OK, been doing a ton more research and making decisions on each part as I go along.
Moving away from the mATX boards because although many have 4 RAM slots and air cooling is somewhat better in mATX cases, the cases I like can accommodate ATX boards. So why limit myself?
I believe there’s a statement “Go big or go home” regarding the board/case size discussion
And it looks like someone else entered the motherboard arena for Z390 I wasn’t expecting which is supermicro, they usually make server products and it looks like they’re loading an ATX board with everything including 10Gbe(which if you have a storage server somewhere could be useful) and the first party m.2 heatsinks, and wifi
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813183657
They even include a proper diagram of what’s using what lanes in their manual
Case wise something like this already includes some nice big fans
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811854004
Lots of great information in this thread, and the OP is probably closing in on a decision. Meanwhile, @D_S sent me back to the wood shed to figure out Shotcut’s CPU utilization, and I’m finally able to report some findings.
This post is a deep dive into Shotcut internals. It is not meant to convince anyone to buy low-grade hardware unless they want to. 
To avoid any confusion, all uses of the word “core” in this post and my last post refer to any hardware processing element whether that be a physical core or a hyperthreaded logical core. Many programmers use this terminology so that the word “thread” can refer exclusively to software threads. It is impossible to talk about parallelism problems if the word “thread” is ambiguous between hardware and software, so this is how we easily make a distinction.
So, a big thanks to @D_S for pointing me to a sample project that demonstrated 100% CPU utilization during export. I had claimed that Shotcut only used 8 cores based on my experience, so I was shocked when “The Fire Escape” benchmark used all 16 cores on one of my workstations. I made almost 100 test renders over a week’s period on multiple computers in multiple resolutions and codecs and every other configuration to find out the difference between that benchmark project and my own projects, and then verify my results.
I finally determined that the big yet simple difference between “The Fire Escape” and my projects was the x264 preset encoding option. “The Fire Escape” renders with preset=slow while all my projects are preset=veryfast. (The preset option can be found in Shotcut under Export tab > Other. It can also be passed into ffmpeg on the command line.)
On my 16-core box, when using preset=veryfast, there are 8 cores near 100%, maybe 2 cores around 10%, and the remaining 6 cores doing nada. This is how I reached the conclusion that Shotcut itself was only using 8 cores. Those 8 cores are receiving video frames, compositing tracks, and applying filters and transitions to create a final frame that is handed off to the encoder. When preset=slow, the other 8 cores on my box get blown up by the x264 encoder, meaning 8 cores for Shotcut and 8 cores for x264. (x264 could use even more cores if they were available.) But when rendering is set to preset=veryfast, the encoding process is so fast that the cores beyond 8 are hardly touched, if at all. To really remove all doubt, I rendered a project with Quick Sync to remove software encoding from the pipeline entirely, and Shotcut did not scale into all cores. For the most extreme example of Shotcut’s scaling abilities, I rendered a 480x270 timeline with 480x270 video clips using Quick Sync encoding. I never got CPU usage to go above 25% during the export on any hardware configuration, which means having bunches of cores buys us nothing. Shotcut has a very peculiar scaling pattern.
I have seen in previous Shotcut release notes that thread count has been modified over the months in accordance with memory consumption. So I am unable to confirm if Shotcut would spawn more threads if I had more RAM for it to grow into. (This box has 16 GB and was not 100% used, so I have my doubts.) What I can confirm from source code (mltcontroller.cpp in method Controller::realTime) is that the preview playback is capped to a hard-coded maximum of 4 threads. To get the smoothest playback experience, this means we still need the fastest cores we can get our hands on, because only 4 will be set to the task of generating a frame for the preview window. Having 32-cores at half the speed of a fast 16-core box would hurt badly once filter and compositing processes start to stack up on four slow cores.
Now the question becomes slow vs. veryfast for exporting. Everyone has their preferences and reasons, so I’m not trying to say one is right or wrong. But what I noticed is that when I exported a project that had 4K H.264 100Mbps sources using both slow and veryfast presets, then took PNG frame grabs from the same timestamp of each video and used ImageMagick to compare their structural similarity index (SSIM), I got this:
magick compare -verbose -metric ssim Frame.23-17.veryfast.png Frame.23-17.slow.png diff.png
Frame.23-17.veryfast.png PNG 3840x2160 3840x2160+0+0 8-bit sRGB 7.55084MiB 0.828u 0:00.849
Frame.23-17.slow.png PNG 3840x2160 3840x2160+0+0 8-bit sRGB 8.1859MiB 0.844u 0:00.845
Image: Frame.23-17.veryfast.png
Channel distortion: SSIM
red: 0.964682
green: 0.970023
blue: 0.961115
alpha: 0
all: 0.973955
Frame.23-17.veryfast.png=>diff.png PNG 3840x2160 3840x2160+0+0 8-bit sRGB 5.29105MiB 48.797u 0:52.174
That’s a SSIM greater than 97%. It only takes 95% to be visually indistinguishable to 50% of the human population according to this research paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262897371_Image_Quality_Assessment_Using_the_SSIM_and_the_Just_Noticeable_Difference_Paradigm I have been editing these videos for hours, and even I am unable to tell which is which in my own A/B comparisons. This SSIM was computed on MP4 exports at CRF 16 (Shotcut VBR quality 70%). I haven’t tested whether slow and veryfast have comparable SSIMs at other CRFs.
As a side bonus, the veryfast file is usually smaller in size (which makes no sense, but whatever, I’ll take it). So for me, the end situation looks like this… by using preset=veryfast, I get a visually identical file that takes less disk space and renders 4x faster than slow, all done on i7-7700K hardware that costs half of the box the OP is looking to build. If we compare the 8-core i7-7700K to a 16-core box of equal base frequency, the 8-core box using veryfast will still render 2.5x faster than the 16-core box using slow. They don’t call it slow for nothing! So, since I can’t find any virtue in using slow for my particular application, that takes software encoding out of the CPU equation, and it’s all down to making the 8 threads of Shotcut as fast as possible.
This was the point of my previous post… Every video editor has resource bottlenecks somewhere, but Shotcut’s bottlenecks are not where most people would expect. For someone like me who edits video exclusively on Shotcut using preset=veryfast and no GPU acceleration, I think it still holds true that finding the 8 fastest cores available will give you the fastest render times. And likewise, magnetic HDDs would be more than sufficient to keep pace with an H.264 workflow. My whole point is that under these specific conditions, someone might be upset to learn that spending $3,000 for a computer doesn’t get them twice the performance they would expect over a $1,500 computer. I just wanted to point out that in the world of Shotcut, more dollars does not equal more performance once you get past a certain point.
Having said all that… the OP is doing more than just Shotcut, which means more cores will provide more versatility. In that light, there is plenty of other discussion here that covers those aspects well. And of course, I would never turn down the chance to use SSD or RAID if I had the option. I’m just pointing out where the bang for buck will be when using Shotcut on a limited budget, if anyone is interested in such. Personally, for the work I do, I would go for the E5-2667v2 that @D_S recommended because it’s cheap, it’s a good balance between core count and base frequency, and it also provides ECC memory which is a nice safety net for really long exports. It has enough cores to export from two instances of Shotcut at the same time, and it has great performance at both preset=slow and preset=veryfast. But if you’re looking for games too, then the i7/i9 crowd may be a better fit.
As for getting smooth preview playback on 4K native files, I should have clarified. Yes, I can get smooth playback of a single video on a single track. But to me, that’s more like transcoding than editing. In our case, our projects are documentary in style, meaning a track for the interviewer, a track for the interviewee, two video tracks for inset videos, and a transparency track for overlay graphics, lower thirds, and logos. The interview tracks are playing all the time because the audio is baked into them, and we need the ability to cut back to the interview session at any moment if we run out of inset video. So under these conditions, no, I have not found any hardware configuration that offers smooth multi-track 4K playback of native files that are loaded with filters using Shotcut. There is another forum topic where I describe the proxy process we use to handle these kinds of projects: Built in proxy generation
Sorry for the lengthy post, but I thought it was interesting and hard-won information for anyone looking to get the fastest export times out of Shotcut. If anyone has a different experience, I’d love to hear it.
@Austin Thanks for taking the time to do the research and post!
I think I’ve decided on my build. Comes in a little over $3,000 but I think it will do me well.
What do you think of this:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
@Tuba I went ahead and took your list and made a few key changes that brought the price down while bringing the feature set up of the things I changed
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant
Motherboard, I replaced with the supermicro board, it adds 10Gbe without a massive price increse which seems like a silly feature to skip for a sub 50 dollar price increase.
Memory, I used slower memory but a full 4x16 for about 100 less, considering how little memory frequency impacts things like encoding(see here https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i7_8700K_Coffee_Lake_Memory_Performance_Benchmark_Analysis/4.html ) It was just money thrown away. I’d probably start with 2x16 anyway (which can be had for ~230) since that still gives you 32gb, leaves room if the memory capacity gets increased in the future to add 2x32 without removing anything and still gives you the option to add 2x16 if you happen to get a good deal on it in the near future.
Storage
The WD black 3d NVMe ssd’s consistently perform neat the 960/970 evo and with how the z390 chipsets handle ssd’s you’re not going to notice a difference outside of synthetics.
The same applies to the micron 1100(I’m actually reviewing one for pocketables right now we purchased for a media encoding drive) might as well save the 50 bucks
Video card
Purch tested it and blower coolers are a necesity if you ever end up with multiple add in cards since they don’t recirculate the hot air throughout the case, conveniently it’s also a cheaper card
Case
Easy enough I just like the phanteks case better and it comes with some fans, being cheaper is just a bonus
PSU
an 80+ titanium psu is more efficent meaning it will cost you less at the wall as well as produce less waste heat meaning less noise
ODD
if you’re going to bother with an optical drive in 2018 it should read and write blu-ray seems silly to skip it honestly.
Funny, the first thing that stood out to me too was the lack of a Blu-ray burner. What I haven’t seen addressed in this list is an archiving plan for old video projects. Will you delete your source videos and only keep the final renders when you’re done with a project to save space? If not, you may need external USB3 hard drives or BD-R discs to archive your work and make room on your 2TB drives for new projects. Space disappears fast when dealing with 4K video, and archive storage costs money. The WH16NS40 is a good drive, but the current firmware removes UltraHD support. It would take a firmware rollback to v1.02 to get UltraHD back, and it’s sketchy at that. The WH16NS60 drive supports UltraHD out of the box. Both support M-DISC, which is nice too.
The other thing not mentioned is your monitor. Is your current monitor known to be color-accurate by industry standards? Most monitors recommended by gamers are not. Those monitors often make it a selling point to boost the blacks in order to increase visibility in first-person shooters. However, this destroys your ability to edit video with accurate colors that will transfer well to everybody else’s TVs and monitors when your video lands on YouTube. Many monitors can be calibrated into compliance using a tool like a Datacolor Spyder5, then you can switch color profiles as needed. If that sounds like too much hassle, there are monitors that are calibrated “good enough” right out of the box, like the Asus PA248Q or an Apple LED Cinema. If that’s also too much hassle, you might consider playing your finished video file on multiple TVs or monitors before uploading it just to make sure colors aren’t shifting more than you’d like.
My other thoughts were fast and basic… @D_S, would you find any value in using a NH-D15S cooler instead just to guarantee a good fit with any high-profile RAM? Or are there plenty of low-profile options such that it’s not necessary? I’m not familiar with the RAM market these days… just the problems that happen when the heat sink protrudes into my RAM space lol.
Since video editing is a specific goal, I would be hesitant to build any computer with less than an 850W power supply. Suppose you want to move up to DaVinci Resolve and get a second GPU some day. I wouldn’t be comfortable running two GPUs on anything less than 850W. Maybe that’s the placebo talking, but being prepared for a second GPU could save you dollars in the future.
Speaking of placebo, I admit to being a Samsung fanboy on flash storage, although I also like the Crucial MX 3D NAND drives. @D_S, I’m sure you’ve chosen alternatives of similar performance, but are there any benchmarks on longevity or write cycles? Samsung has treated me well for years in this regard, so I confess I haven’t done due diligence researching other vendors lately.
Regarding the cooler moving to a smaller cooler means more fan noise, something @Tuba is trying to avoid although the move to the D15S might be a good idea since it still uses a 150mm fan and should be quiet.
750 vs 850 is a small change when the moving from 80+ gold to 80+ titanium and honestly either could be tight considering the RTX2080 has a 215W TDP and a cpu that’s capable of peaking at 200w for shorts bursts means you could be looking at a 600W peak. That said unless you somehow accumulate 150w worth of drives I doublt you’ll have issues at either size.(that all said it’s only another ~30 to bump that psu up to 850 from 750 there’s also fanless psu’s I should look back up as well)
There have not been any longevity tests I’m aware of just yet on the new 3d nand however I can attest to having both reviewed 3d nand drives myself(https://www.pocketables.com/author/daniel-smith) and working with it day to day(we have almost 30 laptops now with a mix of different ssd’s although 25 currently have 500gb mx500 drives) I haven’t seen any issues. I typically write a large amount of data to drives during testing(including several hours of full random) and outside of some very early drives(they still used sandforce controllers) I haven’t seen any measurable wear.
Thanks for the input @D_S and @Austin!
Here are my reasons for the parts I picked and my thoughts on D_S’s suggestions:
Motherboard
I picked this particular Gigabit model because of the reviews and specs. In particular, this guy seems to think the this Ultra model has better PWM and Phase Doublers than the next higher Master model, making it a high-end sweet spot - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVUON93T2j4
I’d be open to another reliable manufacturer but SuperMicro is too much of an outlier and a risk at this time.
Memory
The Noctura CPU cooler fans have 32mm clearance for RAM (unless you raise the fans, which I prefer to avoid). That’s why I picked the 31mm high Corsair LPX (low profile) RAM. The G.Skill RAM you selected is not slower (same frequency and CL) but it is 42mm high.
I picked the 2 packs of 2 because the same RAM in the 4 pack was not listed on the Qualified Vendor List for the motherboard I selected and there was no cost savings for buying the 4 pack over two 2 packs.
Appreciate the option to get 32GB and buy more RAM later but I want to go full 64GB now.
Storage
My plan is as follows:
I also have a 8TB WD EasyStore external for on-site backup and a separate off-site storage set-up.
So I’ll take your suggestion and replace the M.2 Samsungs and WD Blacks as they appear equal in performance.
On the 2TB SATA SSD, I’m going to stick with Samsung for reliability and speed over the Micron as the 2TB drive will be my main file drive.
Video Card
Not going to be doing more than one video card so fans are better than blower style for me.
Decided on the ASUS 2080 STRIX OC because it has 3 fans and a hard switch for a quiet mode (Quiet BIOS) that seems to work well.
I want a card that is overqualified so it can run cool and quiet for my needs. Also makes it more future proof. I do NOT intend to overclock.
Case
My main goal is a quiet machine. The R6 is the best reviewed case in this class.
It has a 5.25" bay and I can open the front panel door if I need more cooling for a particular task.
It’s quality all around and the best compromise between cool and quiet, even at stock without changing or adding fans.
PSU
Same philosophy as my GPU - I want it overpowered so it runs cool and quiet for my needs.
I looked into the SeaSonic Snow Silent and the Corsair RM850x. SeaSonice seems to die after a few months and their RMA process is arduous. Corsair looked really good but the modular cables are a bit short and the lack of an active fan scarified too much in the cooling department for the silence gains.
Bitfenix has great components (as shown in the in-depth break down reviews) and runs quietest out of all the PSUs I checked into.
Optical Drive
I still own a bunch of CDs and DVDs so for $20 this is a no-brainer.
I don’t have any Blu-Ray Discs with data or movies on them. I have a WD EasyStore for on-site backup and an offsite backup system. So I won’t be using the drive for that. At 3x the price, I just don’t need a Blu-Ray drive. If I somehow need one later, I expect it will cost less than now and it’s an easy swap out.
Most of that makes sense, I wouldn’t call Super Micro an “outlier” however, Super micro was last I looked tied for 3rd with a few other vendors for global server market share, their presence in the consumer space is new(ish) but as a vendor, well a good chunk of everything has supermicro boards in it and they’re an ODM for a lot of the large players as well.
That said there isn’t inherently anything “bad” with the gigabyte model I just like having a full chipset diagram and 10GbaseT built in, but I work with servers all day XD
I agree. I just meant SuperMirco is an outlier in consumer motherboards. So even if they excel on server boards, this seems like their first foray into this space I’d rather not be an early adopter.
There’s also the whole chip spying thing but that’s too far off-topic for this thread and the reason above is enough.
I don’t disagree with you there. And I’m jelly that you get to play with cool stuff at work.
Actually it’s their third(fourth depending on how you treat the 370/390 split) they started back with Z170
The chip spying thing was a load of crap unfortunately Bloomberg is going to be in hot water for it
The flip side of that is that I spend far too much time with computers and don’t always get to use all the cool stuff at home XD
I use a 1680 x 1050 SAMSUNG 2232BW+ Black 22" 2ms Widescreen LCD Monitor I got back in 2008.
24" monitor would be do-able but anything larger might not work. Desk isn’t large so not much distance between me and the monitor.
Dual monitors would be cool and better than a single giant monitor. Plus, with the new PC I will actually be able to multitask (hopefully).
Anything suggestions for decent dual monitors that are cheaper than the Asus? It’s a bit more than I need at the moment given I have not even uploaded one video to Youtube yet.
Unfortunately, the Asus was the cheap option for color-correct monitors. There may be used or refurb sites that have it or the Apple for less. On the other hand, for the style of video you are creating, absolute color accuracy will not be a make-or-break deal. You could go for whatever monitors fit your workspace and budget, then just be conscientious about doing video work in Standard mode rather than Game mode or Movie mode. Those other modes shift brightness and color significantly. Do your editing in Standard and you should be close enough.
@tuba @Austin I’m a big fan of the Dell U2413 Panels I use two at work, they can usually be found for ~150 refurbished(https://amzn.to/2JrK9qv) and support calibration. Out of the box they’re fantastic and with a spyder they’re even better the built in capabilities for things like display port multi stream are great too(they’re also 1920x1200 giving you a bit more room when editing)
Edit: I would consider for any panel calibrating it with something like this, even the best panels have variations during production https://amzn.to/2AALjNn
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