Video Editing: High End HP & OEM Workstation Build(s) Help Request.

[Coldkilla]

Hey all,

Well my "work dream" came true! My boss said I can update my video editing system and I can choose the best hardware within "effective price range" (AKA: Not getting into paying premium prices for menial performance gains). My company is an "HP" house, and my boss has an easier time getting hardware approval from HP based systems. He said if we went and built the machine piece by piece, it will be harder for him to convince IT to budget us the components. However, I feel that HP is ripping us off on the financial side, so I would like to put together two identical systems and present both to my boss for approval of one over the other. If the HP system is not approved due to cost, the lower cost of the identical OEM machine might be.

From the HP Side, I was looking to use their customization tool on an HP440 Workstation and after randomly choose some hardware upgrades it ended up being $9,200 (which is fine, includes a Nvidia Quadro K6000). http://store.hp.com/us/en/pdp/business-solutions/hp-z440-workstations-f5w13av-1. However, if an HP system is $9,200 - I'd like to know the identical OEM counterpart cost. I want a modern lightning fast editing system that renders at lightning speed and RAM Previews content in After Effects with ease. I'd also like to get into 3D asset implementation with After Effects and not have the slowest system on the planet.

If anyone could help me out on the hardware side of this I would really appreciate it. I'd do it myself, but I've been out of the hardware space for many years now and I'd hate to build these expensive systems and them not be as effective as they could be.

 

[Burpo]

You need to let us know the specs you chose, as the link doesn't.

I see an HP Z440 with 3.5Ghz Hexcore , 8GB ram & 256gb SSD for $1864 at PcRush

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-F1M52UT-...801037?hash=item5d5f001b4d:g:Mh4AAOSwvt1WRDd3

A Quadro K6000 adds $2300+ to that
http://www.ebay.com/itm/LEVONO-NVID...875743?hash=item3f56b8901f:g:jZkAAOSwEetWBJaR

And you'll need more storage & ram, but I don't see it coming anywhere near $9k

 

[Viper GTS]

Edit workstations cost around $10k, that's just how it is. That said, I'm usually looking at the 840 line not the 440.

I recently had a Z840 demo system in, it was dual socket + 64 GB RAM, 512 GB NVME, and a pair of K6000. I forget what the exact price was but it was right around the $10-11k mark. We get very aggressive discounting though given who we are, the discounts are where you can push them. IT discounts get absurd - I have a standing 60% regardless of order size on most stuff I buy.

I'm an Adobe edit shop so most of this will apply directly to you. Adobe cares more about CPU cores than clock speed, so sacrifice some on frequency in exchange for cores and you can cut your CPU costs down. Populate minimum one DIMM per channel of memory so for a dual socket E5 system you're going to be looking at 8 DIMMs minimum so probably 64 GB minimum memory. IIRC from my HP discussions they don't offer DIMMs below 8 GB any more. I know for sure Cisco is that way. All my edit systems are 2 x 8 core Xeons + 64 GB, and Quadro + Tesla for GPU acceleration. On top of that the baseband IO and audio which you may or may not need depending on whether you're in a pro edit environment.

Are you editing locally or on a SAN? Do you know what kind of connectivity you need?

You really do not want to build your own in a corporate environment, that is a decision that will haunt you. It costs $10k because its guaranteed to work and has official support for all of those pro applications.

Viper GTS

 

[XavierMace]

IT discounts get absurd - I have a standing 60% regardless of order size on most stuff I buy.

THIS. I used to do configs for a major VAR and it was shocking to see the kind of discounts companies like Intel and Blizzard were getting on stuff.

OP, if your company is an "HP shop", it's safe to assume they will be paying less than what you see on the public facing site.

 

[Coldkilla]

Are you editing locally or on a SAN? Do you know what kind of connectivity you need?

Everything is local as far as accessing files is concerned. I do need access to the internet though so an Ethernet port is needed.. I apologize if I did not fully answer this question as I am not sure what you mean by connectivity.

You need to let us know the specs you chose, as the link doesn't.

I didn't choose the specs mostly because I don't know what the most effective part solution is. I don't just want to pick "the bottom one" for each category if it is not worth the premium price.

IT discounts get absurd - I have a standing 60% regardless of order size on most stuff I buy.

OP, if your company is an "HP shop", it's safe to assume they will be paying less than what you see on the public facing site.

Our company does get a large discount working with HP. I don't know how much, but if its anywhere near this amount - this might be why my boss did not express much budgetary concern over the approval process for this machine. I've got a HP representatives direct number I will be calling soon to see if I can get that factored into the price. I'm just not sure what hardware I should be getting...

Based on the replies, it looks like I should build the HP machine for corporate purposes, which is cool. Could anyone help me build out an HP 840 instead of the 440? I would like to make sure I'm selecting the best I can within the most effective price range. It can be in the ~$10k range... Otherwise if its worth just buying the components we can do that.

 

[Viper GTS]

Unfortunately HP won't let you web configure the 840 they make you run it through a reseller. Your company should have the appropriate contacts to do that.

For starters I'd look at the E5 2650v3 it's a pretty solid value vs some of the more expensive SKUs. If you want to aim high and then back it down if necessary ask for the E5 2667v3 to start with. The 2667 costs nearly double the tray price of the 2650 so it's an easy way to pull out $2000 if necessary on a dual socket system. Go with 64 GB of RAM or maybe even 128 (using 8x16 GB DIMMs) if you aren't going to be able to refresh this for a while. My editors regularly use well over 32 GB. I'd get a nice fast NVME drive(s) for boot and cache purposes, and then you need to figure out what you're doing for bulk storage video. 1 TB SSDs are getting cheap enough you could conceivably put in a handful of those for a few TB of internal storage. Those are something I would look at adding separately since retail pricing is far more dynamic than HP. For graphics the K6000 is nice but the 5200 is quite a bit cheaper. I would also make sure you get 10gb ethernet in addition to the 1gb ports, you'll probably want it sooner than later.

Hope that helps.

Viper GTS