Need help building my new Video Editing PC

[neojapan]

Hi! I have an old E6600 PC that I will stop using for video editing purposes and
need to set up a new PC. this is what I got so far, but I really need help in deciding
the motherboard or any other suggestion. I will run everything Stock so I dont need any O/C suggestions. I need stability and fast HDD access speed for the Video files, my budget its about up to $4000 ~ $5000.

so far:

MB: ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 intel x58
COOLER: ZALMAN CNPS9900LED 120mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
CPU: i7 950
GPU: SAPPHIRE 100268L Vapor-X radeon hd 4870 2gb gddr5 pci-e 2.0
RAM: 2x mushkin 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
PSU: ???
CASE: Thermaltake ArmorPlus(Armor+) VH6000BWS Black Aluminum
OTHER: Thermaltake A2309 iCage 5.25" bay convert to 3 x 3.5"

HDD:

OS: 1x INTEL SSDSA2MH160G2C1 X25M 160GB SATA 3.0 Gen 2, MLC, 2.5" SSD
SCRATCH: 1x Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM
VIDEO: 2x RAID 0 Western Digital VelociRaptor WD3000HLFS 300GB
PROJECT: 2x RAID 1 Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM
BACKUP: 1x Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM
BACKUP: 1x Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM


Still deciding on the PSU and on the SATA II raid controller

Any other suggestions? thanks

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

With that kind of budget, don't get a velociraptor, get a SSD. Will be much much faster than the raptor at access times. Intel's 160 GB drive should work out well for you. Definitely get 12 GB of RAM, no reason not to. For the PSU pick a decent brand, Corsair or PC Power & Cooling are popular. I'm not sure exactly how large your PSU will need to be, but with that many HDDs, it's going to be pretty big. I'd probably get a kilowatt minimum if it was my rig just to be safe.

 

[yh125d]

MB - Just about any of the EVGA/Asus/Gigabyte models are hard to go wrong with. just fins one that has any features you're looking for

Yes, ditch the raptor for an SSD. Hell you could even get a second for your scratch drive. 12GB ram for sure

GPU, any mid-high end card would be fine really. Go nvidia if anything you do would use CUDA, otherwise I'd get like a 4890 or 5850

PSU - Any quality 500w or so or higher would do. Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, etc. The Corsair HX-650 or the Antec Truepower New 650w are the two I would look at for great quality, efficiency, modularity, and expandability

 

[ScorcherDarkly]

Originally posted by: yh125d
PSU - Any quality 500w or so or higher would do. Corsair, Seasonic, Antec, etc. The Corsair HX-650 or the Antec Truepower New 650w are the two I would look at for great quality, efficiency, modularity, and expandability

You really think a 650W will handle 9 hard drives, 12 gb RAM, a 4890 and a bloomfield chip? I'm honestly curious, I figured that kind of equipment would suck way more power than that.

 

[alyarb]

one of these.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813182185

two of these.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819117186

all you need for display adapter is a passive PCIe Radeon 4350 unless you have CUDA-capable applications, which I doubt, you could consider a G92 or GT200-based card.

realize that only the Xeon 5500s support multi-socket systems, and the price increase is enormous for a given increase in clock speed. since you're building a very expensive video workstation i would prioritize threads over clock freq. and it's better to have 16 threads at 2.13 ghz than only 8 threads at 3 ghz. if you want to just cut loose and get 16 threads at 3 ghz it'll be about $1500 per CPU.

the others are correct about using an intel x25 SSD for your boot partition, swap file, and program data folders. i would definitely go for 12GB DDR3 and look at the Seasonic M12D power supply.

 

[alyarb]

uhm why are you people recommending gaming GPUs? radeon 4890? he's building a workstation, not a toy. stop abusing his budget.

 

[yh125d]

Originally posted by: alyarb
uhm why are you people recommending gaming GPUs? radeon 4890? he's building a workstation, not a toy. stop abusing his budget.

Because higher end GPUs accelerate openGL and cuda much faster than their $30 little brothers? You don't consider recommending dual socket xeons abusing his budget?





And yes 650w would definitely handle that. With everything loaded thats 125w for the cpu, 25w for the ram, 7 hd's at 10w ea and an ssd pulling like a whopping 1 watt for a generous 75w total, 100w generous for the motherboard and other peripherals, 150w gpu (video editing won't peg out a 4890) and you're a lot less than 650w. Plenty of room for added junk later

 

[Knavish]

Originally posted by: ScorcherDarkly
With that kind of budget, don't get a velociraptor, get a SSD. Will be much much faster than the raptor at access times. Intel's 160 GB drive should work out well for you. Definitely get 12 GB of RAM, no reason not to. For the PSU pick a decent brand, Corsair or PC Power & Cooling are popular. I'm not sure exactly how large your PSU will need to be, but with that many HDDs, it's going to be pretty big. I'd probably get a kilowatt minimum if it was my rig just to be safe.

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.

 

[alyarb]

Originally posted by: yh125d
Because higher end GPUs accelerate openGL and cuda much faster than their $30 little brothers? You don't consider recommending dual socket xeons abusing his budget?

professional video editing has nothing to do with OpenGL or CUDA. he's not going to be using Elemental's or RapiHD's encoders because the output quality is atrocious. nobody takes that software seriously.

Adobe Premiere's CUDA plugins only work on Quadro GPUs, but even if we were to urge him to buy a Quadro, it's useless to speculate on that because he hasn't specifically told us what applications he's running. He's only said that this machine is for video editing and his $4k budget implies that he's a professional/prosumer who wants a machine that is worth a damn without any excessive costs that provide no benefit.

if he is going to use CUDA-accelerated apps, that still doesnt explain why a 4890 found it's way into this discussion because a $200 Radeon is totally useless to that end. it offers zero acceleration for anything he's likely to do. My 2.13 GHz Xeons, together, cost LESS than the i7 950, so no, I do not take the 2S approach to be abusing his budget, I find it to be a very economical, very large boost in aggregate FPU performance.

 

[Knavish]

Originally posted by: alyarb

Originally posted by: yh125d
Because higher end GPUs accelerate openGL and cuda much faster than their $30 little brothers? You don't consider recommending dual socket xeons abusing his budget?

professional video editing has nothing to do with OpenGL or CUDA. he's not going to be using Elemental's or RapiHD's encoders because the quality is atrocious.

Adobe Premiere's CUDA plugins only work on Quadro GPUs, but even if we were to urge him to buy a Quadro, it's useless to speculate on that because he hasn't specifically told us what applications he's running. He's only said that this machine is for video editing and his $4k budget assumes he's a professional/prosumer who wants a machine that is worth a damn.

either way, why oh why would a 4890 possibly find it's way into this guy's machine? it offers zero acceleration for anything he's doing. My 2.13 GHz bloomfields, together, cost LESS than the i7 950 so, no, i do not take the 2S approach to be abusing his budget, i find it to be a very economical, very large boost in aggregate FPU performance.

:thumbsup: for 2S system.

 

[mmntech]

Originally posted by: neojapan
Hi! I have an old E6600 PC that I will stop using for video editing purposes and
need to set up a new PC. this is what I got so far, but I really need help in deciding
the motherboard or any other suggestion. I will run everything Stock so I dont need any O/C suggestions. I need stability and fast HDD access speed for the Video files, my budget its about up to $4000 ~ $5000.

Three big questions first...
1. What editing suite are you running?
-Professional software such as Premier Pro or Avid?
-Consumer grade editor such as Premier Elements, NeroVision, Windows Movie Maker, or Cyberlinke Power Director.

2. What types of video files are you working with?
-Professional uncompressed formats such as DVCAM NTSC 60i (480i), or XDCAM HD (1080i)
-Consumer formats such as H.264, MOV, WMV, etc.
-Is it SD or HD?

3. How big is an average project?
-What's the length of your videos?

Your initial setup seems a little excessive to me. Then again, you could be editing feature length HD movies where as I'm doing broadcast B Roll.

 

[yh125d]

Originally posted by: alyarb

Originally posted by: yh125d
Because higher end GPUs accelerate openGL and cuda much faster than their $30 little brothers? You don't consider recommending dual socket xeons abusing his budget?

professional video editing has nothing to do with OpenGL or CUDA. he's not going to be using Elemental's or RapiHD's encoders because the output quality is atrocious. nobody takes that software seriously.

Adobe Premiere's CUDA plugins only work on Quadro GPUs, but even if we were to urge him to buy a Quadro, it's useless to speculate on that because he hasn't specifically told us what applications he's running. He's only said that this machine is for video editing and his $4k budget implies that he's a professional/prosumer who wants a machine that is worth a damn without any excessive costs that provide no benefit.

if he is going to use CUDA-accelerated apps, that still doesnt explain why a 4890 found it's way into this discussion because a $200 Radeon is totally useless to that end. it offers zero acceleration for anything he's likely to do. My 2.13 GHz Xeons, together, cost LESS than the i7 950, so no, I do not take the 2S approach to be abusing his budget, I find it to be a very economical, very large boost in aggregate FPU performance.

I may be mistaken, but Premiere Pro has openGL filters no? I would assume other popular programs do also, and quite possibly other gpu-accelerated options. You'll have to forgive me if recommending a higher than bottom-of-the-barrel card was silly, but I'm fairly sure the GPU doesn't usually go wholly unused in video editing :\

 

[alyarb]

i think you're thinking of adobe after effects. either way, you have a point, and the OP is not specific enough about the machine's purpose. but i think CPU comes first and GPU comes second based on what has been described so far. his budget is certainly large enough for even a dozen 4890s, but if he's doing any opengl in after effects, you don't need a super GPU for that either. After effects is quite a little bitch about OpenGL, and as soon as you apply a non-OpenGL plugin (just about everything other than opacity, blend, 3D transformation etc), all rendering acceleration is broken and it goes back into x86 mode. sometimes composing effect-heavy stuff is faster on the CPU anyway. but for best-case general purpose OpenGL in after effects, a 8600 GT isn't going to be any faster than a GTX 285.

 

[neojapan]

Thanks for your replies, I'm not a professional video editor, I do lots of Audio/Video Sync projects for personal use, I use mainly MPEG2 enconding/editing, I use Video Studio PRO, max video file sizes are 8GB, once I load in the MPEG and the audio the program goes very slow on my current PC. I will however start encoding HD video eventually I want a system I can use for that purpose too. I have never built a dual CPU machine so I don't know wich ram to buy or anything of the like. I also wanted an SSD but I've read it may have some problems or that its life its limited, dunno much about them tho.

Other programs I use

Video Studio PRO
DVD-Rebuilder with CCE Encoder
DVD-LAB Pro
Soundforge
Adobe Audition

and other consumer programs.

thanks hope you can help me out better with an Idea of the programs I use.

 

[alyarb]

nehalem xeons can use the same DDR3 as desktop nehalems.

i think you should just get an i7 860 and a cheap P55 motherboard. you can probably get everything done, including all that high-end storage, for less than a grand. why is your budget so big if you're just doing stuff for personal use? i don't know if a $5k PC is worth your while.


wait, do you make porn?

 

[Modelworks]

It really depends on what software you are using. I'm an Avid person.



That is the pretty much the standard build you will find in studios and tv stations. The exception being they would go for a quadro card because of support issues, not really a difference in performance. The AJA interface is also something that differs depending on what you need.

For the money:
SUPERMICRO MBD-X8DA3-O Dual LGA 1366 Intel 5520 Extended ATX Dual Intel Xeon 5500 series Server Motherboard - $450
2 - Intel Xeon W3520 Bloomfield 2.66GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Server Processor $315
Patriot Signature 12GB (3 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Server Memory $400
2- HITACHI Ultrastar 15K450 HUS154545VLS300 (0B22890) 450GB 15000 RPM 16MB Cache Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) 3.5" Hard Drive $400
2 - HITACHI Ultrastar C10K147 HUC101473CSS300 (0B21947) 73GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SAS 3Gb/s 2.5" Enterprise Hard Drive $200
Athena Power CA-SWH01BH8 Black Steel Pedestal Server Case 2 External 5.25" Drive Bays $270
CORSAIR CMPSU-850HX 850W ATX12V 2.3 / EPS12V 2.91 80 PLUS SILVER Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply $200
EVGA 896-P3-1171-AR GeForce GTX 275 Superclocked Edition 896MB 448-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Supported Video Card $260
AJA XENA LHi PCI e card with breakout box - $1500

Total : $4,910

 

[alyarb]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It really depends on what software you are using. I'm an Avid person.

2 - Intel Xeon W3520 Bloomfield 2.66GHz 4 x 256KB L2 Cache 8MB L3 Cache LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Server Processor $315

you can't pair up 3000-series xeons. intel locked them out of supporting SMP. only the 5500-xeons will work in pairs.

 

[schenley101]

dual socket xeon's are a must. i would wait to buy an expensive video card until programs actually make use of them. for video editing fpu performance is by far the most important. thats why the old powerpc's with altivec were so good at it. ssd is even more important. it is amazing how much they help with photoshop and premeire.

 

[mmntech]

Originally posted by: Modelworks
It really depends on what software you are using. I'm an Avid person.

Avid is supposedly on it's way out. Final Cut Pro is supposedly the next big thing, well at the CBC anyway. I'm taking journalism and they have us using that on Mac Pros with the X5500s. Still, that kind of power is really only necessary for HD video conversion, not editing. Most of my work is DVCAM NTSC 60i, which is uncompressed SD video at 30mbps. For that kind of work, using Final Cut Express, my laptop handles it just fine. It all boils down to whether you need fast conversion or not when you're exporting the video to a different format. Sounds like the OP isn't doing anything complex enough to require that kind of power or expense.

The OP could go a couple of routes here. For his budget, I'd probably go with the 24'' 2.66ghz iMac and get Final Cut Express. Just because that's what I'm used to using.

For a PC based system, I think I'd go with an i5 720, 4gb DDR3, and an HD 4650. For the mobo, I've heard good things about ASRock's P55 Extreme, which is $139.99 at the Egg right now. For SD video and compressed HD, a standard 7200rpm SATA2 drive will work just fine. If you go the SSD route, get a smallish one for the OS and frequently used programs and keep everything else on HDDs. A complex RAID setup is completely unnecessary for this type of system. The P55 Extreme supports eSata for fast external drives.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Topic Title: Need help building my new Video Editing PC
Topic Summary: $4000 to $5000 Budget PC

Stop. Don't do it.

Your budget puts you at the bleeding edge and you don't want to go there (for now, anyway).

Buy the least expensive AMD/Intel quad core rig you can find to get by for the next year or so. Wait for this years 'bleeding edge' to settle out, figure what you really want to do, and 'play' with the multitude of software packages that are out there.

It appears you have a 'mish-mash' of products from Corel, Adobe and Sony mixed in with some free ware. It would be in your best interest to 'test drive' some integrated packages, find the one you like best and determine if it will suit your future needs (primarily because once you select your integrated package a change in your future path can sometimes become cost prohibitive).

We get tired of saying it (but we mean it this time ): There are big changes coming. In the next year Larrabee will hopefully bring new heights to "task parallelism" (or it could be One. Big. Damn. Flop. - LOL ). CUDA may finally reach the mainstream (and affordability). Gulftown is coming.

And AMD is going 'double cheese burger' in the first half of 2010 - taking the 6-core Opteron Istanbul and turning it into the 12-core Magny Cours.

At the least, what you might pay $5k for right now will most likely cost you $1,200 at the end of 2010 :laugh:

 

[imported_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

 

[Hulk]

Originally posted by: yh125d

Originally posted by: alyarb
uhm why are you people recommending gaming GPUs? radeon 4890? he's building a workstation, not a toy. stop abusing his budget.

Because higher end GPUs accelerate openGL and cuda much faster than their $30 little brothers? You don't consider recommending dual socket xeons abusing his budget?





And yes 650w would definitely handle that. With everything loaded thats 125w for the cpu, 25w for the ram, 7 hd's at 10w ea and an ssd pulling like a whopping 1 watt for a generous 75w total, 100w generous for the motherboard and other peripherals, 150w gpu (video editing won't peg out a 4890) and you're a lot less than 650w. Plenty of room for added junk later

Very few NLE's use the GPU for video editing. I think Pinnacle's Liquid Edition accelerates a few 3d transition functions and that's about it.

Yes, a powerful GPU is a huge waste of money for a video editing computer.

 

[neojapan]

Thanks for your replies, I updated the list, Still deciding on the PSU and on the SATA II raid controller.
Still if you think I can get better performance out of this you can tell me, like the raid setup etc.
I might add the Pioneer BDR-203 Blu-Ray burner, BD-R are great for backing up finalized project files.

Thanks

 

[ChaiBabbaChai]

Antec Signature, Enermax Revolution 85+ or Seasonic M12D. I just bought the M12D, but the Enermax is a little bit better.

650w might work, but it's stressing the PSU and causing it to work more inefficiently than a higher output model would. In other words, it will most likely die young from heat related issues and cost you more in PG&E. With a >$4K budget, there is really no point in being a cheapass when it comes to quality.

In addition, forget the gaming cards everyone here is recommending. Get a workstation card with proper drivers, even if it doesn't perform any faster, the stability and usability is what you pay for.

 

[BaboonGuy]

Dude, an i7 950 costs $554.99! :Q

And it's only 3GHz........ with an i7 920 D0 you can overclock guarenteed stable 24/7 to at least 4GHz. And you can get one of those for over half the cost! Big big mistake not to OC imo. I'm also hearing the i7 860s are able to OC to 4GHz as well.

For this budget I'd strongly consider going Hackintosh as well. Especially for video editing, it's so nice to have that Mac OS X capability since most people in the film industry use a Mac.