Question about Gaming vs CAD vs Photo/Video Editing Rigs

y2adre

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Hello,

Ive been building systems for about 7 yrs now, heavy, but I always here ppl say their machines are good for gaming or good for CAD or good for photo/video editing.

I am asking what is the main differences, what would make a great machine for say photo or video editing over gaming. Or cad over gaming. Please dont give me smart alek answers.

I have built gaming rigs and htpc a lot and have a main rig for my gaming and streaming videos so I kind of know what incorporates gaming rigs and rigs that have stream multiple movies through the house.

Thanks for the help and I ask just in case I get requests like this and the web always gives u mixed reviews. You guys havent steered me wrong yet.
 
These days there isn't much difference. The biggest thing here is how serious they are into one side or the other, and of course the budget.

Somebody who won't game and is serious about their productivity I would try to utilize all their budget in a socket 2011 hex with 16-32GB of RAM and a large SSD while only having something like a GT640 (again depending on budget) for a GPU.

A gamer can get away without having a large amount of cores, and HT is worthless in gaming. So i5s are the perfect territory for this, although any desktop quad i5 variant is perfectly fine to do any amount of editing.

So like I said, it really all depends on the seriousness and the budget.
 
Probably the biggest difference between an editing PC and gaming PC is that to play most games, you dont need a processor with that many cores. Take minecraft for example. You could play that on my laptop with a 4 core processor and get 100 fps. Now when I try to edit video, the CPU shoots up to 100% usage and most of the time it freezes and crashes. Now take a look at my Core i7 desktop with 8 cores. The video editing/rendering is done in a matter of minutes without going past 40% Cpu usage. Still much better then leaving my laptop on all night and waking up to find "sonyvegas.exe has stopped working." Even though the biggest difference I have seen between the two different PC's is the CPU performance. Their could be other factors but thats all I have ever encountered. Hope this helped :p
***Edit: Laptop was a dual core and desktop has 4 cores my bad***
 
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These days there isn't much difference. The biggest thing here is how serious they are into one side or the other, and of course the budget.

Somebody who won't game and is serious about their productivity I would try to utilize all their budget in a socket 2011 hex with 16-32GB of RAM and a large SSD while only having something like a GT640 (again depending on budget) for a GPU.

A gamer can get away without having a large amount of cores, and HT is worthless in gaming. So i5s are the perfect territory for this, although any desktop quad i5 variant is perfectly fine to do any amount of editing.

So like I said, it really all depends on the seriousness and the budget.
Wow you always ninja me on responses xD
 
Probably the biggest difference between an editing PC and gaming PC is that to play most games, you dont need a processor with that many cores. Take minecraft for example. You could play that on my laptop with a 4 core processor and get 100 fps. Now when I try to edit video, the CPU shoots up to 100% usage and most of the time it freezes and crashes. Now take a look at my Core i7 desktop with 8 cores. The video editing/rendering is done in a matter of minutes without going past 40% Cpu usage. Still much better then leaving my laptop on all night and waking up to find "sonyvegas.exe has stopped working." Even though the biggest difference I have seen between the two different PC's is the CPU performance. Their could be other factors but thats all I have ever encountered. Hope this helped :p
Not to be a PC Natzi, but the 3770k is 4 core with HT.
 
I thought it had a lot to do with proc and ram for video editing, and gaming pc's video card's and somewhat th processor (bare min 4 gigs of ram).

What about Cad systems, same thing Heavy on ram and processor?
 
I thought it had a lot to do with proc and ram for video editing, and gaming pc's video card's and somewhat th processor (bare min 4 gigs of ram).

What about Cad systems, same thing Heavy on ram and processor?
It is, but those programs utilize GPGPU acceleration and can utilize HT in i7 processors.

Games are more GPU heavy yes, which is why I say an i5 is fine because they are quad core and there isn't any sense to spending 100 bucks extra on HT tech when games don't utilize that. Plus, Vegas Pro 12, CS6 Photoshop, Handbrake, and a few other programs I have worked just fine on my 2500k when I owned it. One can only assume that a 3570k and 4670k would perform even better.

Vegas Pro 12 doesn't even fully utilize my 3960x with HT on.

Games are getting to the point that a quadcore or at least dual with HT is becoming necessary for higher end rigs. I would say that 4GB of RAM is necessary for any rig anymore. 8GB the sweet spot.

Edit: CAD systems depending on the software used, same thing. Heavy CPU and GPGPU rendering. GPGPU is parallel tech where the GPU receives some load like PhysX in games on Nvidia cards. CAD programs are one thing I do not have any experience with as I don't have a use for them. Pretty much everything else from video editing to audio programs to CS6 Master Suite I've used. I don't get much of a difference from the 2500k I had to this 3960x.
 
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With expierence using lots of different Cad systems I think that if some one plans on doing complex stuff in more then one program at a time the more ram the better ( to a realistic point) also the way the CAD specific video cards are just a little bit more geared towards precision as apposed to smoothness but its going to take a very intensive CAD user to notice this
 
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