New PC build for dad - office, internet, video recording/editing

[Jeff7]

1) Used for: Office software, Internet, Video recording and editing

2) Budget: $1000 max price.*

3) Country: USA

4) Brand preference: Don't care much.

5) No part reuse, with the possible exception of the case.

6) Searching - Going to get to that next. I wanted this going a bit ahead of time. Will look more after work.

7) Default speeds

8) No gaming. Possibly 1920x1080 resolution monitor?

9) 2 weeks until building? Or maybe less?


I kind of exited the constant build/upgrade cycle awhile ago, and never got back in. I wouldn't know what chipset goes with what, or what kind of RAM, or who knows what.

This can be either a prebuilt system, or else I'd assemble the system from scratch.


Some stuff I do know:

- He'll want to be able to record TV, so it needs a capture card. I know nothing about cable services available today...and I wouldn't even know what to ask here. He still uses a VCR, if that helps. D:
- He wants lots of RAM. I'd consider 4-8GB to be "lots," and I hear that RAM is ridiculously cheap.
- Windows 7 64-bit, home edition should be fine.
- Room for more hard drives. I'm thinking maybe a RAID1 setup for him. If this is going to be a prebuilt system, it needs to have expansion space for drives. I'll probably go with a total of 4x 2TB or 1.5TB drives then. (RAID 5 controllers would give a balance of price and drive space, but the controllers are expensive.)
- If I can squeeze in an 80GB SSD drive for Windows and programs, I'd like to do that too. If that pushes it over $1k, I'll pick up up to $100 of overage.
- He'll need a monitor. He's using a 17" CRT now, so I'm thinking maybe a 21-23" LCD will offer at least that much screen real estate.

Graphics and sound: He's not a gamer, but I do want something that'll have good driver support, and my experience has been that integrated graphics just don't get as much attention as add-in graphics with respect to DirectX/Draw compatibility and all that.
Onboard sound is fine.

 

[dmoney1980]

do you have a Micro Center near you?

 

[Ken g6]

He'll want to be able to record TV, so it needs a capture card. I know nothing about cable services available today...and I wouldn't even know what to ask here. He still uses a VCR, if that helps.

Well, let's start here. Is he recording stuff from just local TV stations on cable, or any/all cable channels? If he wants all cable channels, the choices become either SD recording from an analog out from the cable box, or paying the cable company more money and getting a CableCARD.

Personally, I forgo the whole mess and just record OTA TV with rabbit ears.

 

[titan131]

Something like this?

ASRock H67M $79.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157233
Intel Core i5-2400 $189.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115074
G.SKILL Value Series 8GB $40.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820231424
Antec Three Hundred Illusion $44.99 (with promo code) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811129066
ASUS 24X DVD Burner 18.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...=N82E168271352
Crucial M4 128GB SATA III $196.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148442
SAMSUNG EcoGreen F4 $69.99 x 4 $279.96 (with promo code) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822152245
Antec EarthWatts Green 380W $39.99 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16817371033

Total: 891.89

I haven't included a monitor because i'm not sure what to recommend so maybe someone else can help. I also don't know about video capture cards so again maybe someone else can help here too. If you need windows then you could cut the SSD to the 64gb version.

 

[Ken g6]

You don't need nearly a 2400 for most of that stuff. All that's left is:

Video recording and editing

Now, video recording doesn't take much power at all. Video playing while recording may take a little. But what's this editing mean? Editing out commercials? Saving to DVD or something? Converting for iPod or something? Or more like editing home movies with special effects?

 

[Slugbait]

...my experience has been that integrated graphics just don't get as much attention as add-in graphics with respect to DirectX/Draw compatibility and all that.

Sandy Bridge, and now Ivy Bridge, are getting lots of attention...especially in reviews here at Anand's. Ivy Bridge will supposedly support a resolution of 4Kx4K.

I'm assembling a new system for the wife tonight based around a G530. She doesn't game either, but I'm confident the GPU will be more than she needs. Perhaps not the same with your dad, since he wants to do editing, so you'll want a proc that supports Quick Sync.

Normally I say, "Dad gets a Dell", but you have a couple of requirements that make Dell less realistic. So I'd suggest something like this: http://www.ibuypower.com/Store/Gamer_Paladin_E710. No option to remove the video card to save cash, but you might be able to throw it on eBay or something. But there is an option for Raid 1 for an additional $56, so that's nice. Otherwise, you could cut back to an i3-2100 or 2120, reduce the case to a Source 210, select the XMS3 free upgrade, get a 27" monitor, and have $50 left of your budget to get whatever capture card compatible with your source.

One of the cool things about the mobo they use for this system is that it is one of only a handfull of Sandy Bridge boards that supports legacy components like IDE, LPT and COM. In fact, this is the board I bought for my wife's upgrade.

 

[Jeff7]

do you have a Micro Center near you?

Nearest one is about 90 miles...so not really.

Well, let's start here. Is he recording stuff from just local TV stations on cable, or any/all cable channels? If he wants all cable channels, the choices become either SD recording from an analog out from the cable box, or paying the cable company more money and getting a CableCARD.

Personally, I forgo the whole mess and just record OTA TV with rabbit ears.

He's got the extended cable service, I believe - so there's the basic 20 lower channels, and then up to things like Sci-Fi, Animal Planet....um....Comedy Central....and I don't know what else is still out there now. (I ditched my cable TV subscription a few years ago.)
I've got no idea about digital TV anything or whatever's even available in that respect.

Now, video recording doesn't take much power at all. Video playing while recording may take a little. But what's this editing mean? Editing out commercials? Saving to DVD or something? Converting for iPod or something? Or more like editing home movies with special effects?

Video recording: The cards he or I have used in the past did the MPEG-2 encoding right on the card, so the CPU load was quite minimal.
Editing: Probably stuff like editing out commercials, or just splicing videos together. Probably just MPEG-2 encoding at the most intensive - not likely to be any kind of advanced HD or h.264 encoding.

Options at Newegg...ok, there are:
- combo tuner
- hybrid tuner
- digital tuner
- analog tuner

....yeah. I've been away for quite awhile, huh.
I have no idea what I'm looking for.
He's got a coax cable. 75 ohms. Cable TV. That's as specific as I've got. :$
I'm going to be after PCI or PCIe though.

Something like this?

<snip>
Total: 891.89

I haven't included a monitor because i'm not sure what to recommend so maybe someone else can help. I also don't know about video capture cards so again maybe someone else can help here too. If you need windows then you could cut the SSD to the 64gb version.

Monitor: He's using a 17" CRT with some geometric distortion issues, and is mostly ok with it. (And he's not too keen on the whole widescreen thing...but he's kind of out of options. )
A 17" CRT will give less than 138 square inches of screen space though. So a 16:9 LCD would need to be a bit over 18" diagonal to give at least that much space, if my math was right. So any 20-something will do just fine. (Something like my 27" Viewsonic would probably be a bit much though. )

I just don't know how sensitive his eyes are to the problems inherent in LCDs though. I still haven't seen an LCD that could match my Trinitron-tube 21" CRT of a few years ago. Motion that has gradients moving across a screen, such as anything with natural light shading on it, results in banding, as the pixels can't keep up. The monitor allows for setting of the response time, but putting it on anything but the middle "Advanced" setting either results in blurring or severe banding in moving gradients.
Could partly be my eyes, too, though. I can apparently detect flicker in PWM'd LEDs operating at 2kHz, possibly higher. (Checked with an oscilloscope.)





And to clarify: I do want a discrete videocard in this system. My experience with integrated graphics has been that they're good for showing the Windows desktop, Office, and maybe some screensavers, but not much else. Try throwing something at them like video players or a TV tuner card, and they've often started vomiting profusely all over the screen.



I'm putting together a list of stuff though based on what titan131 put together. I still just feel a bit blind - I don't have oodles of reviews committed to memory, so I have no idea if I'm getting the "best" deal or not. We'll see what I've come up with in a bit.

 

[Slugbait]

He's got the extended cable service, I believe - so there's the basic 20 lower channels, and then up to things like Sci-Fi, Animal Planet....um....Comedy Central....

For this scenario, he could use something like the Hauppauge 150/250/500. I just picked up a 250MCE at a garage sale on Friday for a dollar (but you probably won't be so lucky). If he only cares about channels up to 20, he can plug the cable directly into the capture card...if he wants the extended channels, he will need to route the signal thru the descambler to the capture card, then run an IR Blaster from the capture card back to the descrambler. Up until about 14 months ago, descramblers were not needed for Expanded Basic (I truly miss those days with my HTPCs).

Best of either worlds would be a Hauppage 1250: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815116028. I have these in two of my HTPCs, they're great for OTA HD...but they are "hybrid" capture cards, so you could instead plug your cable service into it and it'll work for SD, too.

My experience with integrated graphics has been that they're good for showing the Windows desktop, Office, and maybe some screensavers, but not much else. Try throwing something at them like video players or a TV tuner card, and they've often started vomiting profusely all over the screen.

Things have changed quite a bit since you exited the constant build/upgrade cycle awhile ago. You should read up what the guys at Anand's are saying, they've been covering Sandy Bridge rather closely since it was released.

 

[Jeff7]

For this scenario, he could use something like the Hauppauge 150/250/500. I just picked up a 250MCE at a garage sale on Friday for a dollar (but you probably won't be so lucky). If he only cares about channels up to 20, he can plug the cable directly into the capture card...if he wants the extended channels, he will need to route the signal thru the descambler to the capture card, then run an IR Blaster from the capture card back to the descrambler. Up until about 14 months ago, descramblers were not needed for Expanded Basic (I truly miss those days with my HTPCs).

I've never had to use any kind of descrambler for anything, at least that I can think of.
If it's what I think it is.
The only "scrambled" anything I've seen were the premium channels like HBO.

Best of either worlds would be a Hauppage 1250: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16815116028. I have these in two of my HTPCs, they're great for OTA HD...but they are "hybrid" capture cards, so you could instead plug your cable service into it and it'll work for SD, too.

Sounds like that'll work.

Things have changed quite a bit since you exited the constant build/upgrade cycle awhile ago. You should read up what the guys at Anand's are saying, they've been covering Sandy Bridge rather closely since it was released.

I suppose I should read up on Sandy Bridge. I've heard the name here and there, but....um, I don't actually know what it is. Brb, quick reading.

"Intel graphics" still makes me nervous though.


And I just blew past $1100 at Newegg without adding a videocard yet, so some $$$ has got to come out of there somewhere.
Edit: Aw hell, even the cheap videocards are insanely powerful.


....and it appears that Newegg just purged my entire shopping cart when I deleted an item. Huh.


(For an idea of the performance level I've got to exceed here: He's currently running a ~1.5GHz T-bird processor with an nForce2 IGP chipset. Just about anything available today will blow it away. But I also don't want to have to be upgrading this PC again in a year or so when Flash 12 shows us just how good we had it with Flash 10. )


Edits:
- Sandy Bridge: I is intrigued. "Up to 17% more CPU performance clock-for-clock compared to Lynnfield processors" per Wikipedia.
CPU-Z says I've got a Lynnfield sitting in my computer here, and my tablet's sporting an i5 Arrandale (which is still a fair bit faster than my work PC).


Hauppauge WinTV HVR-1250

G.SKILL Value Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBNT

Intel Core i3-2120T Sandy Bridge 2.6GHz LGA 1155 35W Dual-Core BX80623I32120T

QTY 4: Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS 1TB 5400 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

SAMSUNG S22A300B High Glossy Black 21.5" LCD

Kingston SSDNow V+100 KR-S1296-3H 2.5" 96GB SATA II MLC Internal SSD

SeaSonic SS-350ET Bronze 350W ATX12V V2.31 80 PLUS BRONZE Power Supply

LITE-ON DVD/CD WRITER Model iHAS524-T98A

MSI R4350-MD512H Radeon HD 4350 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 Video Card

ASRock H67M (B3) LGA 1155 Intel H67 Motherboard

Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit - OEM

Kaybles 6 ft. Premium DVI Digital Dual-Link with Ferrites M/M Model DVI-DD-6FT - OEM

Mushkin Enhanced MKNSSDBRKT2535 3.5" to 2.5" drive adapter bracket


Total there: $1050.84. For the processor, I went with that particular one because the 35W TDP caught my eye, versus the other one that was 65W. I don't know that the performance difference will be that significant for him.
Power supply: I guess I'm partial to Seasonic.

 

[mfenn]

Jeff, we need a little more information about the cable TV setup. Does he use a cable box or just plug it straight into the TV? If it's the latter, any capture card will be fine. The former, and things get complicated (I'd recommend a Hulu+ subscription instead ).

As for the need for a discrete GPU, I'd say you're betraying the date of your knowledge here. :awe: The Sandy Bridge IGP is really quite good for the purposes that you've listed.

Assuming that your Dad uses normal analog TV (i.e. plugs the coax into the back of the TV), here's what I would recommend:

i5 2400 + Windows 7 HP 64-bit $277
ASRock H67M $80
Hauppauge HVR-1250 $50
G.Skill DDR3 1333 8GB $38 AP
Crucial M4 128GB $197
Samsung F4EG 2TB $70
Seasonic 350W $42
Fractal Design Core 1000 $40
ASUS VH242H $170 AR
Total: $964 AR AP

 

[Jeff7]

Jeff, we need a little more information about the cable TV setup. Does he use a cable box or just plug it straight into the TV? If it's the latter, any capture card will be fine. The former, and things get complicated (I'd recommend a Hulu+ subscription instead ).

Uh....I'd have to find out about that. Really not sure.
I'm guessing that they just plug the cable into the TV, without a box, mainly because if they had to get a cable box, I probably would have received phone calls about it.

As for the need for a discrete GPU, I'd say you're betraying the date of your knowledge here. :awe: The Sandy Bridge IGP is really quite good for the purposes that you've listed.

Well, I thought I had some idea of what Sandy Bridge was. It sounded like it was a processor, but now SB has an IGP? Last I knew, the IGP was part of the northbridge chipset. Oy geez.

 

[Slugbait]

Uh....I'd have to find out about that. Really not sure.
I'm guessing that they just plug the cable into the TV, without a box...

If they have Comcast and subscribe to Expanded Basic (now called "digital starter"), and they were the last to be "converted", then they got the box 13 or 14 months ago. The descrambler is the only way to watch channels above 29 in the Seattle area (so no ESPN, Comedy Central, MTV, etc without the box). Unscrambled channels vary between regions. Here's the best part: you pay for the electricity for the descramblers, you might be paying to rent the descramblers on top of it, and you don't get HD.

Your parts are nice. But you're well over your max limit, and you don't have a monitor, so you can't see it to use it. Wouldn't matter much tho', cuz you ain't got no KB or mouse to make it do something, either.

 

[Jeff7]

They're on Blue Ridge Cable, a smallish local cable company.

http://detonator.dynamitedata.com/c...com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824001488(And the monitor's on the list - Samsung LCD. )

Yeah, it's a bit over the limit. That's a first pass, I'll go over it again to prune out what I can. I really want a SSD in there though. It makes an entire PC feel so much faster.

 

[Ken g6]

Assuming that your Dad uses normal analog TV (i.e. plugs the coax into the back of the TV), here's what I would recommend:

i5 2400 + Windows 7 HP 64-bit $277
ASRock H67M $80
Hauppauge HVR-1250 $50
G.Skill DDR3 1333 8GB $38 AP
Crucial M4 128GB $197
Samsung F4EG 2TB $70
Seasonic 350W $42
Fractal Design Core 1000 $40
ASUS VH242H $170 AR
Total: $964 AR AP

I agree with this, except that I'd drop the processor to a dual-core, maybe as far as:

G620 + Windows $168

I'd then use the extra money, depending on the type of cable service:

HD, unencrypted: Another 2TB drive, though I'm not sure you can fit it in that case. So maybe a different case too.
SD, encrypted: To pay the extra cable company charges!

Edit: If watching TV in a dark room, you might upgrade to:

ASUS VE247H $180 AR

Wouldn't matter much tho', cuz you ain't got no KB or mouse to make it do something, either.

5) No part reuse, with the possible exception of the case.

I figure KB and mouse is included in "the case".

 

[dmoney1980]

Jeff,

I only mention Micro Center because you can pick up an Intel Sandy Bridge CPU + motherboard for a lot less than newegg. You can even bring in a printout of any other components that newegg sells for less than MC, and they will do a price match.

CPU choices:
core i3 $99- http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0359809

core i5 2400 $149- http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0354590

ASUS z68 motherboard - http://www.microcenter.com/single_pr...uct_id=0371775

 

[Jeff7]

Keyboard and mouse are being carried over to the new system, unless he really wants to keep the old one running.

I figure the parts in his old system are worth something too. How much does gold scrap sell for these days?



There's still the option to go with a prebuilt system and upgrade it. I'm a bit wary of that because the prebuilts I've seen are usually tailored for the minimum requirements needed to harbor only the specific parts in that particular system, so there's no much in the way of expansion. (And expansion capacities don't seem to be specified very clearly for prebuilts.)
He's got a nice Antec case right now that's still quite usable. (Part of why I'm hoping it'll be adequate to just image his stuff over to the new system and not worry about having to buy a case too, though I'm sure I could still get a dirt-cheap case somewhere just to hold the old system for awhile.)



MicroCenter...much driving. No like much driving.

I'll check out some of the CPU/Win7 combos though, they might at least save a tiny bit of money.

 

[Ken g6]

It's the CPU/Mobo bundles at Micro Center that save the big bucks - $120 off a z68 CPU/board combo as compared to Newegg, which would be equivalent to buy-the-processor-get-the-board-free at Newegg. But it's the end of the month - new specials probably start Saturday, both for Micro Center and for Newegg.