HP Z8 workstation laid down various claims as it was introduced to the market. It has been conferred upon the title of the most customizable yet most powerful workstation, which is capable of taking on resource intensive tasks like a breeze. We put the two of the best devices HP Z8 and Apple Mac Pro against each other to see for ourselves, if the claims of being the best were true or not.
The Benchmarks:
Ingest in Adobe Prelude cc: In this test, 74 seconds of RED 4K footage was ingested and converted to Cineform for editing, and to MP4 for internal distribution and viewing. While the Z8 took 211 seconds (3:31) to complete the task, Mac pro took 333 seconds (5:33). So basically, if you were uploading a 30 mins of ingest, you will have to wait around for 58% longer with Mac Pro as your device.
Preview in Adobe Premiere Pro: Once the ingestion process is complete, it’s time for some tweaking, editing and previewing. The preview performance relies on the GPU, CPU and hard disks combined performance; so, let’s see which device performed better in the test.
Now, since previewing is a GPU intensive task, the major load processing was done by the GPUs on board the systems. And we can see from the comparison chart that Mac Pro drops significant amount of frames even before the color correction process is started. This implies that you will have to render again and again to preview your file on Mac Pro, while Z8 gives a seamless preview experience even in 4K resolution.
Rendering in Preview in Premiere Pro: Looking at the comparison chart mentioned below, we can easily make out that Z8 is faster and renders full preview at an incredible speed, so, no matter the format you are working on, Mac Pro will take more processing time than Z8 ideally.
Just like the HP Z8 trumps over the Mac Pro in the above mentioned benchmarks, it also leads the way when tested for below mentioned parameters involved in 4K video editing and rendering process.
- Color Grading in SpeedGrade
- Rendering in Adobe Media Encoder
- Rendering in the Real World
Conclusion:
After rigorously testing both the workstations for video editing and data handling capabilities, we can finally conclude that HP Z8 has been able to pass the tests with flying colors, while Mac Pro struggled a bit to match the level of performance required. Both the tested devices are well capable of handling intensive tasks; it’s just that HP Z8 proved to be more efficient and faster in doing the same.
