New kit AMD ryzen 3900x vs intel i9-9900

[Mambo]

hi all

My first post so please be kind

Firstly I am well aware that this forum specialises on advising old hardware to use as a BI server such as old dell or hp machines, which is Great, and I am also aware that only Intel have quick sync, however...

I (and many others I’ve seen in recent posts) am looking to build a decent pc that will also act as a bi server. The intel i9-9900 looks impressive and also has quicksync, but the amd ryzen range, particularly the 3900x which has 12 cores
And hyper threading also looks good, plus there’s a 3950x on the way but I expect this will be silly money. I also intend to have a medium priced graphics card in the machine and I am wondering if any members have tried either of these and what the results are, ie in comparison for BI, is the quicksync the must have feature to buy and damn everything else or does the amd equivalent perform equally aswell?

Does anyone have any experience or performed any tests?

For reference I plan to use 5 or 6 4k cameras at full bitrate running on movement detection and on the recommended settings I have seen on the forum- a bit vague I know but I’m keen to see if anyone has experience of these cpus, I don’t want to reject the amd option outright just because it has no quicksync without someone proving that the amd is not up to the task

Thanks in advance

 

[bp2008]

Blue Iris only supports Intel Quick Sync and Nvidia NVDEC as hardware acceleration options. Whatever AMD's equivalent for hardware acceleration is, it is not supported in Blue Iris, and it is not in the highest-end Ryzen CPUs like the 3900x anyway. Nvidia's decoding is super inefficient (uses way too much power) so really Intel Quick Sync is the only viable option for hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration is not strictly necessary. A powerful CPU like the 3900x should be able to outperform an i9-9900K despite the latter having Quick Sync. All of this is only guessing based on CPU reviews and benchmarks, because I am not aware of anyone who has tried a Ryzen 3000 series CPU with Blue Iris yet.

Here are some charts from anandtech.

About the closest we get to a video decoding benchmark is this Handbrake encoding benchmark. Encoding and decoding are not the same things, and won't be using the same code as Blue Iris, but it is similar enough for this purpose I think. As you can see the 3900x has a significant lead over the i9-9900K, and it is absolutely blowing away older models.




The power consumption tests show the 3900x to have lower power consumption at full load compared to i9-9900K.




Certainly the 3900x beats the i9-9900K for most purposes. I bet it does better in Blue Iris too, but again, I'm only guessing.

The 3950x is supposed to be $750, for what that is worth.


Anyway, you really should consider a dedicated system for Blue Iris. Especially if you wanted to do anything resource-intensive like video editing on that machine, or performance-critical like gaming. Six 4K cameras at 15 FPS is 746 megapixels per second, which is on the top end of what I'd try to run on a cheap ebay system (a $220 i7-4790 box for example). If you were willing to cut frame rates a little bit, like to 10 FPS, then such a machine would be fine.

 

[Mambo]

Blue Iris only supports Intel Quick Sync and Nvidia NVDEC as hardware acceleration options. Whatever AMD's equivalent for hardware acceleration is, it is not supported in Blue Iris, and it is not in the highest-end Ryzen CPUs like the 3900x anyway. Nvidia's decoding is super inefficient (uses way too much power) so really Intel Quick Sync is the only viable option for hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration is not strictly necessary. A powerful CPU like the 3900x should be able to outperform an i9-9900K despite the latter having Quick Sync. All of this is only guessing based on CPU reviews and benchmarks, because I am not aware of anyone who has tried a Ryzen 3000 series CPU with Blue Iris yet.

Here are some charts from anandtech.

About the closest we get to a video decoding benchmark is this Handbrake encoding benchmark. Encoding and decoding are not the same things, and won't be using the same code as Blue Iris, but it is similar enough for this purpose I think. As you can see the 3900x has a significant lead over the i9-9900K, and it is absolutely blowing away older models.




The power consumption tests show the 3900x to have lower power consumption at full load compared to i9-9900K.




Certainly the 3900x beats the i9-9900K for most purposes. I bet it does better in Blue Iris too, but again, I'm only guessing.

The 3950x is supposed to be $750, for what that is worth.


Anyway, you really should consider a dedicated system for Blue Iris. Especially if you wanted to do anything resource-intensive like video editing on that machine, or performance-critical like gaming. Six 4K cameras at 15 FPS is 746 megapixels per second, which is on the top end of what I'd try to run on a cheap ebay system (a $220 i7-4790 box for example). If you were willing to cut frame rates a little bit, like to 10 FPS, then such a machine would be fine.

Thanks this is really helpful

 

[aristobrat]

Also if you haven't seen it, there's a BI performance repository that gets populated from folks that run the Blue Iris Update helper tool:
Blue Iris Update Helper

You should be able to type in AMD in the CPU Model box and it'll show you some performance info on BI systems running AMD processors. If you click on one of the fields of a particular system, it should show you more details on the system.

 

[bp2008]

I should note that BI5 changed registry locations so some camera details are wrong for records from BI5 systems.

 

[Mambo]

Blue Iris only supports Intel Quick Sync and Nvidia NVDEC as hardware acceleration options. Whatever AMD's equivalent for hardware acceleration is, it is not supported in Blue Iris, and it is not in the highest-end Ryzen CPUs like the 3900x anyway. Nvidia's decoding is super inefficient (uses way too much power) so really Intel Quick Sync is the only viable option for hardware acceleration.

Hardware acceleration is not strictly necessary. A powerful CPU like the 3900x should be able to outperform an i9-9900K despite the latter having Quick Sync. All of this is only guessing based on CPU reviews and benchmarks, because I am not aware of anyone who has tried a Ryzen 3000 series CPU with Blue Iris yet.

Here are some charts from anandtech.

About the closest we get to a video decoding benchmark is this Handbrake encoding benchmark. Encoding and decoding are not the same things, and won't be using the same code as Blue Iris, but it is similar enough for this purpose I think. As you can see the 3900x has a significant lead over the i9-9900K, and it is absolutely blowing away older models.




The power consumption tests show the 3900x to have lower power consumption at full load compared to i9-9900K.




Certainly the 3900x beats the i9-9900K for most purposes. I bet it does better in Blue Iris too, but again, I'm only guessing.

The 3950x is supposed to be $750, for what that is worth.


Anyway, you really should consider a dedicated system for Blue Iris. Especially if you wanted to do anything resource-intensive like video editing on that machine, or performance-critical like gaming. Six 4K cameras at 15 FPS is 746 megapixels per second, which is on the top end of what I'd try to run on a cheap ebay system (a $220 i7-4790 box for example). If you were willing to cut frame rates a little bit, like to 10 FPS, then such a machine would be fine.

Hi looking into this the i7-4790 systems on eBay and refurb companies are pretty good value, I’m likely to get a dedicated system for the bi server, I’ll still upgrade my main pc to a 12core ryzen so will report back on its performance for bi. In the meantime I’m curious what cpu you’d think I’d need if all 6 4k cameras were running at 15fps? I’d like to compare second hand prices with the i7-4790

Thanks in advance

 

[bp2008]

i7-4790 will probably work. I am just concerned that you might want more CPU time to spare for local and remote viewing. A step up would be i7-8700, i7-8700K, i7-9700, i7-9700K but those are a lot more expensive still.

As a specific example, a month ago I put together this i7-4790. Here is its biupdatehelper record, annotated to add or correct certain information which was not gathered quite accurately by the program:

(It was fine on their old TV, which was 720p, but then they upgraded to a 4K TV and CPU usage hit 100% so we had to limit the live preview FPS).