My last consumer desktop was a Pentium4 system I built in , and I have used dual socket Xeon workstations both at work and at home ever since then. I wanted to test the equivalent 9th gen Intel K at the time, but three generations later, I am now finally gathering that data, with a 12th-Gen Intel CPU.
A lot has changed in the interim, with more cores, higher bandwidth, and new OS and application releases, but this allows me to see what professional content creation tasks can be accomplished effectively on a consumer targeted architecture designed for gaming performance.
The basic question is, how far a can a consumer level architecture be pushed, before you have to step up to a more expensive professional solution? And to be fair, the system I am testing, in the Boxx Apexx S3, is as high-end as a consumer architecture system can be. Although PCIe 5. It increases overall available bandwidth, which is an issue in consumer systems, especially when it comes to PCIe slots.
I was planning to also test it with my existing GeForce installed, for comparison purposes. But with the smaller sized case, it was too tight to install the behemoth of a GPU in it without modifying the chassis. Only people working in true 3D should need anything faster. I usually recommend GeForce cards unless a user needs a specific pro feature, but with the inflated price of GPUs right now, the premium for the Pro version is minimal, and the single slot solution with professional drivers and support is much more attractive than usual.
There are 3 other PCIe slots available for other cards Two x8 and one x1 slot. The system comes with dual 2. If I was configuring this system for an individual editor, they would undoubtedly have a RAID card for storing their media, but users who are part of a team are likely using the network interface to connect to a shared storage solution, or both, to share their own local media volumes with others.
