i3 6300 bottlenecking on 4k playback - upgrade to kaby lake i5?

[wazzickle]

With 16gb of ddr4, it seems reasonable to assume that still won't bottleneck on true 4k stuff - this machine can handle some 4k playback but not the 40-70gig films that appear to need a lot of decoding power. The question is whether the upgrade of i3-6300 skylake to i5-7600 kaby lake (not K - my case is rated to dissipate up to 91W of TDP but I don't particularly want to push it that far, and I don't know how to overclock anyway) will be the difference with these files. Using MPC-BE with hardware acceleration.



Also: speccy is reporting that virtualization is supported but currently disabled. Is there any reason enabling this would improve performance in any ways?

Thanks guys.

[Hoonigan]

Maybe someone can confirm this, but do GPUs not decode this sort of thing yet?

[wazzickle]

Maybe someone can confirm this, but do GPUs not decode this sort of thing yet?

They do - the iGPUs on skylake (HD 530) can decode 1080p no problem and low bitrate 2160p stuff fairly smoothly, but the high bitrates give this CPU trouble. The gap in my knowledge is whether the HD 630 that comes with kaby lake, which doesn't seem to present much of an improvement if at all on 530 (by gflops and clock speed), will be responsible for any change in performance, or whether it's the change in cpu performance that will come from i3 skylake to i5 kaby lake that will improve 4k playback & decoding.

[Bagnaj97]

Wouldn't a 1050 or 460 discrete gpu be a better option? From your posts it sounds like it's hardware decoding on the GPU, but the IGP isn't up to the job. A 1050 or 460 will be much faster than the IGP even in a Kaby Lake i5.

[AETAaAS]

I don't think it is the bitrate which is causing problems. Looking at the video you were trying to play, it's a 10bit HEVC file. Skylake (your CPU) only has partial hardware decoding for that. Skylake can do 8bit HEVC on the FFP but 10bit is partially offloaded to the CPU.

Kaby Lake brings in full hardware 10bit HEVC support. So you don't have to splash out on a i5, you can go for a lower power i3 to save cost and heat. I note your listed case is a Streacom F8C. On balance of cost, heat generation, the limited half height PCI expansion which you may already be using for something else and for the sake of just keeping it neat, a CPU upgrade is appealing. Note you may need a BIOS update to go to Kaby Lake: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/asus-k...ews-54008.html.

Bagnaj's suggestion of a dGPU is another path but I am not entirely sure on that side which GPUs properly support 10bit HEVC decode. Someone else may chime in on that.

edit: Hell, you can get a Pentium or Celeron Kaby Lake if you are going ultra budget. The Pentiums got HT on some models, some run at lower TPDs (~35w) and as long as you check on Intel's ARK to make sure they have Quicksync and a 6xx series GPU, you should be good to go.

[wazzickle]

The aim for my build was entirely passively-cooled and silent so heat dissipation is limited - I had a look around for half-height, single slot, passively-cooled dgpus but came to the conclusion they would be unworkable in the space I have and not enough of a boost over the igpu.

That's interesting regarding 10-bit video decoding, thanks. Budget is not an issue at the moment and the pricing difference between i3 and i5 doesn't seem to great, so I'm probably going to go with the i5 7600. Thanks!

[Hoonigan]

The aim for my build was entirely passively-cooled and silent so heat dissipation is limited

so I'm probably going to go with the i5 7600.

Will those two be possible? The 7600 is a 65W processor, if I'm not mistaken, which may be a little too much for a passive cooler?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This Pentium has HT and is the cheapest CPU with HD630 IGP:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...pu-35w-cpu-oem

It only has a 35W TDP.

This one has higher clockspeed but has a larger TDP:

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/inte...pu-51w-cpu-box

[kompukare]

Will those two be possible? The 7600 is a 65W processor, if I'm not mistaken, which may be a little too much for a passive cooler?

Yes, even the low-power 35W like the Core i5-7400T might be too much.
AETAaAS's recommendation for the Kaby Lake Pentiums is good, although for media handling duties it's probably best to get either the G4600 or the G4620 for the HD630 rather than the HD610 in the G4560.
The wikipedia is a good place to get an overview and a link to Intel's Ark database:
Kaby Lake Pentium
Kaby Lake i3
Kaby Lake i5

TPU isn't the whole story, as certainly the Pentium G4560 (which is AFAIK the only one reviewed so far) uses a lot less than it's 54W TPU would imply:
https://www.computerbase.de/2017-01/...t-kaby-lake/4/
CB's review had the whole platform going from 34W to 57W a delta of 23W. Note the i5-7600K going from 34W to102W for a delta of nearly 70W. CB also said they were able to undervolt their Pentium to reduce the delta down to 16W. Intel also do the G4600T (with HD630) which is rated as a 35W part - although I doubt in real live it will be far below an undervolted normal G4600.

[aidanjt]

It depends entirely on the passive dissipation capacity of the heatsink. Some can even handle 90W on all but the most intense synthetic workloads like prime95 w/ small FFT's running constantly.

[wazzickle]

It's rated for 65W up to a maximum of 95W; the hardest task it will have will be 4k decoding so it shouldn't hit peak very often I'd have thought? Given where it lives at the moment my current i3 is generally running at ~ 40C under load so I'm fairly happy with the performance of the case.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

It will tax the IGP and I expect a fair amount of the quoted TDP is including the IGP. Also unless you really need AVX2 in the Core i3 6100,the Pentium G4600 only is £75 anyway. I expect if you ditch the Core i3 6300 you will be able to get the Pentium almost free!!

[wazzickle]

It will tax the IGP and I expect a fair amount of the quoted TDP is including the IGP. Also unless you really need AVX2 in the Core i3 6100,the Pentium G4600 only is £75 anyway. I expect if you ditch the Core i3 6300 you will be able to get the Pentium almost free!!

Well I've got an inheritance to blow so I'm not too concerned with cost for now; as far as I can tell the igpus of the pentium and i5 are the same, and they'll be doing the same tasks - why would the i5 get maxed out?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Well I've got an inheritance to blow so I'm not too concerned with cost for now; as far as I can tell the igpus of the pentium and i5 are the same, and they'll be doing the same tasks - why would the i5 get maxed out?

??

Video playback will be taxing the IGP if its doing most of the work,so I don't see the real point of a Core i5,for playback. If CPU performance was that important for video playback most of those ARM based devices would be incapable of doing so.

Most of the TDP spec would be including both the CPU and IGP being used,so this is why you never quite see the Intel CPUs hitting quoted TDP figures,I would expect if both parts were taxed they would be closer.

The Pentium G4600 has the same IGP(the cheaper ones don't),and you only gain AVX2 and ECC going to the Core i3 7000 series. The Core i5 7400 gains two cores,losses HT and drops single core clockspeed a bit.

I really don't see the point of blowing £200 on a Core i5 unless you need AVX,and I have mates who earn silly money,but still bought a GTX970/R9 390 instead of a Titan X(which they could easily afford),otherwise its almost like using a sledgehammer to swat a fly!!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some Intel marketing bumpf:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10610/...g-in-january/3



The improved playback features of the Kaby Lake IGPs have no doubt been formulated to help with lower power CPUs.

So looking at that they have even probably improved power consumption on the GPU side too.

However,YT 4K is not nearly as high bitrate as rips/downloads,so if even Intel is saying 4K YT can push their CPUs quite a bit,you can see why you are hitting some performance issues,with higher bitrate stuff.

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Proces...p-over-Skylake

Specific additions to the codec lineup include decode support for 10-bit HEVC and 8/10-bit VP9 as well as encode support for 10-bit HEVC and 9-bit VP9. The video engine adds HDR support with tone mapping though it does require EU utilization. Wide Color Gamut (Rec. 2020) is prepped and ready to go according to Intel for when that standard starts rolling out to displays.

Performance levels for these new HEVC encode/decode blocks is set to allow for 4K 120mbps real-time on both the Y-series (4.5 watt) and U-series (15 watt) processors.

[Xlucine]

Isn't the point of hardware decoding that it doesn't use the power hungry CPU and sticks to dedicated logic, thereby staying nowhere near the TDP?