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Need some suggestions on buying 3 machines

A

Arkitech

Diamond Member
I'm looking to buy a pc for video editing, another one for a music workstation and finally one for a data server. My budget is roughly around 2000 bucks, I don't really need top of the line equipment just enough horsepower to get several different jobs done. In fact I might even consider making the server and video editing machine just one box. So what would be the best place to buy a pre-built system for a good price? I'm not really concerned with tech support as I can deal with any problems on my own, I'm more interested in getting a good deal. Any suggestions?
 
if you want a pre-built system, check the hot deals forums for Dell deals. at least for the video/musc apps, their p4 setups should suit you well. usually they have soso prices, but if you wait for the right deal, you can score big
 
If you're going 3 different machines for different jobs, you may want to go Shuttle XPC just to cut down the size... 3 would stack nicely. 🙂

Of course, if you don't need radical hardware differences for each machine, you could just have one (or two) with removable hard drives for each job. Want to play with audio? Pull out the normal HDD and replace it with the one specifically for audio! Reboot and it's almost like a new machine, untouched by any of your other software! 🙂
 
I don't think I'd want to be pulling hard drives just to switch from my video editor to audio editing system.

I do like the SFF idea though. Shuttle isn't the only mfgr either. Lots of options on the market right now.

As for a file server, you could probably get by with an older P3 system. It doesn't really need a lot of horsepower just to read/write data to the hard drives. If the data is important, you may want a hardware raid setup with a couple hard drives. And since you may be working with large video and audio files, get bigger drives.

You may even consider gigabit for your internal network if you are going to be moving super huge files.
 
MonarchComputer.com is a pretty good shop. You can pick your own parts and they will assemble and test for a reasonable fee - or choose one or more of their pre-packs. You might even find something in the For Sale/Trade section here.
. On the drive switching idea. There are switches out there that would allow you to leave all the drives in place, just flip a switch - I've seen them for two and three drive setups.
.bh.
 
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