to see if that saves space without generation loss, planning it to be a once only operation.

jamesd

So, £400-500 budget? I didn't make that but it looks just barely doable with more searching.

A more technical option would be a search for i5-11400 barebones and add the bits you want yourself. Even more technical would be a motherboard and CPU swap while hopefully keeping all of your other components.

Norman-B

Jamesd, thank you for sharing all that info. I need to read it more than once to take it in (old brain🙄)
Norm

jamesd

Two free things that you can do:

1. Set up 12000 megabytes of virtual memory and maximum 32000 megabytes. Windows does this on the fly by default but that's considerably slower than pre-allocating the space. Instructions at https://computerinfobits.com/adjust-page-file-windows-10/ but ignore their size suggestions, I've adjusted for what you're doing.

2. Right click on your disk drive letter and choose properties then tools and defragment. For an SSD Windows will seldom actually defragment but it will tell the SSD which space it no longer needs so the SSD can more efficiently reuse the space. While this should be automatic sometimes it seems not to be and once a week or month repeats might be useful.

Defragmenting in the spinning disk meaning of moving files so they are in one or as few pieces as possible isn't much use for SSDs. While they are faster reading defragmented things they lie about where things are put to prolong drive life (wear leveling) or skip damaged areas so actually getting things to be defragmented is a challenge. The disk map in the operating system might show defragmented but reality on the hardware could be radically different.

[Deleted User]

jamesd said:

Two free things that you can do:

1. Set up 12000 megabytes of virtual memory and maximum 32000 megabytes. Windows does this on the fly by default but that's considerably slower than pre-allocating the space. Instructions at https://computerinfobits.com/adjust-page-file-windows-10/ but ignore their size suggestions, I've adjusted for what you're doing.

2. Right click on your disk drive letter and choose properties then tools and defragment. For an SSD Windows will seldom actually defragment but it will tell the SSD which space it no longer needs so the SSD can more efficiently reuse the space. While this should be automatic sometimes it seems not to be and once a week or month repeats might be useful.

Defragmenting in the spinning disk meaning of moving files so they are in one or as few pieces as possible isn't much use for SSDs. While they are faster reading defragmented things they lie about where things are put to prolong drive life (wear leveling) or skip damaged areas so actually getting things to be defragmented is a challenge. The disk map in the operating system might show defragmented but reality on the hardware could be radically different.

Very outdated advice with SSD systems. As the article you link to suggests, you are better off leaving the virtual memory to be managed by Windows and I agree with that in all but very specific circumstances. If your system is needing to use 12GB of virtual memory then you seriously need to consider buying more RAM for the tasks you are doing.

Response to your above points.

1. "Set up 12000 megabytes of virtual memory" All you are doing is wasting 12GB of disk space that will rarely be used. Pre-allocation is not a benefit with SSD's. It is a benefit with spinning HDD's that end up with a fragmented pagefile.sys when it dynamically expands which increases seek time for the mechanical heads to locate each fragment but there is no such problem with an SSD as it has no moving parts so seek times are identical regardless of the data location.

In fact at a hardware level, it can be quicker for an SSD to expand a smaller page file than to modify a pre-allocated one. If the OS wants to write new data, the SSD will prefer to use a completely empty block if available and that will require 1 step - write. If the OS wants to modify a pre-allocated block on an SSD, it needs 3 steps - read the whole block, erase it and then write the modified data which takes longer. 

2. "For an SSD Windows will seldom actually defragment" - Not true - Windows never ever defragments an SSD. I agree that Windows doesn't regularly run the trim function as it should so it is worth running manually. Modern SSD's do have "garbage collection" routines that somewhat mitigate the need to trim as often.

"they are faster reading defragmented things" not true, makes no difference whatsoever. When an SSD wants to read a large file consisting of many blocks of data, it makes no difference whether the next block is adjacent on the same chip or on a different chip at the other end of the circuit board, the read time is identical.

When it comes to writing, SSD's will purposely spread the writing of multiple blocks across different chips to speed things up as the write process is relatively slow - using multiple chips speeds this up. Writing also generates a lot of heat which is another good reason for spreading those writes across many chips.

"so actually getting things to be defragmented is a challenge" - There is no challenge, no need to defragment ever, you need a different mindset to understand how SSD's work, fragmentation is irrelevant.

The only thing that affects performance of and SSD is the availability of empty blocks and the only thing 2 things that can be done to about that is regular trimming and keeping as much free space as possible - eg 25%.

jamesd

Most of your mistakes are corrected at https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd so I recommend that you read it.

Pre-allocating swap space makes less of a difference now but not yet none, particularly on older low RAM systems like this 4GB one. This system is likely to use 12GB of swap routinely and from experience with similar systems I know that preallocation can be noticeably faster. Norman-B can try it at no cost and easily undo it if after a bit of use it seems to make no difference.

Thanks for trying to correct me, I do get things wrong occasionally so I appreciate it. You just got unlucky this time so it's you rather than me doing the learning. Hopefully some others here will read the link and the collective wisdom of this place will increase.

[Deleted User]

jamesd said:

Most of your mistakes are corrected at https://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd so I recommend that you read it.

Pre-allocating swap space makes less of a difference now but not yet none, particularly on older low RAM systems like this 4GB one. This system is likely to use 12GB of swap routinely and from experience with similar systems I know that preallocation can be noticeably faster. Norman-B can try it at no cost and easily undo it if after a bit of use it seems to make no difference.

Thanks for trying to correct me, I do get things wrong occasionally so I appreciate it. You just got unlucky this time so it's you rather than me doing the learning. Hopefully some others here will read the link and the collective wisdom of this place will increase.

I do stand corrected in the "Windows never ever defragments an SSD" comment, this was a surprise to me.

However on reading the article, he is referring to the Windows logical file system that is being defragmented, not the data on the physical SSD itself and it is due to a specific use case regarding volume shadow copies and it only does it once a month and only if necessary. Do it any more frequently will just add unnecessary wear to the SSD with no benefit.

Furthermore the data on the physical SSD is still fragmented after Windows has done a defrag - as far as the physical SSD is concerned all the data has just been shuffled around for no reason, it is only done because the Windows file system is inadequate.

The OS can't see where the data is stored on the actual chips on the SSD. A map is used to link the LBA's to the SSD memory, and when you write to the SSD, data can literally go anywhere and the OS has no idea where it is in relation to all the other data at a physical level.

The defrag the article is talking about is at the "map" level that the OS is presented with from the SSD, all it does is re-arrange that map to provide contiguous blocks for files as the OS sees them, the actual data on the SSD will be moved in the process but it will still be scattered all over the place and fragmented but the OS doesn't know or even care.

For example, with old HDD's, if I had a 2GB drive and create 2x1GB partitions, then half the physical disk space is reserved for each partition and data will only reside on either physical half of the disk.

If I partition an SSD in the same way and it has say 8 NAND chips, it doesn't allocate 4 chips for each partition, the data can be stored on absolutely any chip whatsoever.

If Microsoft used a better file system like Ext4 then there wouldn't ever be a need for defragging, I have a 16TB NAS running Ext 4 on spinning disks and it has never been defragged and will never need it.

If you want to check when defrag last ran on your PC:

Get-EventLog -LogName Application -Source "microsoft-windows-defrag" | sort timegenerated -desc | fl timegenerated, message

Or see how fragmented is it:

defrag /a C:

My PC reports 12% fragmented and has never done a defrag according to the event log.


I stand by my original comments, don't try to defrag an SSD manually, there is no benefit - just leave Windows to do what it does.

Laz123

The equivalent defrag for an ssd is called a TRIM. To check that TRIM is activated https://www.windowscentral.com/how-ensure-trim-enabled-windows-10-speed-ssd-performance

arciere

Sandtree said:

Mac Pro, 28 core Xeon processor, 1.5TB RAM, 2TB SSD, Twin Vega II 32GB v cards

How much was it?