Need help building my new Video Editing PC

[BaboonGuy]

Originally posted by: Mills
If this were me, I'd pick up the drive setup (though I think you'd get much better performance out of RAID 10 than you would RAID 5 but I'm only going off of intuition here), and the controller card, and wait on the next gen stuff coming out early next year. If you need the speed now, I'd go with a i7 920 and an x58 board, since everything will be compatible with the upcoming high end 6 core chips and you'll only have 'wasted' the $ for the 920. Ebay it or something and you're not at a huge loss.

I'm not familiar with how performance scales in video encoding to multi-CPU setups, and personally I don't think it would be worthwhile to make the huge price leap to Xeons, but should merit some research.

Good luck,

Mills

It scales pretty much perfectly actually, and is another reason he should go X58 and i7 920 D0. 6 cores with HT is like ZOMG for video encoding.

 

[alyarb]

i'd rather have an i7 at 4.2ghz than an i9 at 2.4 ghz.

for the cost of a single i9, a faster encoding system would be a pair of six-core Opteron 2431's. twelve physical cores will be considerably faster than 6 physical and 6 logical, but that isn't the issue here. the issue is that the OP seems like a video-editing noob and he shouldn't be pissing away $4000 on this little side project. a perfectly fine i7 860 machine will get him started for under a grand and he should start there.

heybooboo is 100% dead right about backing off from the bleeding edge because there is absolutely zero return on your investment, but that advice will go unheeded because this thread has turned into a bonfire with neojapan's cash for fuel. practically each thread is one harebrained idea after another about this strategy being a faster system than another, etc. all of you need to stop circle jerking over gulftown until a non-$1500 part is announced. i'm sick of it.

macs are only fast in a cluster. the quicktime encoder is slower and not nearly as flexible as x264-based GUI encoders. prosumers seldom fall in line with the corporate structure of companies like pixar, buena vista, etc and their hardware/software kickback lovenest with apple. their financial influence in the industry is merely a band-aid to keep their hyped-up, mediocre systems in demand.

 

[BaboonGuy]

Uh. lol at that last part.

 

[alyarb]

it's a fact. i have no problem with OS X, but the quicktime encoder is horrible. you have to use the x264 r604 quicktime plugin if you want any speed, especially non-PPC macs. i doubt any professionals use it though, because by definition they have drunk the koolaid.

 

[ecom]

Originally posted by: Knavish


Uhhh... HD's take like 10 watts each. For example, the 2TB WD Black drive takes 10.7 Watts in read / write mode. Suppose it takes a bit more when booting -- it would *never* exceed 15 watts.

I'd say:
i7-950 + motherboard + 6x2GB < 250W (at stock speed)
7x 7200RPM sata drives < 100W
+ video card (Wattage depends heavily on card)
+ RAID (W = ???)

1 kW is huge overkill unless you're going dual GPU, which is senseless on a video editing machine.

Where are you getting this 15W figure from? WD does not publish their peak power requirements -- not that I could find at least. Seagate's 7200 RPM drive figures says their drives can consume up to 2.8A or about 34W. If we assume he will have 7 spindles, that demand will be 231W just for the HDDs.