How to Build the BEST PC for DaVinci Resolve - Ultimate Guide to GPU, CPU, and more!

if you've been looking into upgrading your system or building a new system for resolve this is the best video in the world for you we went up to Seattle to talk to the guys at Puget systems they make amazing workstation PCS designed for D Vinci resolve they gave us a tour and showed us their production facility and how they Benchmark all their systems and test things and I mean it was just phenomenal and I sat down with their resolve guy Matt and asked him every question I can think to ask when it comes to building a PC for resolve this is Solid Gold Hardware wisdom we'll have chapter markers down below but I really recommend just sitting back and watching the whole conversation because I learned so much let's go well hey everybody here we are at Puget systems and uh I have Matt here who is the expert on how to make a computer that's amazing for DCI resolve we always reference their their benchmarks and the information that they have available to build workstations for our company and I know you guys have been asking how do I build a system for XYZ in Da Vinci resolve well we came up here and we're going to we're going to pin you down and we're going to ask you those questions and make sure that we get some answers all right this is investigative journalism at its finest or at least what I can do so I'm going to start this off with um what is a computer I I don't know how to answer that that's going to be a problem I mean no I mean to take it to its basic a computer's just a tool I think that's one of the things that sometimes people get a little too caught up you know people have a sometimes a little bit of a tribal mentality and it's you know Apple versus PC or Intel versus AMD but at the end of the day it's a tool it's like your camera it's it's like your keyboard it's a tool to get your job done and the right fit for your job is is different every time so we have some some parts here we got the dad board we have the ram ram slot over here um we have the motherboard here and the motherboard and the dad board go together that's the birds and the bees close and then this is the tower yeah this is pretty much the Entire Computer now yep and then motherboard CPU RAM and uh storage now storage is getting becoming about the size of a sick of gum uh these days which is my goodness that's crazy I think one of the biggest questions I get is what kind of system should I build for my needs and so when you're talking about D Vinci resolve what do you look for in a in a PC yeah so it depends a lot on where your priorities lie um and resolve is a little bit different because you know something like the Adobe suite it's very you know Premier Pro does this kind of stuff after effects is this kind of stuff and they use Hardware differently but they're different applications sure resolve it's all kind of merged into one you've got color grading you've got Fusion you've got Fair light now you've got uh the like noise reduction and the open effects uh so all of those different things use Hardware actually slightly differently and so you really want to look at you know do you do a lot of fusion uh do you work with a lot of hvc footage that needs a hardware decoding uh do you do really heavy color grading um and each one of those different things are going to use things uh differently so for example uh someone who shoots a lot of like 4K hvc they're really going to want Hardware decoding support uh so that's going to be something like an Intel Core CPU with an igpu you really need the igpu to get what Intel calls quicksync which then can be used for Hardware decoding um something like Fusion it uses uh CPU power primarily and single core or lightly threaded so big giant you know those new 96 core CPUs don't really do anything for Fusion wow you want something with like 16 20 cores and even that's more than you really need but that's kind of the sweet spot right now for the fastest per cor performance uh and at the same time if you do a lot of open effects noise reduction that's where you want big beefy gpus even multiple gpus you know it's kind of what resolve is kind of known for in the industry is yeah throw three gpus at it and it can crunch through it but really only for that part of resolve like Fusion that's actually can give you a slight performance decrease oh wow that's interesting okay so um let's let's think of like three uh different kinds of of people because I I feel like our our audience is kind of kind of in three different categories right so um first of all let's just go with like a kind of a casual content creator you know somebody that might be shooting on like their you know little like Panasonic or their Sony mirrorless or you know uh their DSLR that kind of thing if somebody's just wants to edit video you know they're not a visual effects artist they're not a you know a studio colorist or something like that they're just making videos uh what do they want to look for in a system for that kind of a person you probably want to prioritize a couple of things I mean on on no matter who the person is there there is a couple of things that you want to look at first um and honestly probably should take a step back to those the first is actually storage me before you get into anything if you run out of hard drive space you're kind of you can't do much of so do make sure you prioritize that your storage is big enough and fast enough which these days isn't usually much of an issue it being fast enough I mean I typically think of you know get get an SSD does it matter what kind of SSD you get yeah so there's multiple kinds of ssds now uh generally people call them either SSD and when they're talking about that they're talking about 2 and 1/2 in drives that are about yay big um been around forever those things are Ric get quite large these days you can get 8 12 16 terab drives uh and then you have these newer nvme drives and these nvme drives are smaller they go directly under the motherboard and they are incredibly fast uh they do seven gigs a second uh read and right way more than really anyone needs um but they are terrific for a lot of different things they are great as like an OS Drive uh cuz they are not that much more expensive when you're talking about like one terab or yeah it's like it's not that that much money for them um but if you have that as your OS Drive windows will launch faster resolve will start up faster you know everything just is a little bit a little bit faster and for a small cost you might as well yeah but if you need big bulk storage you're shooting raw like 4K raw yeah you typically go still those normal ssds because you can get more for your dollar and they are fast enough yeah um you know once you're talking you know 8K red you know that kind of stuff yeah you might still need to go like giant arrays of nvmes because you need that speed but nvme drives typically are overkill for a lot of those kind of workflows sure yeah that makes sense okay and then probably just name brand kind of stuff don't get bills SSD you know yeah there are a lot of U more affordable ssds out there um especially for Prof professional um kind of systems you know this this computer is a tool for you to get paid um you really don't want to skimp too much on that so there are some big names out there Samsung tends to be uh one of the most most robust uh Kingston makes some great drives there's a number of others uh but yeah there are great drives out there just maybe don't go buy some drives from AliExpress or something like that stick stick to you New Egg Amazon lot of 40 ssds they all have 8 terabytes do they though come on come on uh second thing is actually Ram um so a lot of people you know you want to skip right to the CPU the G GPU those are kind of the fun topics where you get all the benchmarks and the numbers uh but really Ram kind of similar to storage if you don't have enough it's it's going to be problems you really can't get it around that at all uh so for that kind of a person just shooting you off their DSLR you're shooting you know h264 or HBC uh usually like 32 gigs of RAM 64 depends on if you wanted to do like HD or or UHD um 32 to 64 gigs of RAM is what I would start at make sure you have that CU if you're under that it's just it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is oh okay now would that be would that be true for like a Mac as well yeah yeah uh in Mac it's a little bit different in terms of like the total um especially with the their new you know the the m1's the m2s M3s um but still I think generalities kind of you know ly in there um 16 gigs is probably bare minimum on Apple 32 is really where you'd want to start and then go up to 64 or I think they allow like 96 and 128 gotcha so if somebody has uh you know let's say like a gaming PC or something and they're they only have eight or 16 gigs of RAM that's probably a good place to start as up in that Ram yeah definitely yeah that's and that's honestly luckily that's one of the easiest upgrades you can do in a system um you need to double check that it's the right speeds you that's it's compatible with everything but then you just you know get more RAM and it just slots right into these these slots you just toss it in do a couple of quick tests make sure it's not broken um and then you're good to go yeah okay so make sure you have enough storage that's the thing it's funny I get a lot of people saying uh how do I make my videos take up less space and everything and I just always tell them like you can't like I mean you you can do some stuff but you just got to have space that's just the reality of it you know I mean terabytes of space like you shouldn't be you know have a 320 gig hard drive that you're kind of trying to shuffle things off and on it's just not going to work and storage is cheap nowadays you know I mean especially compared to all the stuff we're probably going to be talking about but like starting with that man get storage you guys like it's not that hard and then Ram okay so storage and RAM assuming we have that yeah good what's next okay so for that person you know shooting off camera hvc h264 uh the biggest thing I would prioritize is that you're using an Intel Core CPU with an igpu uh they have some models that are slightly cheaper and they don't have integrated graphics and you might think oh well if I have a video card why would I need integrated Graphics uh but it gives you a technology that Intel calls a quick sync which is used for Hardware decoding and encoding of h264 and a whole lot of the different flavors of hvc you know different chroma sub samplings different bit rates um Intel Core CPUs with Quicks sync will decode pretty much all of those in in a DCI resolve and so by using Intel Core anything you throw at it that's hvc is going to be able to be Hardware decoded um and that's way faster than forcing it with software decoding wow I don't know if I have I don't think my system has that I might even have an AMD I don't even to remember I got to double check that and and there are like often times it's totally fine uh like AMD ryzen they're terrific also uh because a lot of those versions of hvc can be decoded with the GPU so you can be using the GPU instead the big thing with quicksync is that it does more so if you get some footage from a client or you know someone else and it's a different format than you usually work with it's almost guaranteed that you're going to be able to use Hardware decoding for it you're not going to have to deal with oh shoot this is something weird I got to do a trans code or proxies when I don't normally need to use that it'll just work out of the box um so that's the biggest reason because other than that Intel and AMD are pretty close to on par for DCI resolve so all things being equal again like if you don't have a you know a team loyalty to team red or team blue uh Intel is usually the way to go just because you get that extra capability if you need it sure okay yeah so it's just a safer option yeah it just covers more of the bases okay all right and now does that does it matter whether you use Studio or free version yes absolutely yeah and honestly studio is probably the first investment you should make even before Hardware uh that's what usually what I tell people it's 300 bucks believe it's a lifetime basically thing I some of the licenses so far some of the licenses we use are still for resolve 14 I think and we're on 18.6 now um so yeah cuz Studio gets you Hardware decoding support so it doesn't matter if you have a Intel CPU with Quicks sync if you don't have studio um opens up a whole bunch of the uh you know the open effect things a lot of the new AI stuff so it really does pretty solid deal yeah oh yeah yeah yeah yeah so if if you're if you're looking at upgrading your Hardware make sure you upgrade resolve to Studio first because some of the hardware you can't even use if you don't have studio right is that is that right yeah yeah and the other thing I always tell people too is beyond just Studio do take a look at your workflow first um a lot of people think that throwing money at a problem is going to solve it uh but sometimes it's actually their workflow is a little unusual and they don't even realize it cuz that's just the way they've always done it examp that uh they might be shooting with a camera and they're shooting in h264 422 um and that is a format that does not have any hardware decoding support off of any hardware in existence um and maybe they were shooting that because they like hey my camera does both hey might as well use the higher quality one it'll give me better sense better picture uh but if they don't need it well going down to 420 now they get Hardware decoding support maybe they don't even need a new system or at the same time if their camera also supports hvc and they just haven't decided to move over to hvc switching over to hvc they could now have Hardware decoding support again maybe they don't even need a new system um often times uh you just working proxies into your workflow could be enough um it's just you take a look at what you're doing first and see is this optimal you know is this really the right way to do this yeah I mean it I've definitely seen people you know they'll shoot something like 6K raw and they'll just they'll just edit with that and you know in a full 6K timeline the whole time and then they delivering to 1080 at the end and it's like why are you doing that you know it's just doesn't doesn't make any sense but it feels like you are doing the highest quality thing really you might be shooting yourself in the foot that's that's too bad yeah okay so make sure your workflows good make sure you have Studio make sure you have plenty of storage plenty of RAM and then uh an Intel processor with quick sync capabilities right yeah which you'll usually see it as it has integrated GPU often times the quicks sync part is kind of a hidden okay feat so integrated GPU integrated graphics and make sure when you have it in your system especially if you're DIY and you're building yourself often times motherboards will disable the integrated Graphics when you have a discret GPU so you have to make sure you go into the BIOS and say no no I do want that on cuz otherwise it won't work yeah something else we should check on our system all right cool yeah okay what's after that uh so after that is really just the the GPU um now for someone who is just shooting you know hvvc h264 not doing a whole ton of you know noise reduction open effects anything like that you really don't need a ton U usually the rule of thumb is get the latest generation if you can uh just because there is generational improvements uh sometimes you get great sales on like one generational Hardware Great go for it um but usually aim for the latest generation and then the biggest thing at that level or that kind kind of a a user is make sure you have enough video memory uh so the each GPU basically has its own RAM on it and uh the nice thing is these days 8 gigs is kind of the minimum that you're going to be getting most gpus and that's plenty for up to about 4K uh so if you're shooting 4K timelines 8 gig GPU you're fine um so really you don't have to worry too much beyond that uh for this kind of a person again because you're not using anything in resolve that's really GPU accelerated in those situations usually so if somebody's just doing basic editing and they're not doing a lot of noise reduction or magic mask or super scaling or or any of that kind of like intense AI stuff putting a ton of money into their graphics card isn't really going to like be amazing for them right exactly no so for that kind of a person you're probably better off spending a little bit more money on a higher end CPU getting a a core i7 or core I9 and then the GPU keeping at like a RTX 4060 level or a 4070 now that's you know of course just for result if you're doing other stuff you know if you also want to use your system for gaming or something yeah of course change it uh but for that exact workload really not much need for anything above a a mid lowend kind of GPU yeah that's interesting cuz like I mean you don't you don't hear this stuff a lot just like with a quick scan on a forum or something you know everybody just says like get the craziest GPU you can get and then people are spending $1,700 on a GPU you know when it's like they don't even have that great of a processor or you know they're they're shooting in some format that's not ideal anyway and some of it is also too always keep in mind where you are getting your uh recommendations from you know a lot of people on the internet who are going to be talking about this kind of stuff talking about performance in different applications they are primarily Tech enthusiasts they like numbers they like technology they like you know how much faster is this new stuff than the old stuff and in applications like dingi resolve they're going to be a little focused on GPU performance because that's where resolve excels but sometimes you lose that Nuance of where is denture resolve using that GPU that heavily because again just working with h64 hvvc or PR res that's not really using the GPU at all so you really don't need it wow yeah so save save some money if you're just doing some some basic edits you know you're not getting crazy you don't need the craziest uh GPU in the world to uh to have good performance just doing your edits yeah and the other thing with GPU too that we should probably touch on is um Nvidia is not the only option out there um we actually now have three different options we got Nvidia we have AMD and Intel's been getting back into the GPU Market uh and across those three Nvidia is typically our go-to recommendation um they tend to have a little bit more stable drivers uh they tend to have a little bit better support for some of the newer features in in D Vinci resolve especially the newer AI stuff um and it like performance- wise AMD definitely can keep up there are some areas where they actually are faster but generally for most people we say Nvidia is kind of the the the safer option um and then Intel is making some really interesting stuff especially if you're on a tight budget uh Intel can be very attractive but their gpus are first generation and anything that's first generation I tend to be a little bit hesitant of um if you love Tech and you love mess around with stuff go for it uh but if you just want your system to sit under your desk and just churn along and you don't have to think about it Nvidia is probably the way that we would recommend going yeah that makes sense that's kind of the recommendations for just a content creator somebody who's doing edits right is there anything else they should keep in mind if if they just want a box that will help them make videos quickly the big thing I would say is just make sure you're not skimping on quality um there are other parts of the system that we're not really talking about here power supply even like chassis and CPU cooling um those things you don't want to just go super cheap on you can get very very inexpensive power supplies but that's feeding the power to everything else and that's going to become problem if you know that starts giving bad voltages or you know anything to anywhere else so really spend that extra little cost you know at every level on every component to make sure you're getting quality stuff you know name name brand good quality uh reliable uh because man even if you could save all that budget and then get like a higher tier CPU if that system starts blue screening or giving you weird crashes it's worth it you've lost all of that performance absolutely out of like one blue screen a month so go reliable first performance second yeah don't don't buy um Jeff's super powerful discount PC Parts Warehouse exactly yeah yeah exactly so focus on quality if you want it to last if you want it to be reliable you know spend a little bit extra and get the name brand parts that's that's I think really solid advice okay so that is the content creat now what if somebody is into short films and they're less about putting out a bunch of videos you know with their DSLR and they're more shooting like Cinema Camera stuff maybe they're using red or Blackmagic raw or kind of the higher end stuff um what would you would it would it be any different so the biggest difference there uh one of course you're going to need more storage you're going to need a probably a little bit more RAM uh CPU you can actually get away with the same CPUs uh for quite a ways actually up until you get up to maybe like 6K like you're shooting 6K and above you might need to start looking at other stuff uh but like those Intel Core CPUs are terrific um all the way up to about 6K um the big difference is you do have to invest more in the GPU at that point okay because red black magic raw you know a lot of those other raw formats are GPU accelerated and so like your CPU is doing parts of it but your GPU is also doing you know a good chunk of it's doing the debeing process and so that's where you really get up to you want something like an RTX 48 80 possibly even a 4090 uh because you know the more GPU power you're able to throw at it the better it is at processing and you know there are of course points where you know more GP doesn't get you any faster like light playback performance but it can still help smooth out the scrubbing it can make the exports faster if you do need to work with proxies or optimized media it'll be faster for processing that stuff uh so generally it's a similar system as like that normal content creator beef up the GPU and then once you get up to like an RTX 490 level GPU that's when you need to go back to the CPU and probably upgrade to something like uh amd's thread Ripper prob uh line or thread Ripper yeah but if you're not doing you know 6K 8K raw you know Dearing a bunch of stuff you don't really need to go super crazy on the the graphics card unless you're doing the um the AI stuff right yeah AI stuff noise reduction tends to come up a little bit more in those kind of workflows uh some of the other open effects um but yeah it's it's just taking the GPU I would say and bumping it up like one or two notches um is kind of the difference here you just need that GPU a little bit higher uh again Ram maybe go up one not you just kind of turn everything up you just a little bit uh but you can kind of stick with the similar CPU until you get into those really high-end workflows okay all right and so you you were talking about like the Intel Core so those are kind of like the more affordable Intel yeah those are there's a lot of overlap these days we used to call it like client and workstation but man I mean we use Intel Core in I think something like 60% of our DCI resolve systems and like those are workstations so like calling it client versus workstation doesn't really work anymore uh but yeah those are their um I guess you'd call it like consumer more more focused CPUs they're a lot more of the marketing is around gaming and home use but man they do terrific for this and same thing with AMD they have their ryzen line and then they have their thread uper and thread Pro same thing AMD ryzen line is kind of geared more towards enthusiasts and you know clients and that kind of stuff but does great for this kind of workloads all right so at what point would you consider like all right let's go up to a thread Ripper which is a a a huge price difference right big yeah uh I would say that's usually around 6K raw um especially like 8K if you're getting up to into 8K workflows or what does black magic do now like 12K yeah if you're getting up into that stuff that's when I would definitely make that jump up to a thread Ripper uh big thing there is make sure you jump all the way up to the 32 core uh they do have a 24 core and some specialty models that are even lower core counts but those CPUs tend to be about the same performance as like an Intel Core so at that point you're spending more money getting very similar performance you're not really getting anything out of it so you have to there's like a gap between you're you're doing like Intel Core AMD ryzen then there's a big gap in terms of performance for your dollar and then you start getting benefits again yeah okay so you do like the the higher end consumer line or you just absolutely go crazy yeah pretty much yeah yeah you basically have to skip if that's not good enough you got to just lose your mind that's that because if you don't you're spending money to upgrade but it's nominal yeah it's it's not really getting you anything and in some cases it'll actually end up giving you worse performance see that's enraging yeah yeah that's frustrating okay well that's that's great anything else to think about if you're you know doing doing short films or cinematics or things you'd be shooting the higher res raw stuff for sure um so the other things that tend to come up with our customers uh isn't about performance actually it's about platform capabilities um so a lot of people have been uh moving over from you know direct attached storage you know Thunderbolt or USB uh storage and they're starting to use uh network attached storage and if you're moving that way you really want to make sure that your system has like 10g networking um the same time you got to make sure your whole network is capable of that but so looking at does this system support 10g networking is a big deal I'd say these days uh similarly Thunderbolt a lot of people still have tons of Thunderbolt drives and so Thunderbolt capability is a much bigger deal I'd say here is that just a matter of getting the right like PCI card or is there some other things we need to think about so some of it you can uh do with pcie cards networking is very easy to drop in a card you're good to go Thunderbolt is a lot more complicated uh you have to have multiple things that are working together to get Thunderbolt to work um because under unlike just straight USB you know it has to support display it's got to support you know data and daisy chaining um and that's very complicated and especially on PCS um there's a lot of different brands you might be working with so if your motherboard is one brand and you get like a thunderbolt card it has to be the same brand but even then like the firmwares have to match up uh so typically for us we prioritize motherboards that have Thunderbolt built in it's not an add-on card it's just built in um and that tends to be the most reliable way of handling Thunderbolt um now unfortunately that means you have to think about that from the get-go of I want Thunderbolt now because changing your motherboard is not super easy not ideal yeah not ideal okay now I'm super into Fusion right I love making really complicated stuff and as we know Fusion uh is a resource hog so if I were going to build the best computer ever to just destroy things with Fusion how do I do it good news is it's not going to be crazy crazy expensive oh okay bad news is that's because Fusion can't take advantage of some of the more expensive more robust Hardware that's out there okay so Fusion is very interesting I mean because black magic bought Fusion what eight years ago or something like that and they've been you know sticking it in to resolve but because it was a different application from the get-go it uses Hardware very differently than a lot of the rest of resolve um big key points is one it doesn't use GPU a crazy crazy amount um there are certainly GPU accelerated Parts but typically GPU is not the bottleneck uh so you want a good GPU but it doesn't need to be crazy uh multi-gpu actually doesn't really work well in Fusion uh in a lot of our testing if you add more gpus it actually lowers performance in Fusion oh that's interesting so yeah so it's one of those trade-offs where like if you do a bunch of noise reduction and fusion you're kind of getting performance here but you're losing usually it's not a lot it's a few percent but you know it's not really helping you in Fusion uh so that's a big thing as you don't need to go crazy on the GPU mid-range GPU you'll be fine uh CPU also uh it is not super highly threaded so those new AMD CPUs that have 64 96 cores no they're going to be slower than this you know Intel Core CPU that has 24 cores um so Intel Core right now tends to be the fastest performance you can get so you get like an Intel Core i 9 14900 K it's like a six5 $600 CPU that's about the fastest you can get right now which is a little unfortunate that you can't just like throw money at the problem and get more performance man that would be great yeah that yeah sometimes that would be great if you can solve your problems with money but not infusion boy okay and what about Ram yeah so Ram is the other area where you kind of can throw money at the problem uh cuz uh similar to other applications you'll like after effects um you know you're caching all those frames into RAM and so the more RAM you have the more frames you can cach and if a frame is already caching you're just playing again and again you're just like checking out how something looks you don't have to re-render those frames um so having plenty of ram just means it's the chance that you might not have to reprocess the frame at from at the get-go which means that you know you know you don't even have to have a super fast CPU if you're not having to recache yeah so uh just get plenty of plenty of ram I I'd say minimum 64 gig um ideal probably like 128 we have some people who are getting you know 256 512 gigs of RAM for things like Fusion because that's one of those situations where more can help you as long as you're doing longer Fusion comps if you're only doing you know 00 frames yeah you don't really need it you just need to be able to store those frames it's not going to actually make things run faster it's just going to have the have the space to think about all those frames and cach them right yeah and luckily it's just math uh and those in those cases so you know if you are playing through a timeline and you realize oh I'm running out of ram halfway through you know that oh you pretty much need twice the RAM and you're going to be fine it's not some weird nebulous it changes kind of depending on what you're doing it depends on the bit depth the uh resolution and how many frames gotcha so until black magic maybe makes some tweaks to how it uses the hardware which I'm sure they're they're probably working on and stuff but right now it's all about the processor right yeah and all about the single core performance is what we typically call it it's how fast each individual core is not how many cores you have gotcha yeah it's a race car not a semi- so if I were going to build a fusion system from the ground up let me just make see if I have this right okay uh I would prioritize getting the the fastest single core performance for my CPU yep I would get a bunch of ram like 128 maybe something like that and I'd get a decent graph card yep y something like an RTX 4070 4070 TI maybe 4080 yeah and that will get you going and that's about the best you can possibly get wow that's nice that it's like accessible but it's also really sad that you can't just like you know if I have $20,000 I can't just make this amazing system it's just yeah that's where it is right now unfortunately yeah exactly yeah that $10,000 CPU from AMD it's going to be slower than a $500 Intel or AMD ryzen CPU all right okay so you probably just saved people a bunch of money like literally you guys just saved money from what's Happening Here so um couple questions that I get about PCS we've pretty much been talking about PCS here a desktop versus a laptop what are the differences there when would you I mean obviously you need a laptop if you're going to take it somewhere but I always thought that if you have a laptop that has the same kind of components you know it's the it's a 4090 or whatever it's a certain kind of a processor and it's comparable to the desktop version that oh well I'll just get the mobile version of that would those be considered equal yeah unfortunately no uh there's a lot of marketing games I feel like that go on and it's not Intel or AMD or Nvidia it's kind of everybody so I'm not going to point fingers at any one person because it's kind of just the nature of the industry um unfortunately you have a great example is the RTX 4090 we have the desktop version and then there's a 49d mobile which is actually what we're using in our laptops very different GPU name is the same but a 409d mobile is more equivalent to like a 4070 desktop so that's like two three steps down in terms of performance um and CPUs too um there's the 14900 K that we use in our desktop slot there's the 14900 HX that we use in our laptops specs wise they look about the same same core count they appear the same very different um in that case it's more about how much power can you give the CPU because a mobile platform it can't provide as much power as you know a giant cord from the wall to a giant power supply uh but at the same time too it's making a lot of heat and you got to be able to dissipate that heat and in a desktop you can have big heat sinks you can have big fans in a laptop you've got you know heat sinks this this big fans you know gay big yeah uh so you just can't get rid of it so it's got to throttle it down and throttling is very normal these days that's like how things are designed is to throttle but that means that you know you don't have that thermal head room to get more performance so a general rule of thumb number is that a laptop at the same price as a desktop is going to be somewhere around 20% slower um that's a rule of thumb it's going to change it can be more it can be less uh but if you want r on something that's similarly spec yeah uh similarly priced is usually How We Do It similarly spec in terms of like names it's going to be even more because they kind of play those games about like this is the top laptop GPU so let's use the top you know number or model name you know 4090 but it's really not comparable to a desktop 4090 I am so sorry to anyone who bought a laptop right before they watch this and at least the the good part with laptops is that there is less choice in the hardware that you're going to put into it so you don't have something like you have on desktops where you're like hey do I go up to thread Ripper Pro there's no thread rer Pro on laptops so generally with laptop on fire yeah yeah it would not work well yeah so generally with laptops the more money you put into it the more performance you're going to get so luckily at least there most people buy based on budget so you know they're at a certain budget level that's the best they can they can you know reasonably afford cool that's the performance they're going to get but yeah trying to compare it to a desktop somewhere between 20 probably 30% is about the performance hit you're going to take by doing a laptop man that's that's that's wild and that's mostly just cuz you can't grab all the power that it needs in that little box and even if it could it can't cool stuff down exactly yeah it's just a physical problem exactly uh just as like a reference our desktops these days we start off at about an 850 W power supply in most of our systems uh it's Overkill sometimes but that's kind of where we start off our laptops the max laptop that you really can find is going to be about 350 Watts so already that's less than half the wattage the half the power you have to work with yeah U so you know doesn't scale linearly how much power you have to what kind of the performance you get but it just kind of gives you a little bit an idea of how much resources a laptop has to work with compared to a desktop man that's really interesting I know you guys build PCS but we got to ask okay a Mac versus a PC what's the performance difference there cuz I know there's the the the new like you know M1 M2 M3 and those are really impressive for the specs that you can you can see right I mean I wouldn't consider getting a computer with 8 gigs of RAM and really being serious about I'm going to edit video on this thing these days um but that's what that's what my MacBook has and it works pretty well so um why would you get a Mac versus a PC and what are kind of the differences there as far as uh content creation and DiVinci resolve I feel like more than anywhere else the whole Mac versus PC is where you get you know fans of One Versus the other and you know if you want love one versus the other you really like Windows you really like Mac OS go for it it's more important that you are comfortable with the tool you're using than that you're eing out every little bit of performance so that's that's number one um but in terms of raw performance uh especially with the new M1 m2s and stuff um there are some nuances between PC versus MAC uh some are better for other things than you know they just kind of trade blows in different ways um number one I would say is that if you need to operate off of a battery uh you're out in the field you can't plug in your laptop you need to be on battery that's where Max Exel they are very energy efficient and they pretty much get the same performance when plugged in then when on battery wow so if you need to be on battery Mac is probably the way you want to go like a Macbook the other area that they tend to be a little bit faster than PC for is for uh processing of h264 and HPC media uh their acceleration chips are a little bit more efficient than right now than on PC side uh it's not massive it's like a 10 to 20% difference depending on whether you're talking about versus a desktop or a laptop um but if you're you know right on that edge of like I can almost play this in real time yeah it'd be really nice just to be able to you know do that but again 10% is you know it's the difference between 20 and 24 FPS you know so it's it's not a massive thing but there is an advantage there everywhere else actually PC tends to take a performance lead uh even things like prores or DNX even though Max have those accelerators that's about a wash between the two PCS just have more raw horsepower to throw at it yeah so like even if it's less efficient there's more exactly yeah yeah other things anything that uses GPU pretty much so in D resolve you're talking about open effects the AI stuff especially thei stuff is way faster on PC uh we're talking two or three times faster so if you're doing any of that super scaling the magic masking significantly faster on PC primarily because of Nvidia with their Cuda stuff AI GPU effects uh raw footage is also quite a bit faster uh so if you are you know you need a laptop and you want to be working like dailies on set and you're shooting raw a PC laptop could give you a nice little performance bump there again you want to be plugged in but you know if you can be plugged in you get a nice performance bump and that's probably the way to go um Fusion is probably the last area there uh it's a lot closer than I think a lot of people think um PC has a slight performance lead there but it's something like 10 or 15% uh so it's not it's mostly on the processor anyway right yeah yeah yeah uh but it's not most of the time it's nothing that's gamebreaking it it's close you know little trade-offs here or there um so a lot of the time it actually comes down more to what else are you doing you know are you also working with after effects or Premiere Pro or uh do you need to be working with a bunch of different uh types of external drives so you want windows so that you can do in TFS you know without having to do third party utilities or uh are you doing dit work so you want to use Mac for you know the software that's out there for dit work um so a lot of it comes down to that you know just where else does it fit into your workflow that makes sense wow okay thank you so much absolutely that that's that's the big thing you know oftentimes that we're trying to do is find those truths and share them because you know even for our own customers we would rather our customers spend a little bit less money get exactly what they need be happy with it and then man they become lifetime customers they become fans you know and like and it's just way better for us for our souls sure you know that they're getting the right thing not just the most expensive thing yeah all right so if somebody wants to talk to you about um about building a system and maybe they want a system from Puget right what do what do they do uh so Puget systems.com is definitely the place to start I mean we've got configuration Pages there um if you actually are interested in purchasing a system obviously we always recommend pick up the phone talk um there's so much so much you can get over a phone call conversation that's way better than giant email threads um so that's the big thing is talk to our Consultants but even if you're not going to be buying system from us uh one of the unique things we do is all of the research and testing and benchmarks we do those go on our website not behind any sort of registration or pay wall so you can go to our our website uh I believe there's like articles and you can go to our Hardware articles and you can check out you know the testing we did for the latest Nvidia super cards or the 1400 K that Intel just launched a few days ago um so you can check all that out and see is this worth it for what I'm doing and then you can make that decision you know if you're going to be building your system you know yourself where where do I spend that money is it worth it to make this upgrade versus that upgrade yeah that's that's been such a valuable resource for us over the years and um the Puget systems that we have are are amazing we love them they they're they're our best computers and so uh yeah if you guys haven't checked out Puget systems make sure to do that um this is why we're up here talking with these guys is because I mean you could see you've tested all these different scenarios and all these different ways of creating uh creating content and resolve with all this Hardware that nobody else gets to do that I mean they have these huge test benches where they just go through and and and just actually put the rubber to the road and make sure like okay if you get this card you get this kind of performance and this versus this other this other solution so wildly valuable so thank you guys so much for for what you do and how you're helping our industry I really appreciate it of course of course I mean is we're in a very unique situation I would say we have the hardware contacts so we can get CPUs and gpus and we can do all that um we have the people were talking to the customers who were telling us their headaches because that's what we want to know where is your headache so let's solve that headache so we get to constantly hear what's the problems yeah and so we can take both of those and put them together we have the resources from both side and we're not beholding to Intel or AMD you know we're not having to only sell those products we have freedom to do whatever we want yeah which means we have the freedom to find out what's the actual right thing see I love that I love that that's value first so make sure to check out Puget systems at Puget systems.com and uh yeah get yourself a a just a smoking PC man this is this is so cool I know I'm definitely going to be checking my specs on my PC and making sure that I have everything um because man this has been very very enlightening thank you yeah no problem wasn't that amazing I freaking love Matt I love these guys they've been so good to us over the years they've been a sponsor of resolve con and they've helped us out with a lot of workflow stuff they're just amazing so if you're looking for just a top-notch PC cannot recommend Puget systems enough and even if you're not into buying one from them I would take this wisdom and go crazy and build your own if this video was helpful please let me know in the comments we're trying to make some of the most hard-hitting amazing content for you guys it's just super valuable so let us know what you thought down below and just a little reminder if you're getting into resolve make sure to check out this video it's a full introduction to resolve course totally free on YouTube there it is thanks for hanging out I hope you have a great a great I don't know when this video is going to come out but next few days I was going to say weekend but I don't know whenever you watch this I hope the next few days like two to three days is really good for you

Channel: Casey Faris

Views: 76,709

Keywords: blackmagic design, casey faris, how to, free video editor, tutorial, davinci resolve 18, resolve for beginners, davinci tutorials, editing, fusion, casey faris fusion tutorial, fusion tutorial for beginners, Puget Systems, best PC build, best resolve system, PC for davinci resolve

Id: tCv3vP6LxAs

Length: 43min 9sec (2589 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024