AMD vs Nvidia GPUs - A bit confused...

[ArcticPanda]

Hello,

I have been tasked by my girlfriend to create a Video Editing Hackintosh for her business. She has a budget of £1000 - So I'm trying to get the best system possible for that budget.

I'm 95% the way there to sorting what parts I will be using, however, I'm rather confused on the difference between AMD and Nvidia. The buyer's guide on this website suggests that the Nvidia system is easier to install, but then I've also read elsewhere on this site that Nvidia cards require more aspects to be downloaded to get them to work.

I've then also seen that the AMD GPUs work better with FCPX?

I'm currently wavering between the Nvidia 1060 6GB or the AMD 580 8GB

Other parts to be used:

Intel i7 8700
16gb Ballistix LT
Gigabyte H370 HD3


Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Jamesbond007]

Hello,

I have been tasked by my girlfriend to create a Video Editing Hackintosh for her business. She has a budget of £1000 - So I'm trying to get the best system possible for that budget.

I'm 95% the way there to sorting what parts I will be using, however, I'm rather confused on the difference between AMD and Nvidia. The buyer's guide on this website suggests that the Nvidia system is easier to install, but then I've also read elsewhere on this site that Nvidia cards require more aspects to be downloaded to get them to work.

I've then also seen that the AMD GPUs work better with FCPX?

I'm currently wavering between the Nvidia 1060 6GB or the AMD 580 8GB

Other parts to be used:

Intel i7 8700
16gb Ballistix LT
Gigabyte H370 HD3

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

If you are going to install High Sierra, then you should go for the RX 580, as it is now natively supported in High Sierra. Apple has used AMD GPUs in the Macs for the last few years.

 

[jaymonkey]

If the

I have been tasked by my girlfriend to create a Video Editing Hackintosh for her business. She has a budget of £1000 - So I'm trying to get the best system possible for that budget.
I've then also seen that the AMD GPUs work better with FCPX?

I'm currently wavering between the Nvidia 1060 6GB or the AMD 580 8GB

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

@ArcticPanda

If the machines primary use will be FCP X then for sure you should use a AMD/Radeon 580 8GB .. the PULSE versions are the only one's know to work OOB (in High Sierra) due to Apple using them in the eGPU dev kits .... although using the latest version of WhatEverGreen should make a non PULSE version work ok but then your dependant on a 3rd party kext ....

If you want to save a bit of money you could get a RX 480 8GB ... its the same card/chip as the RX 580 but with slightly lower clock speeds, the difference in FCP X should be no more than around 10% less performance compared to the RX 580.

FCP X is optimised for AMD/Radeon GPU's ... due to its heavy use of Open CL/CI, Nvidia Drivers have pretty poor Open GL/GI performance ... where as Apple's core Open GL/CI is optimised to get the last % of performance out of AMD/Radeon GPU's.

The AMD 580 8GB will be around 50% quicker at rendering than the Nvidia 1060

Cheers
Jay

 

[ArcticPanda]

If the


@ArcticPanda

If the machines primary use will be FCP X then for sure you should use a AMD/Radion 580 8GB .. the PULSE versions are the only one's know to work OOB due to Apple using them in the eGPU dev kits .... although using the latest version of WhatEverGreen should make a non PULSE version work ok but then your dependant on a 3rd party kext ....

If you want to save a bit of money you could get a RX 480 8GB ... its the same card/chip as the RX 580 but with slightly lower clock speeds, the difference in FCP X should be no more than around 10% less performance compared to the RX 580.

FCP X is optimised for AMD/Radion GPU's ... due to its heavy use of Open CL/CI, Nvidia Drivers have pretty poor Open GL/GI performance ... where as Apple's core Open GL/CI is optimised to get the last % of performance out of AMD/Radion GPU's.

The AMD 580 8GB will be around 50% quicker at rendering than the Nvidia 1060

Cheers
Jay

Thanks for this breakdown!

I've seen the "Sapphire Pulse Radeon RX 580 8G" on Amazon in the UK for £250ish which seems relatively well priced as it is. Can't find a 480 easily enough.

I presume that Sapphire card is what you meant by the pulse? Would you recommend I go and get this card then?

 

[jaymonkey]

I presume that Sapphire card is what you meant by the pulse? Would you recommend I go and get this card then?

Correct ... this is the same card that Apple ships with the eGPU dev kits for High Sierra so it should work without any additonal kext's or patches .... the only thing you need to do is enable Clovers RadeonDeInit feature :-

<key>Graphics</key>
<dict>
    <key>RadeonDeInit</key>
    <true/>

Good Luck
Jay

 

[ArcticPanda]

Correct ... this is the same card that Apple ships with the eGPU dev kits for High Sierra so it should work without any additonal kext's or patches ....

Good Luck
Jay

Thanks Jay,

Any recommendations for the rest of the build?

 

[jaymonkey]

Use a good NVMe SSD for the System Drive (eg: Samsung 960 Pro/EVO NVMe) get the biggest you can afford in your budget, then use a good quality large 2TB+ HDD for archiving the video projects.

Jay

 

[ArcticPanda]

Use a good NVMe SSD for the System Drive (eg: Samsung 960 Pro/EVO NVMe) get the biggest you can afford in your budget, then use a good quality large 2TB+ HDD for archiving the video projects.

Jay

Oh, NVMe? Can't say I have much experience with those. What's the difference in those and a standard SSD?

 

[jaymonkey]

About 2000Mbs+ ...

A decent standard SATA SSD will transfer around 500 Mega-bits per second (Mbs) but is limited by the SATA 3 interface which is part of the North/South bridge chipset so rarely will you see the claimed transfer speeds as the bridge chipset also manages all the other embedded ports and IO built into the motherboard.. (SATA, USB, Ethernet .. etc) as such everything that goes through the bridge chip is shared over (usually) 4 PCIe lanes to the CPU which on a busy IO system like a Video Edit System is a bottle neck in terms of getting data to and from the CPU.

NVMe SSD's on the other-hand have their own on-board PCIe controllers and can communicate directly with the CPU over the PCIe bus thus by-passing the motherboard chipset as long as they are installed in M.2 slots with dedicated 4X PCIe lanes. You have to be a bit careful as some budget motherboards connect the M.2 slots to the bridge chip and only offer X2 PCIe lane which will be shared with the other devices going through the bridge chip.

As long as you install a NVMe SSD in a dedicated M.2 slot they can transfer (or write) so much faster then standard SSD's ...

Video Editing is all about passing video data as fast as possible between the storage and the CPU & GPU) as such the faster storage you have the more fluid and quicker video editing will be.

So for a Video Editing System it a no brainer ...

There are plenty of guides on the TMX forums but as long as you use High Sierra you wont have any issues as High Sierra supports 3rd party NVMe SSD's.

Cheers
Jay