AMD processors are great 8 Cores is better. Mine is a 4 Core AMD 965.

You should consider your Video card, Powerdirector is a heavy user of the functions on a video card.

Powerdirector 12 has the ability to edit and produce 4K videos. I have seen some Demos, beautiful images.

I have some BSD issues with my I7 computer once or twice a week and am considering to replace the motherboard.

BSD issues are hardware related. One cause I have found is the Video Card driver. If the Install of the Video card driver is faulty, you can get the Blue Screen of Death. A clean install of the the latest Video card driver will often fix the problem.

It must be a truly clean install of the Video Card driver. I've had to do delete and reinstall two or three times to finally get rid of the BSD.

I went into Device Manager and removed the Video driver, It is best to Rollback to the VGA driver built into Windows, if you can.
Then install the latest Video card driver, Exception; Nvidia, the two latest drivers are filled with problems for Powerdirector.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Hi Eugene and Carl,
It's "comforting" to see 2 able editors have experience the Blue Screen of Death and come through the experience. I see that Eugene has considered the issue is with the Motherboard, it may be. I recently had the Blue Screen of Death and replaced a new motherboard after tracking the issue down. Be aware of the fragility of the CPU pins on the mobo when taking everything apart. Suppliers can blame you for bent pins if your mobo is still within guarentee.
Dafydd

Quote: Hi

I have some BSD issues with my I7 computer once or twice a week and am considering to replace the motherboard.

AMD has far lower prices for their processors so the

AMD FX-8350 Vishera 4.0GHz (4.2GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 125W Eight-Core Desktop Processor FD8350FRHKBOX

is being considered.

Will it work with PD and is there a significant advantage of 8 cores over 4 ?

I also have 4K UHD in mind

Any input is appreciated

Eugene

I recently upgraded my PC for this CPU works well with PD12, however I have no way to compare with Intel I7.
It sure is better than another AMD CPU 4 colors that I used before.
It also does miracles when I have certain effects on the timeline still have hiccups in playback. AMD-FX 8350 / 8GB DDR3
SSD SUV400S37240G / 2-HD WD 1TB
AMD Radeon R9 270 / AOC M2470SWD
Windows 7-64 / PD16 Ultimate

I'm using the AMD FX-8320 3.50 GHz Eight-Core & appear to get good benefit from it, when look in Task manager all 8 cores appear to be working hard during rendering etc!

Selected because AMD processors are that much cheaper than Intel.

No comparison information but am personally pleased with the system performance while using PD12

(I have been advised since that the AMD processor may not always play nicely with the Nvidia Graphics card but no specific issues so far) Director Suite 365
AMD FX-8320 3.50 GHz Eight-Core
Samsung SSD 850 EVO 250gb (OS)
Seagate 2TB SATA-III Hybrid 7200RPM Hard Drive (Data)
Toshiba 4TB SATA-III Hard drive (Archive)
24GB Memory
Nvidia GeForce GTX 650 2gb
Microsoft® Windows 10 (64-bit)

My experience with AMD was bad I had Octa core FX-8150 which pushing my CPU temps high, froze and had high power consumption
Moved to I7-3770K Ivy bridge overclocked to 4.6 Ghz. No problems so far :

PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

Quote: My experience with AMD was bad I had Octa core FX-8150 which pushing my CPU temps high, froze and had high power consumption
Moved to I7-3770K Ivy bridge overclocked to 4.6 Ghz. No problems so far :

BabIndia, sounds like the heat sink was not seated properly on the CPU. I had a CPU fan fail that caused CPU to overheat, the Computer shut down.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Eugene, a few points to maybe consider related to PD:

1) After testing about 15 different procs over the last year, to me, PD user experience for tasks that are CPU intensive pretty much mimics basic CPU performance charts. You can get a good feel of that here http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=AMD+FX-8350+Eight-Core&id=1780 as well as many other performance sites. It's not a 4 vs 8 issue, it's chip architecture. A scattering of PassMark CPU Marks shown below for some procs from which I based my PD user experience

i7 4930, 13605
FX 9590, 10463
i7 3770, 9577
1090T, 5715
x4 965, 4293
i7 4500 , 3880
P8700, 1672

Your current i7-920, 5012, and FX-8350, 9069 are in the range of what I based my comments on. I'd choose the best in the allocated price range.

2) With the AMD's CPU's you don't have access to Intel Quick Sync video encoding within PD, good or bad depends on individual user video editing needs. I use my one box with QS a lot for some encoding tasks, hardly at all for others.

3) Since you may have your box for 4+ yrs, maybe your CPU choice might depending on what CL does with multi-GPGPU support in future releases, or at least hedge. Obviously if you monitor the forums, currently many different user experiences. CL claimed first video editing product with multi-GPGPU support with PD11 release and TrueVelocity3. I'm not necessary talking hardware encoding but transferring some tasks to other processors for enhanced encoding throughput, utilization of OpenCL which PD has migrated to vs previous CUDA(Nvidia) or Avivo(AMD). Will one be able to effective use CPU, integral GPU (Intel), and added GPU card[s] (AMD or Nvidia) processing power with PD over the life of your box, who knows. Other video editing products appear to have an edge here, maybe CL will step it up, CL TrueVelocity4 at PD12 did not appear to be much improvement over PD11 to me.

4) Not just a CPU choice, good subsystems can improve OS performance and PD editing experience significantly.

Jeff

I just purchased the HP Envy machine with AMD 10 core running Windows 8. I'm Impressed with the speed I have 12 gig of memory.

I'm running Power Director 12 Ultimate.

Let me thank all of you for all the relevant information. My computer is past 4 years old and the occasional BSOD may just be a good enough justification to move on. On my present computer only the case MOBO and CPU is original everything else replaced over the years to improve performance, more HD space etc.

One option I have is to do something similar, buy a bare bones computer with the desired CPU, like FX-8350 and swap out other peripheral items. By the way, high temperature operation of this CPU is a common complaint when reading feedback from NEWEGG or TOM's computer. But failure seems to be pretty rare. I was really stunned when comparing cost of Intel vs. AMD.

Planning to stay with Win7


Intell and AMD have placed GPU capability into their processors, I remember reading about a year ago that they can perform much better than even high performance GPU boards. Any thoughts?
An external one has of course the advantage of being able to upgrade, like to HDMI 2.0

Jeff that CPU comparison chart is pretty neat, have to spend more time on that.

Again thanks to each of you

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Eugene,

If interested there is a fairly good article about the integrated GPU's here http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-richland-intel-haswell-gpu.html which brings up several good points on both architectures to consider. They also present some fairly good info in the "Multimedia Engine Performance" section, not just the typical gaming stuff one often sees.

Jeff

Carl

There was no problem with the heat sink. I use water cooler. AMD runs hot and consumes more power PC specs :
OS Windows 10.0 Pro
MB - AS rock Z77 extreme 11
Intel 3770K @ 4.0 Ghz OC
Gskill 32 GB RAM 1800 Mhz
6 TB HDD, SSD bootable
nVidia ASUS GTX 660 Ti
BenQ 22" LCD monitor 1920x1080

Thanks for all the inputs

Jeff et al, assuming a new widow license for the new computer , how does one transfer everything to the new computer?

w7 to w7.

Found the GPU article very iluminating.

Eugene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Quote: Thanks for all the inputs

Jeff et al, assuming a new widow license for the new computer , how does one transfer everything to the new computer?

w7 to w7.

Found the GPU article very iluminating.

Eugene

Do you mean the OS and all of your applications? It's been awhile, but I'm pretty sure Win7 comes with a transfer wizard.

Theoretically you can use a network connection, a (special, crossover) USB cable, or a portable hard drive. I never got it to work in any way other than using an external hard drive. Jerry Schwartz

Quote: Carl

There was no problem with the heat sink. I use water cooler. AMD runs hot and consumes more power

It does depend on what AMD processor you have. Some do run hot.

My AMD 965 core temp is running about 40-42 C.

This computer has never ran hot. It does have about 5 fans. one on the heat sink and the rest are in the power supply and case.

Carl312: Windows 10 64-bit 8 GB RAM,AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz,ATI Radeon HD 5770 1GB,240GB SSD,two 1TB HDs.

Quote: This computer has never ran hot. It does have about 5 fans. one on the heat sink and the rest are in the power supply and case.

Check your MOBO specs, or if necessary try to read the labels on the board itself. You may find that your motherboard can actually support more case fans than are normally installed (mine supports four, in addition to the one in the power supply and the one on the CPU). If your case has enough cutouts, you could probably turn it into a hovercraft.

If you decide to do any surgery on the case to make a hole for another fan, take my hard-earned advice: strip it down to bare metal, and I mean sheet metal, first. When you are done, vacuum it very thoroughly

All it takes is one miniscule bit of metal blowing around in there to give you an endless sequence of mysterious problems. Jerry Schwartz

Jerry the window transfer wizard only transfers data files, emails etc not applications like pd12 etc.
The new computer would have it's own w7 installation. A program by Acronis Trueimage 2014 might do it.

Gene 73s, WA6JZN ex DL9GC
CYBERLINK PLEASE ADD UHD BLU RAY BURNING SOFTWARE
PD14,
Win10,64bit.CPU i7 6700,16GB ,C= 480 GB SSD ,GPU GTX1060 6GB 1 fan. Plus 3 int, 4 ext HDD's for video etc.LG WH16NS40 reads UHD.
4K 24" ViewSonic monitor.Camera Sony FDR-A

Gene,

This was about three years ago, but I think you're right. I might have been thinking of PCMover from LapLink.

I thought the tool I used was a freebie, but I honestly no longer remember for certain.

There are some backup applications that will let you do a bare metal install. No home should be without one. Jerry Schwartz

Gene,

My favourite HD backup / clone is ToDo Backup by EaseUS: http://www.todo-backup.com/products/home/free-backup-software.htm

And it's free! Very easy to use and powerful. It will clone the hidden main partition of the main drive as well as the Main C: partition sector by sector. (In other words it makes a perfect clone.)

Give er a shot and see.

Rob
PD 14 Ultimate Suite / Win10 Pro x64
1. Gigabyte Brix PRO / i7-4770R Intel Iris Pro 5200 / 16 GB / 1 TB SSD
2. Lenovo X230T / 8GB / Intel HD4000 + ViDock 4 Plus & ASUS Nvidia 660 Ti / Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIZw3GPwKMo&feature=youtu.be

Quote: Jeff et al, assuming a new widow license for the new computer , how does one transfer everything to the new computer?

Eugene, everyone probably has a there own view on this. Mine is, don't move everything as you desire. Moving applications, like PD, is a good recipe to issues on a brand new system. I'd reinstall your applications on the new box from install backups. Many apps like PD, during install, register dll's, make registry modifications (PD makes many of them),..., these are hard to capture with a simple backup utility. Registry entries are scattered in ~four different system files. Some installs capture your unique MAC address for authenticity(obviously you have a new MAC address on the new computer), CL captures something as many claim a internet connection required initially, with PD many instances in the forums of what appears as number of installs being reached, work with support to reset, didn't activate h.264, MPEG and other codecs within 30days.... and the like. These PD specific items often stored in windows registry entries.

Microsoft had a application mover, which would attempt to gather all application related bytes and package them to install on a different computer, this app is no longer supported, I've used several app movers over the years and wouldn't really recommend anything, more a niche tool for specific case vs what I would do on a brand new platform for hassle free video editing with PD.

I'd use the windows utility to transfer my user files and settings and go through the install processes for applications like PD from your install backups. Simple overview of windows transfer utility. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/help/videos/transferring-files-and-settings-from-another-pc#tab=desktop

Jeff