As they say, no plan survives contact with the enemy and so my ideas for a budget second editing station vanished. It is worth saying upfront, the i5 12400 and 3060 12GB were more than capable of editing from proxies but even compared to an M1 silicone MacBook Pro the experience was not even close. The time it takes to create proxies, the overall experience of editing proxy files. It’s all friction between the editor and the edit. Unfortunately (and a large reason I am writing these Gear talks) not many people seem to be talking a whole lot about workflow, or at least what is visible to me. I did find after some digging that the 50 series Nvidia cards are able to decode H.265 4:2:2, so that has to be first port of call right? At least one would assume… as I had just bought a 5070 for my main rig, I really didn’t feel like buying another GPU but if I was to spend on a GPU then let it be an upgrade. So I decided with the AI-Bubble in full effect to buy a crazy overpriced 5080 and donate the 5070 to what was about to become The Ship of Theseus.

As I said no plan survives contact, and I found myself in yet another Greek tragedy flanked by Scylla and Charybdis. On one hand we have Apple silicone, by far the best decoders and timeline experience and at a disadvantage in almost every other aspect, and we have building out my “parts bin” PC, again at great cost. So what was it to be the sirens call or sailing my new-old ship into the eye of the storm?

Let us take a look at how my main system looks in its finished state:

Motherboard: Asus TUF Z790-Plus WIFI DDR4

CPU: Intel i7 13700 (-0.07 offset)

CPU Cooler: Corsair Nautilus 240mm AIO

GPU: Asus TUF 5080 16GB

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 64GB 3200 (4x16GB)

SSD: 1TB WD Black SN720 x1 (OS) 2TB WD Black SN850X x2

PSU: Be Quiet! 1000W Gold (Modular)

Cooling: Be Quiet! Pure Wings 120mm x3 (intake) & 140mm x2 (exhaust)

Chassis: BeQuiet! Pure Base 501

I was tempted to go i9, and I am still not full decided if I won’t. I hear that unless you really prioritise cooling then it throttles at a marginal difference to the i7, and with the uplift from 13th to 14th gen indistinguishable in real world use it would take a new case, new radiators and new fan systems with reworked airflow. I built this specific iteration to be housed in the Be Quiet 501 case, selected due to the increased airflow from the front mesh, but with a sleek and professional appearance over the gaudy “fish tank” gamer look. It has best in class airflow, sound deadening and dust filters and I really don’t want to rehouse my system for a single digit uplift. Considering information by people who actually use these systems is few and far between, I have to go off of gaming performance and interpret gains in a similar way. The 5080 rounds out the build nicely, at 54,900 Baht it was still less than half the price of a 5090 and still compatible with my 1000w PSU, though at load it will no longer sit in that efficiency sweet spot (but still with around 250-300W headroom). I am very close to putting a pin in this one, with the only deciding factor being the VRMs of the Z790 being far more desirable and less prone to heat soak for an i9 build.

And The Ship of Theseus:

Motherboard: Asus TUF B760M-Plus WIFI DDR5

CPU: Intel i5 12400

CPU Cooler: Be Quiet! Pure Rock Pro 3 Dark (250W)

GPU: Asus TUF 5070 16GB

RAM: Corsair 32GB 6000 DDR5

SSD: 1TB WD Black SN720 x1 (OS) 1TB WD Black SN850X

PSU: Corsair RM1000e 1000W Platinum (Modular)

Cooling: Be Quiet! Pure Wings x2 (intake)

Chassis: Phanteks XT M3 Air

You will see that I donated the SN720 from the main rig for the OS on this one, but other than that everything is new. Unless we count the 5070 that spent maybe a week in my other rig, which we don’t. The idea of this rig was a “wind tunnel” with cool air hitting the heat soaks of the dual tower cooler then being pulled and expelled from the rear. But as it always begins, being DDR5 puts it at a substantial advantage to the main system, being M-ATX and a B series board — does not. Right now I couldn’t even buy a LGA1700 Z board in DDR5 to replace it, or this would be the perfect candidate for an i9. However, it is not. The i5 isn’t staying in this despite being a month old, it is too lethargic for the work I am throwing at it but just like everything else an i7 14700 is just not available here. 14700F, but without the iGPU there is no Quick Sync and with no Quick Sync for decoding we are in timeline hell. SSDs are also problematic, I managed to find a new-old stock WD SN850X with DRAM, albeit just 1TB. As I did not know if I would see that again (being phased out by SN7100 or SN8100) I snatched it up and immediately realised it was too good to waste on an OS and Adobe Suite. As for the 5070, I was mistaken that it would be enough to handle H.265 4:2:2 alone. What I wasn’t mistaken by is that with a move to 50 series is a move to PCIE 5.0 and as luck would have it a 1000W unit was in the same JIB store I bought the SSD. They were both 4,900 which is a little crazy in the sense that my Be Quiet! PSU just costed 6,000 and only three months ago 2TB on SN850XX was just 4,200 so swings and roundabouts. In total, what was once a 18,500 Baht repurposed workstation has costed just under or just over 60,000 Baht depending if you count the SN720, and with another 12,000 more if I go i7, potentially 30,000 more if I go i9…

And the sirens Scylla did their job profoundly. I knew that no matter how I built out the new system Dararat was used to the MacBook Pro, used to Apple. After spending a total of around 110,000 on the two systems thus far (just over 3,000 US Dollars or around ten months at the average local wage), I purchased a Mac Mini M4, spec’ed out to 24GB in RAM, but handicapped by Apple’s insistence on 512GB internal drives. I hear they are replaceable, but in the meantime I purchased a UGreen dock with NVMe support to re-re-purpose the 2TB Kingston NV2 as it will be capped at 1000mb/s regardless. Silver linings eh? The worst part is the tiny little machine decodes better than both systems, and scrubbing 4K 4:2:2 is effortless. It makes me wonder why I even bother… but I am also not to naïve to think that decoding is everything. Dararat is happy editing from the Mac Mini, and with SSDs like Angelbird’s SSD2G PKT it becomes very easy to dump a project onto that, to grade and render on one of our CUDA based systems.

What I lament most about this odyssey is that I have done the one thing that I was adamant that I wouldn’t; I spent the same as I would to walk the Nakasendo. Do I regret any of this? Considering the rumours that next-gen Nvidia cards are going to flirt with the 100,000 Baht price tag, no I am not. I am a little salty that in an ideal world I could have skipped the whole second system as it is usually myself that does the final grade (for Discover Temples of Thailand) and have come in at marginally the same operational capability but for far less as the Mac Mini even with the dock is less than 40,000 Baht as a second system. As they say, better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it… let us just hope it rings truer for computers than cash flow. At least I know in a year my rigs will chew through this data the same as today, but I don’t know how far my budget would stretch in twelve months of NAND shortages.