HP Z8 G4 Workstation CPU Upgrade

[aperture1]

I noticed that this question has been asked but I needed a bit more granularity -

I am a high school teacher and use my workstation to create chemistry videos for my students, and as I try and get into 4K video the existing setup I have is very sluggish and I would like to upgrade, without having to go out and by a whole new machine.

I have an HP Z8 G4 Workstation

Intel(R) Xeon(R) Silver 4112 CPU @ 2.60GHz 2.59 GHz (2 processors)

RAM: 160 GB

I have added several NVMLE m.2 drives and this has helped with some of the video editing functions.

I would really like to be able to update the chipset to a pair of Xenon Silver 4216 - my understanding is adding a processor with more cores will make a big difference.

The graphics card I currently have is a quadro p5000 that comes with 16GB of dedicated memory.

Any suggestions would be very helpful. I am not sure what the upgrade of the chipset will entail!

Any other suggestions to make the system run a bit faster would be very welcome!

Thanks,

Sam

[DGroves]

the main issue is the video card, followed by Ram and Hard Drive  I/O speeds none of the HP approved cards for the z8 G4 are fully 4k capable for every video task the nvidia 1080 "TI" card can do some 4k editing functions but for useful 4k editing a 3080/3080 TI (or the quadro equivalent model) or the latest 40xx series cards are usually recommended

have you check with the makers of the software you are using for their recommendations?

if your editing is stored on the z8 G4 then the editing drive(s) need to be consistent in their R/W speeds and fast, also the space used depends on what you are editing... simple edits can use a 2tb nvme "MLC" type drive or a raid 0 array of SAS drives connected to the optional 12GBps LSI SAS/SATA controller TLC and QVL type nvme drives are not suitable as editing drives (google "difference between MLC and TLC ssd" for detailed info) in general any SSD that uses a cache to store temp data runs the risk of overflowing said cache which will cause video editing problems

for ram, 64meg is on the very low end with 128meg considered the minimum, however again depending on what/how you are editing  the required amount of ram will change

CPU: most video editing software is multicore aware, however some functions are CPU speed aware but in general more cores is favored over cpu speed in most video editing software so dual cpu's (if the system is capable of it)   should be considered as this setup allows you to buy a faster cpu, and get the core count by using two of them the rule here is the faster/more cores the better (but not at the expense of the video card)

ask on the "blackmagic" user forums, or the forum of the software app you use and you will hopefully get specific hardware recommendations