[winther1]

I bought this little Intel NUC pc in 2019 to replace a traditional tower pc.


It has been problem free and still runs great for most jobs, but as I have been getting into video editing in Premier pro lately, I seem to have found its limit. Very sluggish and preview window useless. Also, loading thousands of 65mb raw files from my new Sony camera in Camera Raw is painfully slow.
I was wondering if more ram will solve the issue. It's currently running 16gb.
Or could the processor be the bottleneck? As I understand, a GPU is not important unless you are 3d rendering.

Full specs:
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-8559U Processor (8M Cache, up to 4.50 GHz)
Total Cores: 4
Total Threads: 8
Processor Base Frequency: 2.70 GHz
OS: Windows 11 64-bit
Maximum Memory Supported: 32 GB
Hard Disk: ‎Corsair MP510, Force Series, 960GB M.2 NVMe PCIe x4 Gen3 SSD
Hard Drive Interface: Serial ATA-600
Graphics Coprocessor: ‎Intel Iris Plus Graphics 655
RAM: Corsair Vengeance SODIMM 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 2400MHz

[ian332isport]

Originally Posted by winther1

As I understand, a GPU is not important unless you are 3d rendering.

3d rendering is more down to the number of CPU cores than the GPU.

I suspect there’s nothing much wrong with the PC as such, it’s just simply not up to the task of heavy duty video editing.

[bishbosh]

Unless you're maxing out the memory capacity then I doubt more memory would help as you'll still be limited by the current memory bandwidth.

I had a 6th gen 'U' mobile i7 cpu in my old work pc and it was next to useless, very slow to do anything. Had to grumble for a year before it got replaced with something faster. I just think the mobile cpus aren't designed for power hungry applications. Also on the all in one pcs the cpu isn't replaceable unfortunately.

[winther1]

watching task manager, both ram and cpu is maxing out under load. But I don't know if lack of ram can put greater load on CPU and vice versa. Also, haven't looked into overclocking yet.
I just checked the ram prices and shocked to see how much they have dropped. 32gb cost less than what I paid for 16gb 3 years ago.
Tempted to give 32gb a shot before forking out 1k+ on a new machine.
My 2015 work macbook pro can still run most tasks with older tech. Not sure what magic is keeping it running so well

[ian332isport]

When you max out on RAM usage, it usually causes high disk usage as it has to store stuff on the disk instead of holding it in RAM.

I don’t think more RAM will help much. I think you’re just asking too much for your current machine.

[Abzynthe]

2400mhz is quite slow for your RAM. I think 3200mhz is the limit for DDR4 though.

You also say you have an NVMe SSD but your interface is SATA?

If that's the case then transferring files over sata is slow compared to NVMe.

You have to bare in mind that your CPU is also your GPU and it shares the available Ram between the two tasks. So increasing your ram and it's speed will help but it's always going to be doing both jobs.

[Watsey]

If you're thinking of a £1K budget to replace your PC at some stage then I'd suggest moving to a Mac Mini.

Apple Silicon uses System-on-Chip architecture with the CPU, GPU and memory all integrated on a single chipset. Data transfer and processing speeds through the chip are greatly increased which leads to better performance.

A Mac Mini with the M1 chip and 16Gb RAM is £899.

£2K would get you a Mac Studio which has an M1 Max chip and 32Gb RAM. The performance jump is significant.

Here's a review of the performance and multi-tasking capabilities of the M1 Max chip, also comparing it with a 64Gb version, in a MacBook Pro (spoiler, the vast majority of users don't need 64Gb) :

[DaveA]

Can you run the Geekbench 5 benchmark tests on it at all...? Both the CPU and Compute tests are useful to see where bottlenecks might be...

My guess is that the on-board GPU is the bottleneck as it is used for the tasks that you refer to as being sluggish...

The mobile intel chip uses and on-board GPU and it is really the limitation using the mobile intel chips... The last Mac mini's with the mobile intel chips had an option for adding an eGPU to overcome those limitations (it was not ideal as not all apps are capable of running via an eGPU)... My Mac mini has been quite modified over the years and by far the biggest improvement came by adding a s/h eGPU I sourced on eBay...

As Watsey says, Apple have addressed this limitation further by going their own way now... I have a standard 10/16 M1Pro MacBook Pro that I bought for travel and my intel mini now runs bench numbers similar to that M1Pro MacBook... But the mini uses 64GB of RAM and an eGPU to do so, which puts the mini up at around the £2k mark...

[Steve_M_Sport]

Have you run the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app to see what speed your NVME is running at ?

I have a MAC Mini M1 with 256gb internal SSD - the internal SSD is very fast at accessing data .

The 1st screen shot is the disk speed of the internal SSD.

The 2nd screenshot is of an external 2TB NVME connected by Thunderbolt 3

As you can see a big drop off in speed.

[Eddamoo]

Your CPU is almost certainly the bottleneck. As BishBosh eluded, you have a U (aka Ultra Low Power) CPU designed for very small form factor PC/Ultrabooks. These simply do not have the grunt to process highly parallelised tasks like rendering. It has a peak turbo frequency of 4.5 Ghz but wont get anywhere near that when using all cores due to the lack of available power delivery (25watts).

If your CPU is maxed, an increase in RAM isn't likely going to help. Windows processes will take all they need and more so you'd need to see if the system is using the page file (https://www.m-files.com/user-guide/2...e_monitor.html). Even if you do max it out, your NVME HDD is still nice and fast so shouldn't make things hang much at all.

If you're seriously into this, you need a high CPU count Desktop chip. I would definitely not be getting a Mac Mini, you can get a 3x faster PC for the same money that would even trounce the M1 Max (e.g. AMD R9 7900x).

[winther1]

Thanks for all the useful replies.
I just ran the CPU benchmark on Geekbench 5 - don't know if this is considered good or bad:





Disk speed seems ok:

[Watsey]

Originally Posted by Eddamoo

Your CPU is almost certainly the bottleneck. As BishBosh eluded, you have a U (aka Ultra Low Power) CPU designed for very small form factor PC/Ultrabooks. These simply do not have the grunt to process highly parallelised tasks like rendering. It has a peak turbo frequency of 4.5 Ghz but wont get anywhere near that when using all cores due to the lack of available power delivery (25watts).

If your CPU is maxed, an increase in RAM isn't likely going to help. Windows processes will take all they need and more so you'd need to see if the system is using the page file (https://www.m-files.com/user-guide/2...e_monitor.html). Even if you do max it out, your NVME HDD is still nice and fast so shouldn't make things hang much at all.

If you're seriously into this, you need a high CPU count Desktop chip. I would definitely not be getting a Mac Mini, you can get a 3x faster PC for the same money that would even trounce the M1 Max (e.g. AMD R9 7900x).

A quick Google search indicates that just the AMD chip costs ~£550. It would be interesting to see full prices for a 'built' desktop PC and core OS and the scores for the usual bench tests.

[robbiep]

If you've got Microsoft Edge installed (whether you use it or not), try this (it has a 'leak' that means it keeps on using more and more memory)

Right click on bottom task bar: 'News and interests' > Turn off

[Eddamoo]

Just wanted to apologise to the OP (and Watsey) here as my research was flawed!

I was going of pure compute power for doing things like the Premier/RAW render, but it seems Premier Pro is now fully Hardware render capable, meaning you can completely offload software CPU computation onto a GPU.

Ultimately the M1/M2 chips are excellent at this (and it seems Apple's primary productivity market is content-creation users so have tailored it so). There are lots of YouTube vids on the topic which would be worth checking out.

[DaveA]

Originally Posted by Eddamoo

Just wanted to apologise to the OP (and Watsey) here as my research was flawed!

I was going of pure compute power for doing things like the Premier/RAW render, but it seems Premier Pro is now fully Hardware render capable, meaning you can completely offload software CPU computation onto a GPU.

Ultimately the M1/M2 chips are excellent at this (and it seems Apple's primary productivity market is content-creation users so have tailored it so). There are lots of YouTube vids on the topic which would be worth checking out.

Indeed, the GPU's do most of the heavy lifting in video rendering these days and so machine performance when doing things like that is dependant upon your GPU capability... and the mobile intel chips don't really have the GPU's built in for this...

The Geekbench "Compute" test/benchmark is pretty good at giving you an idea of performance for things like this...

To give you an idea, my Mac Mini's original intel chip's GPU (a UHD Graphics 620) gave a "Compute" benchmark around the 5,000 mark... Adding an eGPU (Radeon Pro 580, which is a fairly middle of the road card) caused the benchmark to increase to around 38,000....

The Compute benchmark with the eGPU is similar to my current 14" MacBook Pro with M1 Pro 10/16 chipset... The M1 Pro, however, has a far superior multi-core benchmark over the 6-core I7 in my Mini... which you would expect...

[DaveA]

Originally Posted by winther1

Thanks for all the useful replies.
I just ran the CPU benchmark on Geekbench 5 - don't know if this is considered good or bad:

Can you run the "compute" benchmark... as this is the benchmark that will measure the performance of the GPU...

The CPU benchmarks you list are similar overall (I have not gone through the individual numbers) to my Intel i7 6-core, albeit my multi-core benchmark is slightly higher because off the extra cores... but they are essential similar... which might suggest your processor is preforming as expected...

You can look top your model on. the geekbench database and see if your scores are what others are getting for your machine...

[winther1]

Originally Posted by DaveA

Can you run the "compute" benchmark... as this is the benchmark that will measure the performance of the GPU...

The CPU benchmarks you list are similar overall (I have not gone through the individual numbers) to my Intel i7 6-core, albeit my multi-core benchmark is slightly higher because off the extra cores... but they are essential similar... which might suggest your processor is preforming as expected...

You can look top your model on. the geekbench database and see if your scores are what others are getting for your machine...

I ran the compute test as well and got a score of 4400. The GPU is the weakest link, but I never thought this too be a problem as I didn't think it was utilised in the editing process. As pointed out above, turns out it is now an important aspect.

[DaveA]

Originally Posted by winther1

I can the compute test as well and got a score of 4400. The GPU is the weakest link, but I never thought this too be a problem as I didn't think it was utilised in the editing process. As pointed out above, turns out it is now an important aspect.

Obviously I don't know your editing process, but at 4400 you would notice that as sluggish even with photo editing... Like in how long it takes to generate thumbnails in a folder with a large number of images... and running plug-ins and filters...

So I am not surprised video encoding and rendering is struggling...

[agentorange]

I'm puzzled as to why the OP says downloading files from his camera are slow. Is that using WiFi or a cable? USB 3 is supposed to be good for 300 Mb/s I believe. Could it be the antivirus that is slowing the transfer speed?

Task manager saying you are maxing out the memory as well as the CPU I find a little odd. How much memory is taken up by Windows 11 before any other apps are started? I would also check for pre-installed junk software that is continually polling the Web for updates. My wife's laptop had a bunch of that before I had a major clearout.

[winther1]

Originally Posted by agentorange

I'm puzzled as to why the OP says downloading files from his camera are slow. Is that using WiFi or a cable? USB 3 is supposed to be good for 300 Mb/s I believe. Could it be the antivirus that is slowing the transfer speed?

Task manager saying you are maxing out the memory as well as the CPU I find a little odd. How much memory is taken up by Windows 11 before any other apps are started? I would also check for pre-installed junk software that is continually polling the Web for updates. My wife's laptop had a bunch of that before I had a major clearout.

What I meant was that the files from the new camera are huge - loading them in Bridge (not transferring from camera) and working on them in photoshop is noticeably slower than working on smaller files from my old camera. More horsepower needed!

32gb definitely helped with the smoothness of Premiere Pro. Before it would max out the memory, but it now hovers around 40% under load.

When I opened up the NUC, I was reminded of the empty 2.5 SSD compartment, so I bought this 4gb SSD drive - 40% off at the moment and the lowest price ever according to Camel
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07W1SYTTT/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Now I can finally retire my 13 year old mechanical backup drive

[g9icy]

So yeah, a NUC isn't really going to be up to video editing/rendering work.

I'd recommend an AMD 3000 series (or newer if you can afford it) CPU (something with 8+ cores) and a decent graphics card. An older nVidia card would be fine if you're on a budget.

If you're not on a budget, just buy something you like the look of from OCUK, it'll probably be fine as long as you're not looking to be 100% performance optimized and this is a hobby.

If you want a specific set of hardware to buy I can do an indepth recommendation/build for video editing if you'd like.

[winther1]

Thanks a lot!
If I was to upgrade, I would go for something beefy that will get me covered for the next 5+ years.
I will work with what I have for now and see how it goes. I never render, just basic video editing - so far it seems acceptable, but I know it can be much smoother