To Build From Scratch - need recommendations et al

[EelPie]

Greetings everybody.

Been out of the 'hardware' loop for sometime now, but a friend has recently asked me to build her a machine for her college studies.

Last time I built a machine was with KT266 about 20 months back; always kept a watchful eye since, but not actually picked up any barebones equipment to build from the bottom up since, so some help would be appreciated.

The person is looking to build for the purposes of film and video editing; short films, anywhere up to 5-minutes each, so good reliable HDDs will be needed. As their work will be strictly 2D, a heavy-hitting 3D card is not really needed, but if anybody recommends a good video card for handling heavy frame rates 2d for film, please comment. AGP only please.

Of course to start I need recommendation on a good motherboard, and before I go any further I'm in London, UK, so anybody with knowledge of UK retailers, especially for combos (mb, CPU, hsf, etc.) to save cost would be appreciated. Motherboard will need to be able to handle 1G of memory; and I'm a strict AMD builder, so no Intel please; onboard audio is not appreciated - I'm only building for the person so if there's an IRQ conflict or sound conflict, I won't necessarily be there to fix the problem.

Onboard firewire is an option but not a must; I'm sure the person would be more willing to spend the extra £ to get a namebrand PCI firewire card.

Aside from that I just need recommendations, particularly on the motherboard; I'm looking to get IBM 120GXP drives. I was going to encourage the person to get a DVD/CDRW combo so that they could have 3x120G drives across the 2xIDE cables, so hard drive cooling will become a must. Any tips/hints/hardware recommendations on this line would be helpful.

And then let's just start talking, I'll review, and see what we can build!

Cheers everybody!

 

[alkemyst]

I am pretty sure there was another entry level video thread posted somewhere recently with this same premise.

Someone trying to help a girl with the system...I recommended next time mention you are trying to build a machine for a hot set of asian twins if you really want help .


I am not flaming, but that thread had all the info in it you need....it was a good thread.

I tried to search for it but don't know where it was

I don't think firewire on board is an easy find, but there are many firewire combo cards out there to solve NIC and firewire....also I don't think HD cooler really will be necessary with 3 drives...get a decent case and space them a little and save yourself noise from extra fans. DVD/CDRW is only good if you have another CD/DVD to read from....if video editing is prime, then a DVD-/+RW is a recommendation.

Intel would more than likely be a better low support solution, but if you want to support it, AMD would work for the novice....every AMD system I have built caused me nothing but support headaches, even years later after I had forgotten them, they call or email saying they just picked up this and that from CompUSA and it crashed their whole machine "I BUILT FOR THEM"....

For CPU you want at least a 1.5GHz and 512-1GB of RAM, probably 240GB or more for video storage, a decent capture card and sound.

Depends really the budget though....most true entry level system budgets come no where near a really usable video editing solution.

Good luck