Question Help replacing CPU for better reencode/system speeds (using i5 11400 now)

The 11400 has a pretty advanced hardware encoding engine, why aren't you using it?

Using my 8600K's UHD graphics for 10 bit h.265 encoding has really worked well for me. The 11400 has an even newer encoder. Intel is super well respected for their encoding quality, even beyond nvidia for those who seem to care in other forums. Have you tried it?

The 3060 has a pretty decent encoder too, the same as the 1660/2060 family that is considered pretty darn good, even if a step down in quality from the Intel solution.

Either solution will vastly increase your encode speed and overall power usage, in my observations the 3060 and 1660 Super both kick up power consumption a fair amount during encodes. The CPU encoding engine will also be the most power efficient.

Intel has had a bit of trouble with 13th and 14th gen parts so they are not being recommended at this time and a 12th gen might not be enough of an improvement to make it worth the trouble.

Intel also has an issue with drawing WAY over TDP so figuring power draw is a bit of a headache.

I mostly use my phone for this sort of thing these days. I'm typically down-converting shorter clips to a lower quality and the phone works fantastic for that.

What software are you using? Handbrake?

Are you specifically turning acceleration off? For quality reasons? 10bit?

Back in the day I bought a separate machine to do video coding on (FairUse, Gordian Knot, BeSweet, Graph Edit, etc.). Could you switch to another machine/laptop while this one is busy?

Could you set up a batch job and encode videos while you are sleeping? That is what I did back in the single core days when the jobs would take 12 hours or so.

Yup, handbrake for sure. It's got great presets, batching, and you can select a profile then choose your encoder on the video tab.

I was re-encoding blurays for a offline Plex server in 720p HQ 10 bit (looks great, imo, and they are like 3GB with h.265) and it was taking a bit, like 15 minutes or something per entire video? Smaller samples would get done in a few seconds.

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DERP.

I thought you were OP. Sorry. Point still stands. Handbrake+Choosing Intel Encoder = fast, high quality, low power. Using the CPU to encode video is for a very select crew at this point, IMO.

blckgrffn said:

Yup, handbrake for sure.

I was re-encoding blurays for a offline Plex server in 720p HQ 10 bit (looks great, imo, and they are like 3GB with h.265) and it was taking a bit, like 15 minutes or something per entire video?

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Amazing! It took all night to go from DVD to CD size recordings back in the day.

Does the video output need to be attached to the onboard video to use the CPU hardware encode or is that for decode? Is the encoder just an option on Handbrake?

I suppose I could turn on a computer and find out myself but my phone just works so good for everything...

Not sure if it will solve your problem or not...but your motherboard will support up to the i9-11900K CPU...

By comparison to the 11400, it's a beast.


YES...it will double your power draw...or more. (TDP 125 watts.)

@Perene

1) What's your budget and how much performance improvement are you looking for?
2) Unless it's an 11-series Intel that you're upgading to, then the answer will always be yes. Your board accepts 10 and 11 series Intel CPUs.
3) I would expect most recent AMD CPUs to be a significant improvement over Intel's re total power consumption/efficiency. Also, as lakedude said, Intel has had major trouble with reliability in the last two generations and trouble with much higher power usage than AMD. It's up to you of course if you want to hobble yourself by saying "Intel only".

However, your first concern was PC responsiveness during an encoding job; the thing is that video processing will eat any processor for breakfast and ask for seconds. But you should be able to limit a program to only use X number of processor cores, leaving more processing capacity available for whatever you want. Or, in Windows you can set a process priority and that in theory should allow the process to use all available processor capacity until a higher priority process asks for CPU time.

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I can't find a review for the 11900K that includes testing on how much energy was used for say an encoding job, because don't forget that higher peak power usage does not necessarily equal less efficiency (ie. a component might have a higher peak energy usage but only require say half the total energy to complete the task because it does it much quicker). I think techreport used to include figures on joules used during a test but they've been out of the game for some time.

Gamers Nexus did not look kindly on the 11900K:
It says the 11900K's power consumption is barely 2W different from the 10900K which has two more cores, so I can't imagine it being a particularly power efficient processor.

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Re GPU encoding vs CPU encoding - don't forget that GPU encoding, while faster and likely much more efficient comes with a trade-off of larger file sizes and/or lower quality encodes.

lakedude said:

Amazing! It took all night to go from DVD to CD size recordings back in the day.

Does the video output need to be attached to the onboard video to use the CPU hardware encode or is that for decode? Is the encoder just an option on Handbrake?

I suppose I could turn on a computer and find out myself but my phone just works so good for everything...

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Nope. I’ve got output on my 1660S in that particular PC and I can use Intel QSV or NVENC. They are both available via drop down. Then I created a custom profile (super easy, pick a starting profile, customize it to what you want, save it) and the added in like 12 files and came back to check it later.

It worked really well with a little minisforum pc with an old laptop spinner drive inside, when you compress things well you can put a lot of content in 500GB, and the little celeron in that thing supports h265 10 bit acceleration so it didn’t even sweat. Just updated the library and installed vlc and test played a few files to get it all setup. Plex HTPC interface is actually really nice, a real call back to MCE.

I’ve never used it, but GPU encoding is pretty mature. Here’s an old video:

Perene said:

I am not using the VGA for reencodes, they are H.265 only. Even so, the CPU leaves Windows slow more than I like, so I asked in chatGPT-like sites what should I do, and it was suggested to replace the CPU. If this also leads to replacing the motherboard, I don't know. I only asked for INTEL, so no AMD.

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It sounds like whatever app you are using may not be exploiting the hardware Quick Sync feature but is grunting everything out in software using the processor? What app are you using for transcoding/encoding? And why not use the GPU?