6 Core to 12 Core, worth it?

[InuNacho]

I have the opportunity to pick up a 12 core tray locally for cheap, but I'm not to sure I could actually benefit from it.
I have a large backlog of uncompressed video of 16mm and VHS videos I need to adjust in Premiere and compress in HandBrake or Adobe Media Encoder. Problem I see with this upgrade is that I'm still on Mavericks and CS6 which I recall at release not really taking advantage of more than a couple of cores.
Would I be better off just sticking to my 6 core or would the 12 help at all?

 

[bsbeamer]

Make SURE the tray is the right SMC version to match your system. Should read as 1.39f5 for 4,1 compatibility.

VERY few on this forum are on OSX 10.9, so you're not likely to get tailored info to your exact machine/setup. Most have hacked their 4,1 to ID as 5,1 to run latest OS versions (either High Sierra or Mojave).

I will say dual X5690 makes a big difference with Adobe CC (currently 2019) in Mojave 10.14 vs. single W3680. Swapped the single tray back in MP5,1 for testing recently.

 

[grey17]

If your disks are fast enough to keep up Handbrake will take advantage of all available CPU cores for straight encoding. However, (at least in older versions of Handbrake) many of the filters (noise, deinterlace, etc.) are single threaded. So if you use the filters it is hard to take advantage of more CPU cores.

I haven't tried this in awhile so I don't know if it still works, but you could have multiple copies of Handbrake running in parallel (simply copy the program and give each a unique name) . So if you have many files to encode as opposed to one large file you get around the single threaded filters by compressing multiple files at the same time.

 

[AidenShaw]

I haven't tried this in awhile so I don't know if it still works, but you could have multiple copies of Handbrake running in parallel (simply copy the program and give each a unique name) . So if you have many files to encode as opposed to one large file you get around the single threaded filters by compressing multiple files at the same time.

Note that if the source files are on spinners (rather than SSDs), this can cause a lot of extra head movement on the disks, and in the end might be slower than running a single instance. It would depend on the ratio of CPU to IO, and might be useful for a few instances - and harmful for many instances.

 

[velocityg4]

Depends on how cheap. You can also sell your old tray on eBay or here. Plus that tray will markedly improve your Mac's resale value.

Looking at ancient benchmarks of Premiere Pro CS6 and Handbrake. Both show marked improvements when more cores are thrown at them. As they scaled well from 4 threads (3570K), 8 Threads (3770K) and 12 Threads (3930K). I'd assume twelve cores would show further improvement. Premiere shows more improvement than Handbrake.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-comparison,3370-13.html

Out of curiosity. Why not update to El Capitan if that is the latest supported or High Sierra/Mojave?

 

[AidenShaw]

I have the opportunity to pick up a 12 core tray locally for cheap, but I'm not to sure I could actually benefit from it.
I have a large backlog of uncompressed video of 16mm and VHS videos I need to adjust in Premiere and compress in HandBrake or Adobe Media Encoder. Problem I see with this upgrade is that I'm still on Mavericks and CS6 which I recall at release not really taking advantage of more than a couple of cores.
Would I be better off just sticking to my 6 core or would the 12 help at all?

I find it amusing to juxtapose this thread with the AMD fanboy threads asking "why don't Apple use 32-core EpicRippers"?

The number of workstation workloads that scale well with many additional cores is rather small. (Server workloads, on the other hand, often consist of dealing with large numbers of independent requests from the network - so scaling is often more linear with more cores.)

 

[InuNacho]

Depends on how cheap. You can also sell your old tray on eBay or here. Plus that tray will markedly improve your Mac's resale value.

Looking at ancient benchmarks of Premiere Pro CS6 and Handbrake. Both show marked improvements when more cores are thrown at them. As they scaled well from 4 threads (3570K), 8 Threads (3770K) and 12 Threads (3930K). I'd assume twelve cores would show further improvement. Premiere shows more improvement than Handbrake.
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-performance-comparison,3370-13.html

Out of curiosity. Why not update to El Capitan if that is the latest supported or High Sierra/Mojave?

I'm still on Mavericks for some legacy scanner software and some Adobe CS3 applications. If there is an improvment in cpu usage, I'll consider upgrading to something a little more modern.
Thanks for that information.

 

[kohlson]

4 threads (3570K), 8 Threads (3770K) and 12 Threads (3930K).

Are these Windows or Mac OS benchmarks?