Building a video editing pc

[jcarle]

Well, after a long rambling discussion, it's good to see this back ON topic -- and within budget, too!

I wish we had those sort of prices here in the UK. My reqular online suppliers have just hiked some prices by 44% more or less overnight, due to the fall in the £ / $.

It's easy to nit-pick, but 8GB of RAM implies a 64-bit Operating System, which is a whole new ball-game that has not been discussed earlier...

It's not that much of a ball game, all it requires is Vista x64, which by the way runs fine, is more stable then x86 and has no compatibility issues with 32-bit application (even games, except applications that use low level hardware such as disk editors). I was once the biggest Vista critic and now can't live without it, I run Vista x64 on 8GB of RAM and even use my box to play games such as Crysis, FarCry 2 and Unreal Tournament 3 without a single issue. In fact, my XP box wasn't even this stable...

your suggestion is good but is this future proof coz i don't wanna upgrade atleast for next 1 year

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING you buy TODAY is future proof. You're on the cusp of an architecture change with both Intel and AMD. If you want to buy something future proof AND stay within your budget you'd have to wait anywhere from a year to two years for the same type of machine at the same budget. However, keep in mind that what I suggested is still a very powerful machine and the only thing that you would really need to upgrade for gaming would be the video card and PCI-Express 2.0 video cards will be available for years to come.

[puntoMX]

A processor with a good performance to price ratio to stay within a reasonable budget. There isn't more obvious then the Intel E2200 : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16819116063 $70.99

leave that one and go directly with an E5200, price is about the same (83USD at this moment) and you get the extra horsepower (2.5GHz while the E2200 has 2.2GHz) that comes with it for free, besides that it produces less heat and uses a smaller cooler and, the power bill will be the same any way. Besides that, double the cache can´t hurt either

Compare of the E5200 and E2200.

[CoffeeFiend]

There's so many incorrect statements that have been throw about in this thread

It's not all bad

All the money is going to end up being invested into an expensive and unnecessary Quad Core

I was mostly suggesting a Core 2 Duo (over a phenom anyways). A fast quad core helps for encoding, but that's about it. Mind you I do a lot of encoding and don't even have one myself.

Phenom is crap. I don't care what angle you look at it, it's a joke of an attempt by AMD to try to show that it can compete with Intel.

Which is pretty much what I've been saying from the start Yes, it's quad core, but it sucks. It's not exactly fast, just inexpensive, and even then...

Core i7 is where the new disco ball's going to be for a while. It's hilarious to see people think that i7 can't perform when it's a first revision of a completely new architecture and there hasn't even been any retail samples out yet for real world evaluations.

Actually, there are some real world tests / benches of it now, and it performs quite well. I just saw some real prices a couple days ago too, and it's not that bad even. The basic i7 920 is like $300, which isn't all that bad considering it beats a $500+ Q9650. Motherboard with X58 chipset? MSI has an OK board (X58/ICH10R, 6 DDR3 slots, 2 PCI-e 2.0 x16, etc) for $220, which isn't too bad either, considering the "good" LGA775 boards cost around $150 to begin with ($70 extra isn't bad at all for something so cutting edge). DDR3 costs a bit more, but it's come down in price a lot too. Give it a few months, and it'll soon become very affordable. I'm already looking forward to buying one.

With that said, the processor is not as important as people make it out to be.

Depends who you ask I guess. It's by far the most important thing for encoding, but like I said before, it's only going to be a small part of what he does with his box (and even when it comes to encoding, the phenom still sucks).

Antec 300? Exactly what I said. PSU? Would be in Zxian's recommendations too (mind you, I'd rather go for something else personally). Just saying', not everybody was saying completely incorrect stuff all along.

Anyways. There's a few quality PSUs out there. Asus and Gigabyte make great boards (and P45-based boards are a good buy for sure). CPU wise, I would probably spend the extra $30 (like puntoMX said) for the E5200, but again, both are good options (the E7200 isn't too shabby either). RAID would sure help. Hard disks are the slowest thing in a computer, by FAR. A pair of decently fast disks (e.g. the 640GB WD640AAKS) in RAID0 helps a great deal.

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING you buy TODAY is future proof.

Nothing, absolutely NOTHING you can buy EVER will be future proof. There will always be something better/faster/newer around the corner.

But anyways. A machine with specs similar to what you mentioned should be usable for a few years regardless.

[jcarle]

Well, I didn't say that everything that was said was wrong either, just that there was a large quantity of incorrect statements.

I will never understand the AMD fanboys... blind faith is all I can toss it up to... I simply can't justify spending more for less when you can have better for the same or cheaper (Intel vs AMD).

The only reason I favored the E2200 over the E5200 is that I find a system feels more responsive when the FSB is either overclocked to match a 1:1 ratio with the memory or at the least for a non-overclocked system, an even divisor. 5:3 mismatched configurations always seem to have that slight pause feeling when you do anything with it... just doesn't seem as smooth.

[CoffeeFiend]

I will never understand the AMD fanboys...

Well, AMD did have its glory moments. The Athlon64 was vastly better than the netburst junk IMO (and HT vs FSB), and I much preferred their idea of a 64 bit platform (what we now call x64) vs what Intel's idea of a 64 bit platform was (Itanic). But yeah, they used to be yet another cheap clone (much like Cyrix), and they're mostly back to being that (especially now that not only Intel has the superior CPU architecture again, but they also replaced the FSB for a HT-like bus i.e. QPI).

[puntoMX]

The only reason I favored the E2200 over the E5200 is that I find a system feels more responsive when the FSB is either overclocked to match a 1:1 ratio with the memory or at the least for a non-overclocked system, an even divisor. 5:3 mismatched configurations always seem to have that slight pause feeling when you do anything with it... just doesn't seem as smooth.

Both CPUs have a 800MT/s bus .

[jcarle]

Both CPUs have a 800MT/s bus .

I must have misread when I checked, I thought it was part of the 1066MHz group. My bad.