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fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:46 pm
by OstinatoFreak
I was wondering what the 3 fastest cpu/motherboard combos currently are out there for Handbrake encoding? I've been reading lots of threads, and of course many of them are a year or more old. I also read somewhere (not sure if it's true) that Handbrake can only use 6 cores, which makes me wonder if Handbrake wouldn't be able to take advantage of the i9.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:50 pm
by OstinatoFreak
Edit: I currently have an Intel i5-6500 @3.2 with an ASUS Z170M-PLUS motherboard. It usually takes between 21 and 40 hours to encode a single 4K movie using h265, depending on whether I use nlmeans to eliminate annoying film grain or not.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 6:53 pm
by rollin_eng
It will vary depending on encoder and settings but generally x264 will max out at 6-8 threads so the fastest cpu clock speed with 8 physical cores will do you good. x265 might use more cores but I haven’t seen many people test it.

Getting a cpu with 64 cores will allow you to run multiple encodes at the same time so it’s really up to you how much you want to spend.

nlmeans is slow but hopefully bradleys can tell you what to throw at it to speed it up.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 8:47 pm
by Woodstock
Intel i5-6500=4 cores, no hyperthreading. Even an inexpensive AMD FX 8-core processor from 5 years ago is going to be a major speed-up for you. But NLMeans is still going to be a bottleneck, since it is single-threaded.

Depending on the operating system, Intel CPUs are going to be at a disadvantage if you get all the security slow-downs installed.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 8:50 pm
by mduell
Handbrake has diminishing gains above 6 cores, which doesn't mean it can only take advantage of 6 cores. That you don't get a 100% (compared to one core) performance improvement going from 6 to 7 becomes obvious around 6. Somewhere in the 20 core range is where you really run into no gain or even losses, depending on workload.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 10:11 pm
by BradleyS
https://handbrake.fr/docs/en/latest/tec ... mance.html

Might provide some insights. x265 specifically does benefit from more cores, whereas x264 starts showing diminishing returns after about 6-8 with moderate settings.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Tue Dec 03, 2019 11:49 pm
by OstinatoFreak
Assuming I'm only encoding in h265, would an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX or Intel Core i9-7900X be of notable benefit over, say, various processors that are in the $400-$500 range? NLMeans is a single-thread bottleneck... hmm, does that mean a 1-core processor will be as fast as a 64-core processor when using NLMeans?

I'm also curious about multiple encodes as rollin_eng says above... does this require a virtual machine, or do you literally just run 2 or 3 instances of Handbrake within the same O/S and Handbrake does the rest automatically? And does multiple encodes only make sense for h264 (since it's limited), as opposed to h265 which maybe uses all cores? (I won't be doing a lot of h264 encoding in the future)

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 1:14 am
by BradleyS
NLMeans is not single threaded, it's multiple frame threaded. It can be quite slow with high resolution sources because of how much data needs moved around, not strictly CPU.

Generally, given two otherwise mostly equal systems, the one with the faster memory bus and faster/larger CPU cache is going to win for NLMeans.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 2:01 am
by Woodstock
BradleyS wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 1:14 am NLMeans is not single threaded, it's multiple frame threaded. It can be quite slow with high resolution sources because of how much data needs moved around, not strictly CPU.
Mental notes updated.

No need for a VM to run multiple copies of handbrake, but I remember there being a caution about each session's queue.

If you're running with the command line interface, you simply open additional shells, and run your batch/shell scripts in them. The operating system is supposed to spread the load out to available cores.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 3:16 am
by OstinatoFreak
Will it save time to run multiple instances of Handbrake, vs. just putting everything into one single Handbrake queue? Again, assuming all encoding h265. In general I always thought that single-tasking was always faster than multitasking simply because the O/S doesn't have to spend any resources going back and forth from one thing to another. (For example, faster to copy a bunch of files with one command rather than to have multiple instances of Windows copying going on at the same time...)

As for the caution about each session's queue - I assume that's just talking about "make sure you don't encode from the same movie source at the same time" or something like that? If not, what was the caution?

Sorry to ask so many questions, but you guys really know what you're talking about. :)

Sounds like I need to research which CPUs have faster/larger CPU cache and memory bus. NLMeans takes so darned long, but the results getting rid of film grain are so darned amazing.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:55 am
by s55
There is nothing stopping you running multiple instances of HandBrake. That's supported.

I'd avoid threadripper 2000 series since it's NUMA based. 3000 series is a good bet as I don't believe it is anymore. (but I'd double check that).

AMD is probably going to give you the best bang / buck at the moment. Performance isn't significantly different to intel core for core. Especially so at the higher core counts where Intel loses it's clock speed advantage that say a 9900K has over the AMD 8 core parts.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 6:50 am
by OstinatoFreak
No idea what NUMA based means, even after Googling it, haha... I guess I'll just have to take your word for it.

If one just wanted the most bang (regardless of the bang-to-buck ratio), what would that be?

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Wed Dec 04, 2019 4:12 pm
by mduell
The 5Ghz Intel chips, as many cores as you care to pay for.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2019 4:45 am
by nhyone
OstinatoFreak wrote: Wed Dec 04, 2019 3:16 am NLMeans takes so darned long, but the results getting rid of film grain are so darned amazing.
Give hqdn3d a try for degraining. It is much faster than nlmeans. :D

Spatial: ultralight or light.
Temporal: light or medium.

I've found that it works well enough for me.

Re: fastest cpu/motherboards for Handbrake as of December 2019?

Posted: Sun Dec 08, 2019 6:20 am
by OstinatoFreak
I actually used to use hqdn3d, and in fact I was at the point where I could type in filter numbers like 3:3:4:5 based on looking at the film and get it just right every time. When NLMeans came out, I didn't use it for a long time (seemed too complicated to learn - I didn't want to just use presets), and finally reluctantly I looked into it. I found the film presets (light, medium, etc.) are actually very good, and the filter works so much better than hq. Maybe I wouldn't notice the difference if I watched a TV from the distance, but many movies I actually watch on my 4K monitor 2-3 feet away.

(This is also why, when encoding 480p DVD movies, I use quality setting 16 - I can totally tell the difference between 17 and 16, even though 18 is supposedly "placebo" territory. For me quality 15 is placebo.)