Hi, I'm about to order a new computer for Video Editing and was wondering if anyone had any suggestions or even confirmation I'm getting a decent system. Thanks for any advice...



GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3P intel p35 chipset ATX form factor 2xPCI-E(x16)/3xPCI-E(x1)/2xpci/4xddr2 w/sata2 raid,lan(gb),1394,usb 2.0 & audio (cpu type:intel - socket 775) $149.75



OR

MSI P7N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce 750i SLI ATX Intel Motherboard - $165
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6813130159


Looking for a cheap motherboard that also includes a firewire port. I've had good experiences with the Gigabyte board in the past, but It would also be nice to have the ability for SLI. Especially if they end up enabling the use to use on of the video cards as a physics processor now that NVIDIA bought out that physics company.

OCZ DDR2 PC2-8500 Reaper HPC 4GB Edition - 130 w/ $25 rebate

For $100 there are choices fir 800mhz ram but figured this might be worth $20 more


Intel Q9300 - $260

The new core has SSE 4.1 instructions so this seemed a pretty good choice.


PNY Geforce XLR8 8800 gt 512mb - $193

OR

MSI NX8800GTS 512M OC GeForce 8800GTS (G92) 512MB - $230

Think the GTS is worth $40 more?


COOLER MASTER rc-330-kkn1-gp elite 330 (black) mid tower no power supply 4x5.25" 2x3.5" 5x3.5"(hidden) w/ front i/o connector & 120mm fan x 1 -$40

I really don't like fancy cases just something that is hopefully quiet and with some front usb or firewire ports.


Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM $170

I think this would be good for video editing, but i'm not sure to get one or two I figure I'd get one of these and then a 500 gig western digital. so i guess that would be another $100

PSU PC Power & Cooling S610EPS EPS12V 610W Continuous @ 40°C - $120

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817703005

I don't know too much about power supplies but this seems fine I guess.

Around...... 1,000


I was also looking at monitors and found this..

[u] Acer AL2216Wbd Black 22" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor with HDCP support 300 cd/m2 700:1 - $230[/u]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6824009094



Any recommendations for a good power supply?


Thanks for all your help.

Unless you're playing games, you don't need any fancy GPU other than integrated. Yup. Any of them with input. Or you can pick up a $50 video capture card for input. BTW, most modern gpus including 8800gt/gts/gtx can't input video. The except is the video edition cards that Ati released years ago. I don't see them anymore. The bunch of HD cables are for output.

Same thing with mobos. You don't need SLI. You can throw in a fireware card for $15. 1-4 ports. Take your pick. Mobo will limit you to 1 port or maybe a 2nd one to be hooked up to a cable to a port. i.e. firewire port in a tower case.

If you game, what do you play? What resolution?

Is the cpu going to be overclocked & how much?

uhmmm first of all, which editing application are you going to use? premere, vegas, avid?
usually its advised to have 3 hdd: a small fast 10k for the system, another small hdd for cache and one large hdd for files... however i have made a different combination that works great so far for my girlfriends machine: 3 hdd: 1 for the system and 2 sata2 raid 0 large hdds for files... that should boost your renders up a little bit since the bottleneck should be there... im not 100% sure that boosts so much but its a great option and i will be using it for my rig too.
also if youre interested on a little bit of audio editing id advise you to downgrade that gpu a little bit and get an m-audio card (you can get the firewire audio solo or the firefire 410 for around 200 bucks and they are great portable cards with very low latency and all the inputs youll ever need to download uncompressed audio and if you ever need to record sound yourself and you have a laptop you can just take it with your laptop, rent a sennheiser mk40 or any cool hypercardiod mic and record directly to your disk (also you can get a nice couple of headphones or bluesky monitors which are very cheap and youll be able to listen to very very plain sound) but that is totally up to you

Hey, Sorry for not explaining more...

For Gaming I play most of my games at 1680x1050 (Which is the native resolution of the LCD screen.) I enjoy games like UT3, but what I'll really be playing will be Starcraft II whenever that comes out. Basically as long as it can run new games on decent settings with a decent framerate I won't really complain.

I've been using my room mates computer that had a firewire port built in to import the footage from my digital video camera, but I haven't really started adding my own audio yet. The most audio work I think I'll do will be for Narration, voice re dubbing, and other smaller things.

Well according to your advice I think i'll order one Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM, and then two other western digital 7,200 RPM SATA hard drives that will be put into raid 0. Unless it would be beneficial to have another Raptor for digital editing.


I also went to the m- audio website and saw that they have options for both a pci card and a firewire card. I'm guessing the only difference between the two is a $100 price difference and the fact the firewire card is 'portable'. (To me I think $100 more for portability would probably be worth it) Anyways I found it on Amazon for $175 with free shipping but I heard about some driver problems with Vista (I'll be using Vista x64) so I'm cautious about that. Do you have any experience using it in Vista sweetphreak?



Also Price wise I'm not on any strict budget, I'm just trying to waste money on excessive components or things I don't need. If spending a bit more gives me much better performance I'd rather spend a little bit more.

Loof for a centurion 5 case with an 80mm fan in the front. It will help keep the system cooler. They aslo are good cases for keeping out dust. Don't waste your money on a 10,000 rpm drive. 7200 rpm drives are definitely good enough, especially if you get one with 32mb cache. My 640gb hard drive from WD (2 320gb platters) is also pretty fast. You'll get much more gb/$ with 7200, and you won't have to listen to raptor (they are very loud). I'd get a motherboard with firewire if you're using a camera with firewire support. It will be much easier than installing a new card. Don't worry about a video capture card either since it seems like you do have a camcorder with firewire. Firewire is much better for capturing and editing video from a camcorder. 8800GTS is worth the extra $40, IMO, and you might want to consider a Q9450 if it is under $300. Vista Home Premium OEM is only $99 on newegg so look there to save a little money for the OS (yes for 64bit edition too).

For video editing you could do RAID 0 or use a second hard drive.

I recomend:

P35-DS3R (if you need FireWire, get a FireWire PCI card)
4GB DDR2 800 by Corsair, Crucial, or any other high quality manufacture
Note: The P35- DS3x and DS4x boards seems to have problems with RAM natively higher than DDR2 800, but you can still OC DDR2 800 to the same level
Same PSU (nice choice on the PP&C),CPU, case. If gaming pretty hardcore go with the 8800GTS (if possible get a EVGA or XFX due to better quality than MSI)if not get a 9600. You won't need much GPU power for Video editing

Instead of the Raptor get 2*7200.11 HDDs in RAID. The 7800.11s are almost as fast as the Raptor but has more storage (trust me you need more storage over speed 90% of the time)

"Back in the day", the Raptor was a performance product.....now it doesn't even place and get's rocked by WD's 6400. Unless your major concern is "small file database access", the Raptor gets trounced by any modern HD with 320+ GB per platter areal densities. The WD6400 is in that category but WD's recent reliability performance ratings have been in the toilet:

http://www.storagereview.com/WD1500ADFD.sr?page=0%2C9
"According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, the Western Digital Raptor WD1500 is more reliable than 12% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation."

http://www.storagereview.com/WD7500AAKS.sr?page=0%2C6
"According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, a predecessor of the Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD7500AAKS, the Western Digital RE2 WD5000YS , is more reliable than 4% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation."

http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C7
"According to filtered and analyzed data collected from participating StorageReview.com readers, a predecessor of the Western Digital Caviar GP, the Western Digital Caviar WD4000KD , is more reliable than 5% of the other drives in the survey that meet a certain minimum floor of participation. "

Alright Well based on input and a bit more searching here is what will be the final build.

Motherboard:

GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P -$110 Open Box from Newegg Comes with 2 firewire ports.

A little more expensive then the DS3R but I like the built in firewire ports I can use in the front and back.

Hard Drive:

2 x Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Hard Drive - 500GB, SATA, 3.5", 32 MB, 7200RPM - $108 each

I've always gotten Western Digital for some reason before, but these seem to be rated good. Will

Processor

Q9300 - $260

The cheapest I've seen the Q9450 was $360 meaning its at least $100. I don't think its worth the extra money, but perhaps i'm wrong?

PSU

PSU PC Power & Cooling S610EPS EPS12V 610W Continuous @ 40°C - $120

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6817703005

Monitor

Acer AL2223Wd Black-Silver 22" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor with HDCP Support 300 cd/m2 800:1 Built in Speakers - $230

Found this at the same price as the last monitor with 100 more contrast and **** speakers built in.

Ram

CRUCIAL ballistix BL2KIT25664AA804 4gb kit (2gb x 2) match pair pc26400 800mhz - $100

Went down to 800 mhz like you suggested and $100 seems about the right price.

Case

COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Black Computer Case -$54

I'm not sure if this is the one with the fan in the front like you suggested, but it was the only one I could find and I've built a computer in this case before so I like it.

CD/DVD-RW Drive

LITE ON LH-20A1L-06 20x superallwrite SATA+lightscribe - $32

I hear this Lite on drive is pretty good, but I've always been a fan of pioneer. Probably really doesn't matter really.
(I do a lot of Dual layer burning which I think this should work with.)

Final Cost including monitor and shipping is about $1450

Well I'm going to order either tonight or tommorow so any last suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all the help so far.

You're good to go.

I'd argue one more time for a non TN monitor. If you were using it solely as a game box, "no bigga deal", but fior video and graphoics work, you should have

Looks good to me though I'd argue one more time for a non TN monitor. If you were using it solely as a game box, "no bigga deal", but for video and graphics work, you should have a monitor that can produce accurate colors. IPS is outta ya price range but a solid S-PVA monitor like the Lenovo L220x would be worth the $200 investment IMO.

I'd also look at this as an alternative to the burner:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6827135156
Won Customer Choice Award 2 months running

That monitor is quite good...my neighbour bought the same one a few weeks ago... Rest of the build is solid. Happy shopping.Cheers!

don´t go with vista 64 for video editing, some programs and codecs don´t run well on vista. i advice you to stay on xp. IMO

^ Agreed.

Looks good.

i should worry too much for the monitor if you got a secondary crt monitor, i have a syncmaster 753dfx and its not a good monitor but i have quite plain colors in it and i use a large hp w2207 for editing, gaming, working and whichever thing i do in which i dont mind SOOO much about the colors and its ok, in fact, i usually dont even bother on turning on the other syncmaster, i mean... i dont work with still images that need to be 100% color correct and my hp does the job well for what i do...
the other thing i would keep in mind if i were you is to have 1 hdd for the system and another one for the files, youre bottleneck is going to be there unless you do that, most used configuration is 1 small 80/160 gb hd for the system, another one for cache and a third one for large files. on my new build i will be having 1 160 gb for system and 2 320 gb hd for files in raid 0, and in case i have bad experiences with the raid, i can always change my mind, make a partition on one of the disks and have it as cache and personal files and have all large video files and renders in the other disk